No, I’m not going to ask what Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon called each other; I know we don’t know. What I do want to ask is if there is any particular reason that the names of primitive people would be more along the lines of Ug and Zog than Marianna Carlotta Mononda de Francesco. Do we have any reason to believe anything at all about the names of people who lived 40000+ years ago? Do we know enough about primitive languages, through deduction or otherwise, to make an educated guess?
Look at the tribal societies of the American Indians, the Australian Aborigines, and the Aboriginals of Papua New Guinea at the time of first contact. Those names are probably the ones most similar to what a cro-magnon “caveman” would have called himself.
The Neanderthals are a different story. Despite the fact that they had a wide range, they apparently exhibited little cultural diversity between tribes. Neanderthal artifacts from Spain look pretty much like Neanderthal artifacts from Turkey. I'd venture that if Neanderthals showed little creativity in creating tools, they'd also show little creativity in choosing names for themselves or their family members. Completely arbitrary, easily pronounced words such as "Ug" and "Zog" may well have been the preference, although I'm not sure if scientists have been able to theorize which phonemes the Neanderthals were capable of pronouncing.I think that most caveman names that we hear come from comic-book writers, pulp writers, and screenwriters, folks not always known for the depth of their research, and that they therefore used single-syllable nonsense words that suggested their idea of primitive speech. The alternative has been “literal translations” of names – “Thinker”, “Wolf-Face”, etc.
I don’t know of any writers who looked into real “primitive” names to try to come up with a plausible set of names (I never read Jean Auel’s books. Did she do this?) I do know that even good pulp writeras trod the first route above. Robert E. Howard came up with impressive names based von classical models most of the time, but when faced with coming up with “primitive”" names he fell into thudding similarity – “Thak” was the ape-man in “Rogues in the House”, and “Thog” was a primitive demon-creature.
I always liked “Thak” as a name. I wanted to name my son Thak, but mom would have none of it.
Auel was following a theory at the time that Neanderthals (The Clan) were capable of only very limited verbal speech, but had a rich sign language. Their personal names were spoken words, though. Most of their speech is described as gutteral and rolling, with swallowed sounds. Her spelling is fairly Anglicized. A name spelled “Creb” is described as sounding like “Grrrrrrrrrrrrub”, with a long rolled “r” sound surrounded by two swallowing sounds. (But it’s always “Kreb” in my head.) The protaganist, a Cro-Magnon, has a much longer and more linguistically gymnastic name, but we never find out what it was originally. The closest the Clan can come to saying it is “Ayla”, though most of them say it more like “Arrrgghaa”, and Ayla becomes her name.
Other Neanderthal names in her books: Broud, Brun, Iza, Uba, Zoug, Dorn, Durc
Her Cro-Magnon names vary by culture, and each group of people have a distinctive pattern to their naming. It’s easy to tell a Mamutoi from a Zelandonnii just by name. Mamutoi names: Deegie, Latie, Tronie, Tulie, Thonie (for women), Talut, Ranec, Frebec, Manuv, Barzec (for men.) Zelandonnii names: Jopalaya, Marthona, Marona, Jonayla (for women) Jondalar, Thonolan, Dalanar, Joharran (for men).
It’s probably not correct to use “primitive” to describe the language spoken by our ancestors 40,000 years ago, and it certainly isn’t accurate to call any extant language “primitive”. In the vernacular, the word “primitive” means simple or unsophsiticated. In the scientific sense it simply means “older” or “not derived”. Scientifically, one might call Old English “primitive” English simply because (modern) English is derived from it. But it would incorrect to assume that older languages are less sophisticated (unless we were to go back further than 40,000 years) and no linguist would call any extant language “primitive”.
We certainly don’t know what names were like 40,000 years ago, but it’s unlikely anyone would have a name like “Marianna Carlotta Mononda de Francesco”, since people lived in small groups with no need to designate where someone was from or who their parents are. There is also no reason to assume that people used short, gruntish names for people since names were probably derived from words in the langauge, and there is no reason to assume that the language was made up of only short, gruntish words.
Oh, wow. Um, what in the world do you base this guess on? And what common features do you see there being between those (rather large) groups that could possibly be similar to the speech of “cavemen”?
It strikes me that any guess about how Neanderthals talked at all - let alone how they named each other - is based on very little. Most of the articulatory organs are composed of soft tissues that don’t fossilize well; any guess at all about what sounds the Neanderthals made, or if they had any capacity for speech at all (since it requires brain adaptations as well as adaptations in the articulators) strikes me as rather imprudent.
For the record, my name’s Russell
Pronounced: Urrrrslgh
Because they’re both human groups that either still live in tribal groups or lived in tribal groups within recorded history. Names are a function of culture, and the cultures are similar.
Hey, I’d fit right in!
Huh?
Except you’re comparing modern cultures to ones from tens of thousands of years ago. None of them are going to be particularly similar. You’re assuming that all non-agricultural societies are somehow inherently similar - similar to the point of having similar naming customs! That’s just not the case. As I hinted at in my earlier post, there’s no obvious similarities to be found amongst all the modern-day languages and naming customs that Stentor referenced - so what does that tell us about people thirty thousand years ago? What do modern languages tell us about this? Imagining that the languages spoken in Australia, the Americas, New Guinea, and every other part of the world with hunter-gatherer communities are somehow similar to each other - or any more similar to each other than they are to European languages - is simply mistaken.
And further, linguistics doesn’t know anything about language that far back. It’s something pretty well-understood within linguistics that all modern languages are essentially equal - not identical, but similar in their complexity and in the scope of what they can express (which is essentially unlimited.) But we also know that at some point in history, proto-humans without language existed. Presumably, for some period in the middle, humans spoke some sort of proto-language. We have absolutely no knowledge of what that language could be like. We can conjecture a few things based upon features that tend to be more common among languages, but you have to recognize that that’s an incredibly limited tool. And the other question - about Neanderthals - is even worse, since we have no evidence at all about how - or if - they spoke. Perhaps artifacts of their culture indicate that they very likely had some sort of language (I’m not an archaeologist; I wouldn’t know) - but they certainly don’t tell us anything about them.
The style of names used in comic books in the like alluded to by Priceguy is only a matter of custom; they’re just what appeal to people as somehow “primitive”. There’s an enormous variety of different cultural practices among all the groups Stentor mentioned, and their languages aren’t similar to one another either. Which tells us that the languages of ancient hunter-gather groups from tens of thousands of years ago are probably also not particularly similar to modern-day hunter-gatherer groups. What similarities do you imagine exist between these languages that we can assume apply to cavemen?
Excalibre: All I was doing was trying to explain what was going on in Stentor 2.5’s head. I didn’t intend to defend it in any way. It’s possible I was wrong, but that would only be the case if Stentor 2.5 was trying to make a different point.
:eek: You guessed my real name!
There’s no way we could go back far enough to even make an attempt at guessing what names 40,000 years ago would be like. This is pretty close to asking what the “oldest” language is. There really can’t be a meaningful answer because we don’t know a whole heck of a lot about languages of the past and anything we know about present languages has almost no bearing on the past. Modern “primitive” languages might have been substantially more complicated 1,000 years ago. We just don’t know.
The guessing games linguists have played, like piecing together a hypothetical Proto-Indo European language, have given us a possible pronunciation guide and limited vocabulary. There’s a slightly jargon-heavy overview from Wikipedia with probably more detail than you’d want. According to some theories, names recorded in Vedic literature might represent some of the oldest names we have a good idea of how to pronounce properly.
Most of what we know about Sumerian, which is the oldest written language we know of, is a guessing game when it comes to pronunciation, since the key to deciphering it was through Akkadian. For all we know, that might be like deciphering English through Japanese loan words; it’s very uncertain to what extent reconstructions are influenced by Akkadian features that may not have mirrored Sumerian ones.
Chinese has the longest continuous written tradition. The sounds have changed, but scholars have a good idea what the originals were. I don’t know if 3500 year old Chinese names are good enough to satisfy you though. Basque, a language isolate, might provide some clues as to what ancient names were in their area since they’ve been there for a really, really long time, but again, nowhere near 40,000 years. Khoi-San languages are sometimes proposed as the earliest language branch, but that’s mostly speculative.
The problem is that unless you can find ways of comparing different languages to each other at various points in time, you can’t find out how they’re changing relative to each other. If you can’t do that, you can’t track changes back and play any guessing games about what earlier forms of the language are like. The only way to compare old languages is through writing, and the oldest writing we’ve got, Sumerian, is only about 5,200 years old.
So, take your pick. Your ancient names could sound like Sanskrit, Sumerian, Khoi-San, Basque, Chinese, or something else entirely. They could be grunts or poetic phrases. Here’s one area where your guess is entirely as good as an expert’s because there’s basically no way to know what names were really like then.
While we can’t be certain what names were like then we can be reasonably confident that they weren’t grunts. We can assume that because we have various groups in Australia and New Guinea that have been approximately isolated for >40, 000 years. These groups don’t speak in grunts, they have perfectly “normal” langauges.
So from that we can assume that languages 40, 000 years ago were already ‘modern’ in all important repsects, and not primitive grunts and mimery. And if the language is normal it follows that the names will be just as normal.
Perhaps the cavemen were Albanian royalty.
Lots of interesting information here, thanks everybody.
Having been isolated for 40.000 years doesn’t necessarily mean that language hasn’t evolved for 40.000 years, does it? That those people don’t grunt now doesn’t mean they didn’t grunt 40.000 years ago.
No, it doesn’t mean the language evolved. It means the langauge changed. All the evidence we have so far indicates that languages aren’t evolving. There are things in language change called cycles. My personal favorite cycle is the Cycle of Negation.