Re: Human Language. (long post)

John A. Halloran (seagoat@primenet.com)
19 Jan 1997 15:06:02 -0700

In article <19970119181601.NAA06112@ladder01.news.aol.com> mscob@aol.com (MSCob) writes:

>You know what throws cold water on Liberman's elaborate theory about the
>Homo
>sapiens sapiens vocal tract developing to be able to produce more vowels?
>The
>assertion by historical linguists that Proto-Indo-European only had one
>vowel!

> Linguists reconstruct the phonemes, not all the phonetic variations,
>of ancient languages.

This is true. Would you accept, however, the assertion that with just one
vowel phoneme, vowels lacked semantic significance in the earliest version
of this particular proto-language?

Regards,

John Halloran