Some more thoughts on Neanderthal speech…
I’ve been thinking about the abstract comment:
While research on the acoustics of speech production indicates that a vocal tract with this shape is insufficient for producing quantal speech sounds resistant to articulatory error and perceptual confusion, other modeling studies suggest that Neanderthals could have possessed fully-articulate speech capabilities.
I’m thinking that since we’ve never heard the speech of a Neanderthal, we really don’t know what their language was like. They sure didn’t speak English. There are so many languages in the world and many that have components other than the vowels and consonants that we use in English. Some languages are tonal where the same words may mean different things depending on the notes the syllables hit when spoken. There’s a language that uses clicks in addition to sound. So, even if the Neanderthals couldn’t produce quantal speech, they may not have needed it because their language compensated for the lack somehow (lots of hand waving here).
In looking up the word quantal in Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary:
being or relating to a sensitivity response marked by the presence or absence of a definite reaction (an all-or-none response to a stimulus is quantal)
It seems to me that the “quantal-ness” is in the hearer not the speaker. The listener adjusts for errors in articulation not the speaker. So isn’t this backwards? Just thinking because I’m not a linguist but I find that often science uses perfectly good words in ways that make clear understanding by laypeople a tad difficult. Looking at the above definition, I really think the onus of understanding is on the hearer, whether or not the speaker clearly enunciated each syllable, vowel, and/or consonant. Often, I have trouble understanding people who slur or lisp or otherwise have difficulty clearly speaking, but that’s may problem in understanding and their speech problem is a separate issue. I sometimes have problems understanding people who speak clearly (such as politicians) but that an entirely different issue.
I still think the research is amazing and I look forward to hearing a full sentence with their synthesizer but, I think the only way we’d know for sure what a Neanderthal actually sounded like and what their language was like is to invent a time machine and then, of course, we’d have all those pesky time travel tropes to deal with.
Hyperion here. Just thought I’d add one extra datapoint. Several years ago, we were in Scotland for the World Science Fiction Convention. Our hotel was right next door to a hole-in-the-wall fish and chips shoppe. We went in to place our order and the clerk asked me something. Could have been to describe quantum relativity as far as I knew. All I heard was incomprehensible gibberish. So I asked him to repeat it. He did … and it was just as nonsensical as the first time. The third time was just as bad. So I’m staring at him, he’s staring at me, and we both know that we’re not going to be getting anywhere. Then Gayle puts a hand on my shoulder, looks at the clerk, and says, “Let me translate for you … Would you like vinegar on your fish?”. I responded enthusiastically, and then the clerk just stared at us like we were nuts. Then he went off and got two meals ready for the crazy Americans.
But the fact was that he was speaking clearly (for a scotsman anyway), and Gayle could understand him fine. But his accent rendered his speech total opaque to my best efforts. So was the problem in his speaking or in my listening? Or both?