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Re: Archaic H. sapiens???
MSCob (mscob@aol.com)
16 Jan 1997 15:43:22 GMT
Michael McBroom wrote about the Neanderthal palate and throat:
The morphology of the Neanderthal palate and
basicranial area, however, indicates that his vowel and consonant
inventory was much more limited than ours.
Doesn't it show that his inventory was different from ours, rather
than necessarily more limited? He could not produce the extreme point
vowels (a, i, u), as I recall, but there are lots of sounds in modern
languages that are not exploited as widely as they might be, which might
have filled out the Neantherthal phonetic inventory: tones; implosive
consonants; trills; clicks.
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