Hallo conlangers!

On Thursday 29 November 2012 15:46:50 R A Brown wrote:

> On 29/11/2012 13:52, George Corley wrote:
> [...]
> > Actually, I think they are.  Consider the cavemen in the
> > Geico "Even a caveman can do it comercials" -- where
> > prosthetics are used to give the actors Neanderthal-like
> > brow ridges and facial features.
> 
> That, surely, depends upon who's doing the reconstruction.
> I've seen varying "reconstructions" of Neanderthal faces
> ranging from almost ape-like to much the same as one sees
> among some modern Homo sapiens.

Right.  And it is usually the older reconstructions that are
more ape-like and the newer ones that are more like modern
humans.

> > The pop-culture caveman may not be precisely the same as
> > a Neanderthal, but many versions are based on it.
> 
> IMO they're based on the popular view of Neanderthals
> current in the early 20th century.  I doubt whether these
> characterizations are based on latest theories about
> Neanderthals.

They are not!  They just continue old prejudices about
Neanderthals, which no paleoanthropologist now believes in
any more.
 
> > As far as Neanderthal language, they may have had
> > language, but it's not possible to know if that language
> > was not in some way different from modern human 
> > language.
> 
> Indeed - I don't see any way in which we can know, without
> time travel.

Yep.  One can only speculate.  There is some evidence that
Neanderthals were much more hidebound and less imaginative than
we are, and this perhaps means that their language was in some
way less sophisticated than ours.  But we will probably never
know.  (Some cryptozoologists claim that there are surviving
Neanderthals in the Caucasus or somewhere else, but no
convincing evidence supporting those claims has been adduced
so far.)

> > After all, evidence suggests that Neanderthals didn't
> > trade, so their social instincts may have been at least
> > somewhat alien to modern humans.  Then again, they
> > couldn't have been too different, given that modern
> > humans and Neanderthals interbred and even lived together
> > at times.
> 
> Certainly communities of Neanderthals lived in the same
> proximity as Homo sapiens.  I thought the jury was still out
> on interbreeding.  But some, of course, consider that
> Neanderthals were of the same species as us, labeling
> Neanderthals as _Homo sapiens Neanderthalis_ and us
> 'moderns' as _Homo sapiens sapiens._.

The interbreeding question is still not settled.  If there was
interbreeding, it did not leave much of a mark in the genes of
Europeans.  There are some points in which non-Africans are
similar to Neanderthals while Africans are different, which may
mean that the first modern humans to leave Africa interbred with
Neanderthals to a small extent, but this is still controversial.
 
> >> Did Homo erectus have language?  Probably of some sort,
> >> and that, I guess, would be 'primitive.'  Did
> >> australopithecines have language language of some sort?
> >> Possibly.
> > 
> > I would say if homo erectus had language, it would
> > probably be quite pidgin-like.  Australopithecines
> > weren't too much more than upright-walking apes, though
> > they may have manages something slightly more complex
> > than other apes.  I imagine if we had Australopithecines,
> > Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and other intermediate stages
> > alive today, we'd probably find a continuum of linguistic
> > ability that would show the evolution from animal
> > communication to human language.
> 
> Yes, indeed - I argued much the same when we had a similar
> thread to this some time back on Conlang.

Right.  Australopithecines were little more than upright-walking
apes - but apes can manage quite a bit.  While claims that chimps
had been taught ASL are exaggerated (they learned only about 100
ASL signs but no grammar), the great apes are capable of using
systems with up to about 200 symbols, even though the "grammar"
consists merely of crude concatenations of symbols.  I call that
a "linear language".  Australopithecines certainly were as smart
as chimpanzees and would have been able to use some kind of
linear language.

_Homo erectus_ probably managed what I call a "hierarchical
language": one in which morphemes consist of phonemes, phrases
of morphemes and clauses of phrases, almost like modern human
languages - but without recursion (such as multi-attribute NPs
or relative clauses).  Recursion may have appeared only with
_Homo sapiens_, but we will probably never know.

> > Unfortunately, us modern humans thoroughly supplanted
> > all other hominids on the planet, so we will never know.
> 
> Sadly, we won't unless time travel ever becomes possible.

Likely so.

> [...]
> 
> "Cavemen speak" seems to be basically pidgin with odd grunts
> thrown in.

Yes, and it probably has nothing to do with what early hominins
actually spoke.  For instance, "caveman speak" is often full of
"throaty" sounds such as [u] or [k] - and I have read more than
once that early hominins would have had anatomical difficulties
with precisely those sounds.  Perhaps their speech was all
labials and coronals and front vowels!

> [snip]
> 
> > I think one could create a primitive language of stupid
> > brutes without being dumb about it.  That said, I've
> > avoided the traditional fantasy races in my own fantasy
> > world, as I feel it's a little played out,
> 
> Good for you!
> 
> I agree - the traditional fantasy races are IMO more than
> played out.  When I see yet another bunch of Elves, Dwarves
> (always, of course, Dwarves and never traditional Dwarfs),
> Goblins, Dragons etc., I give a yawn and move onto something
> else.   ;)

Sure.  The only meaningful use of them is to add some new spin
to them.  My conlang Old Albic is meant to be spoken by "Elves"
- but not the usual Tolkienian or D&D-style Elves: they are a
*human* culture without any biological peculiarity (beyond being
mostly blond, blue-eyed and lactose-tolerant, which all are
actually mutations that appeared late in human evolution, of
course) who in my fancy underly the Northwest European mythical
traditions of Elves which Tolkien and others built upon. 
 
> The only reason I got involved in this thread was happening
> to notice "1 of the 3 main races use a caveman style of the
> language"; or, more precisely someone's reply to it.
> Linguistically "caveman style of the language" is meaningless.

It is!
 
> > and I think too often people use it in a way that
> > basically amounts to covert racism.
> 
> Yes, sadly, with respect to "cavemen speak" especially.

Certainly.

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