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Computers Emulate Neanderthal Speech
Clarence writes "After some 30,000 years of silence, the Neanderthal race is once again speaking thanks to some advanced computer simulation. A Florida Atlantic University professor is using software vocal tract reconstructions to emulate the speech of our long-dead distant relatives. 'He says the ancient human's speech lacked the "quantal vowel" sounds that underlie modern speech. Quantal vowels provide cues that help speakers with different size vocal tracts understand one another, says Robert McCarthy, who was talking at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Columbus, Ohio, on April 11. In the 1970s, linguist Phil Lieberman, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, inferred the dimensions of the larynx of a Neanderthal based on its skull. His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.'"
I'm imagining, then, that it sounded something like "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."
[ducks]
I can see the fnords!
Computers are already cryptic enough when they speak normal English. I'd rather not have to hear one say "Me get segfault. Me dump core."
Let me guess.. the simulator immediately tried to sell people car insurance.
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Throw in a Tuvan throat singer, an Aussie with a digidiroo, and Hal, and we'll have oen halluv an ensemble going.
(Oh, throw in Shatner with some Esperanto, too... and some Kirk-being-stunned-on-heavy break dance...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
All mammals seem to have some form of intercommunication it seems though by that measure, even if it is by scent or subtle body/tail movements. Is our only difference the specificity which our language can define our environment?
I think the real difference between human communication and that of other animals is the fact that we have grammars which directly encode semantic content. An ape can be taught to sign, but the signing lacks grammar, being more a string of symbols with no clear semantic relation.
Modern sign languages are grammatical. I think the sign languages of ancient humans were probably grammatical as well. In other words, I'm speculating that grammar might have evolved before speech did.
It's well-established in our cartoons and such that neanderthals often use the objective "me" rather than nominative "I", i.e. "me doug". Looks like the verb of being wasn't invented yet, either...
Do you have ESP?
Legitimate linguists make no claims whatever about 35,000-year-old languages. The rate of language change is such that no one can possibly know anything about a language at such a time depth. There's no reason at all to expect any connection between proto-Indo-European and something we imagine might have been spoken by Neanderthals. Yes, your notion is unrealistic--exceedingly so.
Dude, his research is close to a tautology anyways: "His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.'"
/dev/urandom through it, you really can't do jack with it.
Who the hell gave the grant for this research? Of course, you can sort of create an apparatus that follows the same constraints as a Neanderthal larynx would have followed, but apart from piping
Now, we're fairly sure that concerning syntax, early human's language surely followed some sort of predicative model - that can be seen when analyzing more isolated and primitive languages (which are mostly dead by now) - especially aboriginal languages of America and Oceania/Australia. Sentences there usually are of the form "This is an Apple. This is red." - instead of "This is a red apple". Basically they were speaking in "features", chaining them together, which resulted in either isolating languages (words have no inflection and are immutable, syntactic structure gives a sentence meaning "This apple is. This red is." Chinese works this way) or agglutinating languages (like early Nahuatl, they would incorporate subjects and objects into their words: "Thisapple and Thisred".) in the end. More sophisticated stuff, like polysynthetic languages (Inuktitut) and inflectional languages (Germanic) are thought to have evolved thereafter. But of course, this is one hypothesis and there is no way of proving any of this. You can only use fairly circumstantial evidence.
And what this guy did was in no fucking way making "Neanderthals talk". Not even close. He just explored what kind of restrictions the anatomy of a Neanderthal's speech tract would impose on their phonetics (not even phonology let alone phonotaxis), so basically, he can now say: this is what it would have sounded like, but not more. Talk about misleading summaries/headlines/articles.
I'm an infovore...
Although this doesn't make the simulation any less interesting, the article is misleading:
Neanderthals are not really "ancient humans", they are a different branch of the hominid line that probably co-existed with our ancestors.
I suppose it is fitting for an anthropologist but I also find it a bit anthroprocentric that because the simulation suggests they did not produce the same types of sounds as humans that they somehow did not have subtleties in their language nor could they have a spoken language. It is possible they simply spoke to one another differently (maybe in Morse Code using grunts and whistles).
Still hiding away in his cave. Working on his audio format.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
A few things I'd like to say. Firstly Neanderthals have suffered a lot of bad press over the years. The word itself is often used to describe "Homer Simpson" type people, i.e. stupid.
What most people aren't aware of is that when compared by cc Neanderthal brains were, in fact, larger than those of modern humans. You and I have a mass of around 1400cc, a Neanderthal 1500cc. (a rough guess, anthropology classes were a long time ago) How much of this is extra mass is related to them having more musculature thus greater need for control, we don't really know.
Still, they were certainly smart. As far as culture goes, Neanderthals had rudimentary technology and more importantly they had ritual. Graves show that they buried their dead with flowers and other trinkets. This suggests some concept of "remorse" or even the afterlife. These are clearly human traits, so they were obviously closer to us in thinking than other apes.
On the main subject of Neanderthal language. Well, there's a theory that it is not, in fact, an extinct language at all. In northern Spain and southern France there's a strange "language islote" called Basque. As far as modern linguists are concerned this language exists in a little language family of its own, totally unrelated to any other in the global family. It certainly pre-dates the Indo-European languages that are prevalent in most of Europe. This raises another question is: What is the Origin of the Basques? Who knows?
However, it may JUST be coincidence that the last (as far as archaeologists can tell) Neanderthals lived in Iberia. So is Basque is the linguistic cockroach - staying alive when all around it dies? Who knows. There is some strange evidence. Basque people have a 55% O blood group - the highest percentage in the world, which suggests some genetic differentiation from the rest of us. In a nut shell, though, we really don't have a clue.
Isolation and polysynthesis are simply two different ways of encoding information; they put no bounds on the expressiveness of a language, only on the form that it takes. More sophisticated stuff, like polysynthetic languages (Inuktitut) and inflectional languages (Germanic) are thought to have evolved thereafter. Polysynthetic languages are fairly rare, and actually some of the "primitive" languages you mentioned earlier were/are polysynthetic. See Wikipedia.
I really suggest you read Edward Sapir's "Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech" (available here for free). As described in that book, there is a natural tendency for languages to drift in their syntactic "philosophy" over time.
(I'm aware that this issue is a bit more complicated than this; Africans are not nearly as homogenous a group as Europeans and Asians, and some Africans are more closely related to Europeans than to some other Africans, but let's not get into that detail here, okay? My point is that all modern humans are much more closely related to each other than to Neanderthals.) Still another theory is that early modern humans interbred with neanderthals. In that case caucasians would still have neanderthal genes to this day. This is a serious theory. I believe the consensus at the moment is that Neanderthals died out without passing genes on to modern Europeans, but some scientists disagree. It's certainly not impossible that it happened, but there's no evidence that I know of (which doesn't mean much, since I'm not a geneticist or paleontologist or something like that). None of the last two theories have been proven and the first theory is more accepted. If the first theory is correct then it is possible that since neanderthals and modern Europeans both had to live in the same climate it makes sense that their outward appearances might become similar after a while. Keep in mind that Neanderthals lived in that environment far longer than modern Europeans have. We only showed up here some 70,000 years ago at best, whereas Neanderthals lived here for a couple of hundred thousand years. Homo sapiens clearly lived here for long enough to develop pale skin, but not long enough to develop very significant anatomical differences compared to African branches of homo sapiens. Personally I think that it is likely that neanderthals have been given a bad rap and were probably more advanced than we give them credit for. Maybe if they were still around they would be able to fit in quiet nicely in our modern world? Of course we have enough trouble with racism in a world where were all human and have surprisingly little genetic differences. Imagine how history would be different if there were more than one species of advanced hominids living to this day. Seen the TV series Cavemen?