___________________ HUH? ___________________

Please excuse me etaoin, for posting a paragraph so tightly written. But honestly, I didn't think anyone was listening. Maybe this expansion will render it coherent...

Big deal, you say, until you remember that frogs find their mates by mating croaks,

Most frogs find other frogs in fogs by sounding croaks peculiar to a specific bog or even specific to the particular frog to which he hopes to mate.

(Forgive me etaoin, apparently I am my own whore and can't help amusing only me. Forgive me. I think it's best hereafter that I quote only from the book.)

"Ethologists have noted that songbirds literally sing for their partners. Birdsongs serve as "genetic isolating mechanisms". Frogs find their mates by their less than melodic 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.

I think I can handle this...
Like frogs and birds people tend to mate with those who talk as they do. Even when no mountains or deep waters are in place to accomplish genetic divergence by isolating the gene pool, a beginning dialect establishes boundaries that, outside of other factors, increases genetic divergence exponentially with the degree of semantic divergence.

For example, my dear mother did not want her two boys to join the US army, not because she was afraid that we might get killed in a war -worse - she was afraid that we might be sent up north where we might marry a fast talking yankee.



"Thus, the sounds of speech in themselves can account for the extinction of the Neanderthals".

Again, the book...

"Over the course of time even a slight advantage in coping with nature would have led to the increase of our human ancestors and a struggle available resources. That is the pattern commonly observed for species competing in the same ecological niche. Again, given the isolating effects of dialect, a small difference in lingistic and/or cognitive ability, operating over many generations, could have resulted in the Neaderthal extinction."