Abstract
While speech and language do not fossilize, they still leave traces that can be extracted and interpreted. Here, we suggest that the shape of the hard structures of the vocal tract may also allow inferences about the speech of long-gone humans. These build on recent experimental and modelling studies, showing that there is extensive variation between individuals in the precise shape of the vocal tract, and that this variation affects speech and language. In particular, we show that detailed anatomical information concerning two components of the vocal tract (the lower jaw and the hard palate) can be extracted and digitized from the osteological remains of three historical populations from The Netherlands, and can be used to conduct three-dimensional biomechanical simulations of vowel production. We could recover the signatures of inter-individual variation between these vowels, in acoustics and articulation. While ‘proof-of-concept’, this study suggests that older and less well-preserved remains could be used to draw inferences about historic and prehistoric languages. Moreover, it forces us to clarify the meaning and use of the uniformitarian principle in linguistics, and to consider the wider context of language use, including the anatomy, physiology and cognition of the speakers.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.
Highlights
The dead cannot speak: we cannot listen to Shakespeare reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we cannot elicit verb conjugations from Cicero, and we cannot even get Tutankhamun to say ‘aaah’
Before discussing the type of vocal tract data that can be recovered from this record, and the kind of inferences for speech and language that can be made, we briefly review a few studies linking variation in details of vocal tract anatomy to phonetics and phonology using a multitude of methodologies, including experimental designs with living 3 people, computational modelling and phylogenetic inferences
While our models are rather simplistic and, crucially, do not implement articulatory compensation or acoustic-auditory-based targeting, the differences we found are real in the sense that they would exist in the speech output of these individuals if they could maintain exactly the same articulatory structure and posture; they are components of our organic voice quality [138,139]
Summary
The dead cannot speak: we cannot listen to Shakespeare reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we cannot elicit verb conjugations from Cicero, and we cannot even get Tutankhamun to say ‘aaah’. Our limits in what concerns the speech and language of long-gone people run deeper than this: there seems to a widespread assumption in linguistics that, on the one hand, there are precious few traces left by speech and language (writing goes back not more than a few thousand years) and, on the other, living (and attested) languages are very poor at retaining information about their earlier stages Taken together, these seem to impose a ‘time horizon’ beyond which we cannot really know much [11], a time horizon that is usually placed at most 10 000 years ago, and rooted in the breakdown of the ‘standard’ historical linguistic comparative method of information recovery and inference ([12,13,14,15]; see [16]). Besides allowing us to make informed guesses about Neanderthals lacking labiodentals and the persistence of clicks in sub-equatorial Africa, this approach questions the indiscriminate application of a strong uniformitarian principle to speech and language, arguing instead for a much more nuanced inferential framework that takes into account the wider context of language, which includes, among others, the physical environment and human biology [39,40]
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