Hallo conlangers!

On Friday 11 January 2013 14:40:46 R A Brown wrote:

> On 11/01/2013 11:24, BPJ wrote:
> > On 2013-01-10 19:50, And Rosta wrote:
> >> My own view is that pre-h,-sapiens-sapiens had
> >> something similar to human language that wasn't
> >> actually language, something tantamount to a lexicon
> >> without syntax (or morphology).
> 
> Certainly having lexemes without syntax is not human
> language.

Certainly not!  This is what I call a "linear" language:
a communication system where lexemes are just uttered in a
random order to express an idea.  Chimpanzees can do that;
that has been proven in numerous experiments.

>       Even the comic-book stereotypical "cavemanese"
> has some sort of syntax.

And real Neanderthal languages certainly were more complex
than that!  My personal guess is that the languages of
Neanderthals and other species of _Homo_ other than _Homo
sapiens_ had what I call "hierarchical" languages, in which
utterances were made of clauses made of words etc., but
what was still missing was recursion.  There was a fixed
number of syntactic levels (may have been as low as 3 in
early _Homo erectus_ but as high as 5 or 6 in Neanderthals),
but no way something could contain something of the same
kind.  A sentence such as

The brave hunter who killed the huge lion lost his spear.

would have to be expressed as something like

Hunter brave.  Lion huge.  Hunter kill lion.  Hunter have
spear.  Hunter lose spear.

But that is only my personal guess and there is probably
no way knowing.
 
> > Nobody can know anything about that one way or another,
> > short of discovering Neanderthal writing!
> > 
> 	:-)
> 	:
> > Anyone can believe whatever they want, but it will still
> > be only beliefs, not the stuff which science is built
> > of.
> 
> Though one can weigh up evidence and form some sort of
> hypothesis (but short of time travel, the hypothesis can't
> be tested).

Yep.

>       There was a time in my past life when I held
> that H.N. did not have language (indeed, I think I stated
> this in my M.Litt. thesis of 1982.  But this was based on
> incorrect information about Neanderthal anatomy and very
> faulty (i.e. almost non-existent) understanding of
> Neanderthal society.  As I've come to know more about N.H.
> I've radically changed my opinion, and ...

He apparently at least was capable of producing a similar range
of speech sounds as we are; whether his syntactical abilities
were up to ours is anyone's guess.

> [...] 
> 
> I seem to recall that this topic has been debated on this
> list more than one before.  We obviously have a fascination
> for Neanderthals   ;)

Seems like that.

On Friday 11 January 2013 15:05:33 Patrick Dunn wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 7:40 AM, R A Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> [...]
> >  I also believe that denying H.N. to be called human is a
> >  
> >> form of racism. But it's all my opinions and belief.
> > 
> > ... which I also share.
> 
> Well, at worst it's speciesism, but I'm not sure it's even that.  After
> all, if I say a dog isn't human, or that a chimp isn't human, I'm merely
> being accurate.  I'm not suggesting that H. neandertalis was less valuable
> than H. sapiens, just that they *weren't* H. sapiens.
>  
> I suppose one could argue that the entire genus Homo should be called
> "human," which is fine and merely a matter of definition as far as I'm
> concerned.  I tend to reserve the label for H. sapiens.

This is indeed a matter of definition.  Some people use _human_
for all of the genus _Homo_, others only for _Homo sapiens_.
I prefer the latter; we already have a short, handy term for the
former, namely the genus name _Homo_ (I have read somewhere that
the word _homin_, derived from the oblique stem, is in use among
cryptozoologists).  And there is some evidence for at least some
of the mental abilities that render us unique among the life forms
of our planet being exclusive to _Homo sapiens_.  For instance,
there is no evidence of any kind of fine art among non-sapiens
homos.  They only made tools, weapons and other useful items.
These are often beautiful, sure; but all of them had a practical
function.  Also, technological evolution was unbelievably slow,
with the same types of artifacts being in use for hundreds of
millennia.  Apparently, the non-sapiens homos were unable to
consciously invent new gadgets.
 
> (and in light of recent evidence of interbreeding with H. neandertalis, we
> might need to revise our taxonomy, which might very well make H.
> neandertalis a kind of H. sapiens or vice versa)

Perhaps.
 
> [...]
> 
> > I seem to recall that this topic has been debated on this
> > list more than one before.  We obviously have a fascination
> > for Neanderthals   ;)
> 
> Sure we do!  They're a conlanger's dream.  Human-like (or human, if you
> like) and capable of thought, society, language -- all that stuff we like
> to play with as conlangers.

Exactly!  And so many gaps in our knowledge that ask for filling
them in creatively.

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