So the other day I was talking with the mrs about something when I joked around about how "English is degenerating" and pretty soon we'll all start just be speaking in cavemen grunts.
Given my background (my major that is, not necessarily my caveman ways), I couldn't leave it alone. I got to thinking what would be the least a caveman (or future, degenerate, texting, cavepersons) could utter and still be considered able to communicate via language. For something to be considered Language, linguists say it needs to have a few basic requirements:
- It needs to be able to convey ideas that are not necessarily present at the time and place of the utterance.
- It needs to allow for a potentially infinite set of utterances.
This precludes all animal communication, as far as we currently know.
Anyways, I've boiled down the bare minimum that cavemanese needs:
- uh
- silence
These two sounds can allow for the same expressiveness, infiniteness, and subtlety, as English or any other natural language. How, one might ask? All we need is a way to distinguish one thing from another thing. That's it. In this case, we have a schwa ("uh") and silence. From these two objects we can build up a language, the same way that Mike's beautiful digital photos are made up of ones and zeros.
Let's try building cavemanese. First we need a lexicon. For simplicity sake, we can use the basic ideas behind
Huffman coding and
data compression:
(silence): word-boundary
uh:
theuh-uh:
touh-uh-uh:
withuh-uh-uh-uh:
inuh-uh-uh-uh-uh:
Iuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh: (
genitive-marker)
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh:
eatuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh:
likeuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh:
caveuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh:
mammothuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh: sauce bourguignonneuh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh:
cavemanese...
So let's speak cavemanese now. For simplicity sake, let's assume that cavemanese syntax is similar to English, although we could easily use other word-order configurations. We'll transcribe silence with a space:
uh-uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh
"I like to eat mammoth with sauce bourguignonne in my cave."
So the next time someone says that English is degenerating, you can tell them "uh-uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!"
It's official: I'm old. How do I know this? Well, a couple weeks ago I came across the picture on the right, thinking it would be funny to post when my biological odometer rolled over. Then a few days passed and I couldn't remember why I needed to keep the picture around. So I kept it lying around, remembering that I was going to use it for something, but forgetting what specifically.
