Simon Prentis and the Origin of the Brain

SIMON PRENTIS — SPEECH! HOW LANGUAGE MADE US HUMAN — KINDLE — 2021

The author is no phylogenist of language and despite remarkably interesting ideas and the a priori assumption that all languages can say everything in a way or another, he ignores the following elements and that is regrettable.

1- language is NEVER a simple sequence of noises, not even sounds. They are vowels and consonants from the very start. Monkeys do not have a language, but they have calls that are built the same way as our words: vowels that enable consonants to be uttered on a basic pattern C-V-C.

2- the difference between the “calls” of monkeys and human words is not in the difference between sonorous or vocal architectures of the items or units, but in the fact that human language invented the rotation of vowels and consonants. The basic call of the monkeys I know is “boom” often doubled up into “boom boom.” It is a call for attention before any meaningful call can be uttered (note that only concerns males and the researchers who studied these monkeys know that women and the young are “speaking” when they are together, but no study has been made of their communication or “language”: sexism at work there). You can see, and this is true of human languages, a syllable is C-V-C with the possibility of having one consonant reduced to zero. If the monkeys I know had had or even had in the present this rotation of vowels and consonants (cat, bat, mat, pat, hat; cut, cot, cap, car, cam, cab, etc.) they could produce with the means they do have in their calls at least 125 or so calls, but they only have six or seven calls.

3- Question. Why did humans develop this rotation? Because they were able to utter or articulate a lot more vowels (not so many more, just two or three times more than monkeys, at times slightly more if we take into account the slight phonetic variations on each vowel according to their environment) and consonants.

4- Question: Why were Homo Sapiens (and probably, though less, older Hominins) able to produce many vowels and consonants? Because Homo Sapiens…