BOOK REVIEW

EVE SPOKE : Human Language and Human Evolution
_____________________________________________ Phillp Lieberman 1999

Nothing radically new in this book but Phillip Lieberman decries Chomsky's kooky ideas throughout. Good - as well he should - Chomsky being the snake oil Sigmund Freud of 20th Century linguistics.

Some ideas found in this 180 page book are...

*** Our kinfolk the Neaderthals most likely spoke in a "proto-language". The reconstruction of the position of the larynx in adult Neanderthals has indicated that the language of Neaderthals was likely a paltry one when compared to we, the wonderful Cro-magnons of today. It seems that their low positioned vocal tracts could probably pronounce all human vowels except (i), (u), and (a). Moreover the Neanderthal could not produce consonants like ((k) and (g).
Big deal, you say, until you remember that frogs find their mates by mating croaks, and in the absence of any physical barriers to effect genetic distinctions, local dialects accomplish the very same thing, i.e. people mostly mate with those who sing a familiar sounding song. "Thus, the sounds of speech in themselves can account for the extinction of the Neanderthals".

*** Spoken words are not spoken nor heard as individual units when spoken within a sentence. Rather, the sentence construct holds the full meaning and our words are percieved as continous flow of water and not as a float of individual boats. Our ideas of phonetics are therefore poorly contrived, and as such they can only be of functional value to us if the sounds we make when expressing ourselves can be rearranged to reflect this continuum of vocal reality.
Forget meter and syllabification and stress, think German, think mega-byte.

(more in a minute)