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.'"

Comments

Just great

[CSMatt]

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."

Re:Neanderthals weren't subtle?

[pclminion]

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.

we know

[Trailer Trash]

His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.

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...

Re:Obligatory joke

[jollyreaper]

I'm imagining, then, that it sounded something like "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."

[ducks] I was thinking more along the lines of "I'm the decider! You've done a heck of a job, Brownie." But I could be completely wrong. It might sound more like "Developers developers developers developers."

Re:Does this work for present humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Does this work for present humans?

[Mantaar]

Dude, his research is close to a tautology anyways: "His team concluded that Neanderthal speech did not have the subtlety of modern human speech.'"

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 /dev/urandom through it, you really can't do jack with it.

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.

Re:Does this work for present humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, we're fairly sure that concerning syntax, early human's language surely followed some sort of predicative model As does modern human language...

- 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. Linguists like Sapir have made it quite clear that such aboriginal languages are just as sophisticated and expressive as any other languages of the world. They have died out because of the ebb and flow of civilizations, not because of inherent "primitiveness" of the language.

Sentences there usually are of the form "This is an Apple. This is red." - instead of "This is a red apple". It sounds like you pulled that from your ass. American languages, for instance, are perfectly capable of expressing "This is a red apple" (in Lakhota, it would be "Le thaspan sha", literally "this apple red"--and before you complain about it missing the copula verb "is", please note that Russian does the same thing). In any case, it makes no sense to analyze another language by using English-language sentences without any further explanation.

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. Chinese is a very prominent, in no way primitive, modern language. English itself is fairly isolating when compared to its Germanic origins--for example, it has lost case markings in preference for isolative mechanisms such as prepositions or use of word order to distinguish roles (which is why you can say "I gave him the book" and know it means "I gave the book to him" and not "I gave him to the book"). And by the way, the actual way of saying "This is an apple" in Mandarin Chinese is "Zhe shi yige pingguo", which happens to be identical with the English sentence in structure.

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.