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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: SF & Language - Minimums
Message-ID: <petrichE6t25t.For@netcom.com>
Organization: Netcom
References: <01bc265a$a239f270$275ee8cd@sal9000> <5fmcuq$rbq@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 02:13:05 GMT
Lines: 42
Sender: petrich@netcom19.netcom.com

In article <5fmcuq$rbq@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>,
John M. Lawler <jlawler@tempest.rs.itd.umich.edu> wrote:

... Dolphins, for
>instance, have three separate systems for breathing, food intake, and
>sound production, and consequently their "phonetics" is vastly different
>from humans'.

	That brings sometime to mind. I remember reading John(?) Lilly's
books on trying to communicate with dolphins, and the first thing he tried
to do was teach some dolphins to make human speech sounds. It seemed to me
at the time that that was a fallacy, since some birds, such as parrots,
can do some approximation of that feat without manifesting much by the way
of true linguistic prowess. The idea I preferred would be to try to 
adjust to what dolphins might prefer.

	That's the approach that has had the most (seeming) success with 
chimpanzees -- they are limited in what human speech sounds they can 
make, because their larynx does not move downward, as ours does, so 
someone got the idea of teaching chimps sign language. Some chimps appear 
to have learned a sizable vocabulary of signs, though they do not seem 
capable of composing coherent sentences. 

>And dolphins are related to us. ...

	The youngest common ancestor, however, lived about 70 million
years ago, and would have looked something like a small rodent or
insectivore, though without the rodentian specialization of gnawing
incisors. This ancestor was very likely nocturnal, meaning that its 
vision was relatively poor; the closest thing to language it would have 
had would have been some mouse-ish squeaks.

	Thus, human and dolphin big brains are a case of multiple
evolution, though with different specializations (ours has a big visual
area and various language generation and processing centers, while much of
dolphins' brains is likely used for processing audio information for
echolocation). 
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/petrich/home.html
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