{"id":514,"date":"2008-04-16T19:41:25","date_gmt":"2008-04-16T18:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/?p=514"},"modified":"2008-04-16T19:41:25","modified_gmt":"2008-04-16T18:41:25","slug":"voices-of-ancient-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/?p=514","title":{"rendered":"Voices of ancient history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Anthropologists and computer geeks have worked their magic and <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/20080416\/sc_nm\/neanderthals_voice_dc;_ylt=AmvHyR1JuHGrepS187bBm3Ws0NUE\" target=\"_blank\">reproduced Neanderthal speech<\/a>. Yes, they spoke. They just didn&#8217;t sound anything like modern humans.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The conclusion is that Neanderthals spoke, but sounded rather different to us. Specifically, the ancient humans&#8217; lacked the &#8220;quantal vowel&#8221; sounds that underlie modern speech and which provide cues that help speakers understand one another.<\/p>\n<p>By modeling the sounds that a Neanderthal larynx would have made, McCarthy&#8217;s team engineered the sound of a Neanderthal saying &#8220;e.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In contrast to a modern human &#8220;e,&#8221; the Neanderthal version lacks a quantal hallmark, which helps a listener distinguish the word &#8220;beat&#8221; from &#8220;bit,&#8221; for instance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Go download and listen <a href=\"http:\/\/media.newscientist.com\/data\/images\/ns\/av\/dn13672A1.wav\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/media.newscientist.com\/data\/images\/ns\/av\/dn13672A2.wav\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anthropologists and computer geeks have worked their magic and reproduced Neanderthal speech. Yes, they spoke. They just didn&#8217;t sound anything like modern humans. The conclusion is that Neanderthals spoke, but sounded rather different to us. Specifically, the ancient humans&#8217; lacked the &#8220;quantal vowel&#8221; sounds that underlie modern speech and which provide cues that help speakers [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}