When there are only a few dozen people you might interact with during your lifetime, long/complex names are a bit unnecessary.
I mean, why use “Jonathan” when you haven’t used “John” yet?
Obviously that’s assuming a bit, but I’d say it’s a safe assumption that names were originally just identifiers and carried none of the sentimental/cultural overtones that we associate with names today.
That’s how I feel about it. I mean even if the original language didn’t have verb conjugations (and all we can do is assume here), they ought to be added in the translation. There are plenty of languages today that don’t conjugate their verbs according to the subject, don’t have as complex of temporal tenses, don’t use articles, etc, but we add them in translation. I think it’s humorous in a comedy but in a serious movie, it detracts from it. Just stick with good grammar and leave out modern words.
Yeah, but they threw like girls. 
Seriously, the Neanderthals’ musculature didn’t permit them to throw their spears over-handed, so they had to get in closer to their prey to thrust their spears at it. Cro-Magnons could throw over-handed with more power, so were able to kill prey from a farther distance. Some anthropologists believe that Cro-Magnons out-competed the Neanderthals for food, thus hastening the Neanderthals’ extinction.
Me, Grimlock, just have preference for objective case!
Looks like somebody woke up on the wrong side of the rock.
ETA: Now that I think of it, though, didn’t all the Geico cavemen speak with kind of a lisp? I remember somebody speculating that neaderthals or one of those guys would actually have some kind of speech impediment like that given the structure of their mouths and throats.
It’s pure ethnocentrism and Holywood conventions – having primitive speech patterns is supposed to show that you’re a primitive rough-hewn character.
Remember the old Saturday Night Live routines with Tarzan, Tonto, and Frankenstein all conversing inthe minimal and broken English? What made that routine truly bizarre was that, in the origijnal literature, both the Frankenstein monster and Tarzan are incredibly literature and well-spoken. Unlike their movie counterparts, they can both read and speak in complex, downright flowery sntences. Heck, Tarzan is multilingual, having learned to speak French before he learned to speak English (although he learned to read English first).
Tonto was a creation of the radio and the movies, so he didn’t have a literary pre-existence. In fact, his speech patterns were probably invented to take advantage of the fact that they only had voice to portray his character, so they fell back on this device to convey his image simple and succinctly. But I figure that his halting and sparse speech is the result of English being his second language, learned late in life.
In reality, some of the most complex languages on Earth are spoken by “primitive” tribesmen. Modern English is far simpler grammatically than Old English. The tendency is for languages to get simpler over time. Cavemen probably had very complex grammar.
Sci-fi authors sometimes make this mistake, when the alien visitors to Earth describe how they have learnt to speak our “simple language” in order to communicate with us.
It’s not clear that languages get simpler overall in time. What usually happens is that they lose complexity in certain parts of their system and gain complexity in other parts of their system.
Which make sense. After all, you wouldn’t expect a complex grammar to emerge without going through simpler stages first.
It doesn’t really follow. Modern primitive people, after all, have been around just as long as the rest of us, while ancient people hadn’t been around as long. And as others have said, at some point language had to have been invented, and it seems implausible that they went instantly from “Arrrrgh ! Ugh ! Ugh !” to “I say good sir, could you hand me that azure polished mineral crystal ? I require it to complete my most recent artistic endeavour.”
It’s likely though that language hasn’t gotten any more complex for the past 100,000 years, since the point that Homo sapiens left Africa to take over the rest of the world. Incidentally, there was never any point in human evolution when there were humans or human ancestors living in caves. The only reason that the term “cave men” was ever used was that there are some early drawings in caves. That doesn’t mean that they lived there.
Well, I know pople have spent the night in caves, and I’m guessing there has been hermit or somesuch that has called a cave thier permanenet address.
The Anasazi lived in dwellings on cliff faces - some with overhangs so are sort-of cavelike
I know there are some cave/cavelike places in Wisconsin that the natives used for shelter - though I can’t say they “lived” there
Brian
Put it this way: There was no time in the evolution of humans when large numbers of people lived in caves. In any case, cliffside dwellings were actually rather advanced structures. They were carefully carved out. They were used in historical times and weren’t related to the period of the art found in caves in Europe.
One of the reasons creoles and pidgins are fascinating to linguists is that they give indications both as to the inherent structures of language and language development over time. While a pidgin develops from a simplification or blending of rules of the languages involved, and necessarily has a limited vocabulary, it tends to get more complex and capable of nuances after a while. Creoles are usually, though not always, the next step in development. Typically they’re created by the children of pidgin speakers. The kids standardize the rules of grammar, add complexity, and vastly expand vocabulary. Even pidgins are plenty expressive though, so the notion that “caveman” language was simple, limited, and not capable of nuance is almost certainly wrong.
After all, the capacity for making a large range of sounds used in speech developed at least as far back as Homo heidelbergensis. There’s reason to believe that combinations of sign language and sounds were used for communication in earlier hominids due to the development of specialized brain structures that have been mapped to language and lateralization in modern humans and chimpanzees. That means that language had had at least hundreds of thousands of years, and probably well over a million years to develop before hominids even had the capability of full vocal expression. Researchers have proposed that hominids as far back as H. erectus used language extensively. Neanderthals had almost as much flexibility in speech apparatus as their counterparts, and obviously used it, judging from the complexity shown in behavior and artifacts.
If you had a time machine and popped back to live with a Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon group, you’d probably have just as much trouble learning to speak their language properly as you would if you tried to learn any other modern language. More, probably, because there’s a large degree of inter-relatedness among many languages that are in the same language family. The difficulty of an English speaker mastering a non-PIE language like Khoi would probably be a better match than something that’s closely related like German or French.
See Hulkspeak.
Does anyone else remember the film ‘Quest for Fire’? In it, Anthony Burgess invented a prehistoric language.
Hmmmm. I’m not convinced. Wouldn’t the language complexity during any era reflect the complexity of the society in general? I mean, we have complex philosophy and jumbo shrimp and “leave Brittany alone!!”, and everything, and they had, what, “Wall of ice closer today, Thag?”
I love *The Far Side
*
Ah, poor Thag Simmons.
Shamozzle writes:
> Wouldn’t the language complexity during any era reflect the complexity of the
> society in general?
No. I don’t know how to convince you of this. Read some books about linguistics. If you want to learn something about historical linguistics, you might start with the book The Evolution of Language by Guy Deutscher. There is some evidence, in fact, that present-day languages that were isolated until just recently are slightly more complex than languages spoken around the world. An Australian aboriginal language, for instance, might well be slightly more complex than English. The theory is that having lots of foreign speakers learn the language tends to knock off some of the complexities of the language.
Not only is it a fallacy to assume that the complexity of a language reflects the society, but you assume that industrial societies are complex. They’re not. When it comes to the way people lived in the past, we’ve got it easy. We don’t have to learn anywhere near as many different areas of knowledge and we don’t have to remember as many social interactions and connections. Americans don’t have to keep a mental list of gifts received and given, or keep track of a complicated system of familial relationships and obligations and the relationships of other people to those family members. Social obligations are extremely casual in most Western societies compared to pretty much any traditional society.
For all the scholorship surrounding it, Christianity has a very simple cosmology and pantheon in comparison to animist religions. Most people, even after going to church all their lives don’t know more than a handful of the more popular stories well enough to tell them, while almost everyone in a village might be capable of competent storytelling and know the related songs and dances. The relationships of the gods might be even more complex than the relationships of the people who tell those stories. And without writing, all of it is memorized.
Hunters and gatherers have to have a depth of knowledge about their area that encompasses hundreds of plants and hundreds of animals, along with their development cycles and uses, that puts most dedicated botanists and zoologists to shame, because it’s a matter of eating or going hungry for them; being a biologist is in effect their main full-time job. They all have to be able to make any of the tools they use, and anyone who has tried flint-knapping will tell you that “simple stone-age tools” are not exactly simple or easy to make. Even making a fire with nothing but a bow drill or other friction device requires an extensive knowledge of the available woods in the area and how they react under different conditions. (I know exactly how hard flint knapping and making a fire from available tools are because I’ve tried my hand at both. Theoretical knowledge of the concepts of mineral cleavage and flash points doesn’t help at all, by the way.)
Truthfully, many people in modern industrial societies underutilize their capabilities in both physical and mental skills. Part of the reason why that’s so is because we don’t have to learn very much or be very good at doing something to survive. That’s true whether you grew up poor or rich, but especially so in the latter case. I would go so far as to say that the attention people pay to celebrity relationships and the dedication to the tangled relationships and stories in soap operas or TV series like Lost is a substitute for missing complexity in modern social networks.