> "still speak in whistles"
"still"?
Why is having more degrees of expressiveness in a vocal language considered an anachronism?
"still"?
Why is having more degrees of expressiveness in a vocal language considered an anachronism?
Looking back I saw he was actually on his mobile phone.
Other forms of communication are available.
https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/bad-linguistics/phonemi...
I don't think this is accurate. While it certainly does happen, new phonemic distinctions can certainly arise as languages change.
The article you link to does not support the idea either, in fact it explicitly contradicts it:
"Moreover, there is no bias towards decreasing the size of phonemic inventory over time as human populations moved out of Africa, as phonemes may be added as well as eliminated."
"That doesn’t mean that modern whistled speech is a vestigial remnant of those protolanguages, Meyer cautions. If whistling preceded voiced speech, those earliest whistles wouldn’t have needed to encode sounds produced by the vocal cords. But today’s whistled languages do, which means they arose later, as add-ons to conventional languages, not forerunners of them, Meyer says."
Did you think that passage was a total non-sequitur? Are they cautioning you from believing something you would have no reason to believe? Or do you think they were aware they had unduly created that impression.
I suppose if I say "we shouldn't assume people who comment on HN posts are sad, lonely, and grumpy" I'm not being offensive or disrespectful. After all, I never said outright that anyone was any of those things. On the contrary, it actually says the exact opposite
It's a trick of language called insinuation.
So identifying the minimum requirements for comprehensible, yet sophisticated, communication by sound would possibly shed light on what paleo-speech was like...
"Despite their interest to both linguists and casual observers, whistled languages are disappearing rapidly all over the world, and some — such as the whistled form of the Tepehua language in Mexico — have already vanished. Modernization is largely to blame, says Meyer, who points to roads as the biggest factor. “That’s why you still find whistled speech only in places that are very, very remote, that have had less contact with modernity, less access to roads,” he says."
I'd replace "blame" with "thank": the simpler languages can become, and the fewer of them in daily use we can get to globally, the better for the entire species.
I'd love an expressive and terse baseline human language.
No problem if people still use other languages too, for cultural or historical reasons.
But having a multilingual globe comes at a massive, immeasurable cost.
One of the greatest forces to improve economic opportunity and equality in the history of the world would be if everybody suddenly agreed on one simple, terse, expressive human language and switched to it, in all contexts except home life and shared spiritual or community services.
No more IELTS tests, no more spelling bees, no more "why is 'wherefore art thou' not about Romeo's location?", no more notarized translation costs everywhere in the world... everybody gets equal access to all media created in all places (although of course there'll still be place-specific references in that media), etc
If you were designing an ideal human world, the last thing you'd want to do is build a Tower of Babel on it.
I suspect this is one of those "pick two, at best" situations.