PIE vs. Proto-Language

[Larry Trask]

X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>  Let me just posit a slightly different scenario.  That the first change that
>  happened that moved early primates towards homo was the ability to make
>  complex sounds.  One of the core understandings of evolutionary theory is
>  that all adaptation is local and limited in time.
>  So this adaption would have had a very local and limited advantage - say, in
>  the ability to hunt communally or to signal with precision where food or
>  danger was on an ad hoc basis.

>  But with the ability to make more complex sounds would have come a number of
>  additional features that became more long term.

Clarification, please: what is meant here by "complex sounds"?

It is not obvious to me that the sounds produced by human vocal tracts are more
complex than the sounds produced by other creatures -- acoustically more
complex, I mean.  I would suggest rather that our sounds are more numerous than
those of other creatures, and that, crucially, he have the more-or-less unique
ability to combine sequences of meaningless sounds into meaningful units.
Other creatures generally operate on the principle of 'one-sound-one-meaning',
but we don't.

And it is the emergence of this duality of patterning that seems to me to
require an explanation.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk