Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: longshadow
As Richard Mitchell (The Underground Grammarian, "Less than Words can Say") once noted, a vocabulary that consists of 75 synonyms for copulation does not a language make. While his remark was originally intended as a rebuttal to the laughable claim that Ebonics was a legitimate language, it seems equally applicable to putative proto-languages of Neanderthal.

This is a good point. A recent book out about the development of language asserts something along this line. Some monkeys have different screams designed to alert their fellows to different dangers. Lions get a different scream from them than other predators. Is this a language? I think not. It's communication, but not language.

116 posted on 10/07/2001 3:13:28 PM PDT by TKEman
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 97 | View Replies ]


To: TKEman
It's communication, but not language.

That's my sense of it. Pointing to a wooly mammoth skeleton and grunting three times while pointing beyond the next hill may well communicate to the other Neanderthals that there are three wooly mammoths waiting over the hill to be hunted done for dinner, but lacking abstraction, syntax, structure, and so forth, it is hardly language. Or so it seems to me.

117 posted on 10/07/2001 4:36:39 PM PDT by longshadow
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 116 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson