What if a Neandertal were running for the Republican nomination?
Category: Humor
Posted on: October 22, 2007 1:00 AM, by PZ Myers
It would be a terrible slander of decent Neandertals…but otherwise, we probably wouldn't notice much difference.
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Comments
that comic is perfect, given that Romney is currently polling the highest among the religious right.
Posted by: Ichthyic | October 22, 2007 1:08 AM
Mr. Ugg! Mr. Ugg! Will you be smashing enemy's head by yourself or will be leading the raiding party?
Posted by: Janine | October 22, 2007 1:31 AM
Couldn't that equally apply to all the Democrats running as well? Is there a single Democratic candidate running that doesn't profess a belief in an invisible man in the sky who guides their decisions? No. Every one of them shares similar religious beliefs as the Republicans, they just hide them better since they're pandering to a different audience.
Posted by: John | October 22, 2007 1:32 AM
pandering to a different audience
well, that IS the issue, eh?
they don't pander to the religious right, which regardless of how you slice the rest of it, is at least a step in the
rightcorrect direction.Posted by: Ichthyic | October 22, 2007 1:36 AM
i'll never vote for a caveman. he'll just pander to the car insurrance lobbyists.
Posted by: arachnophilia | October 22, 2007 1:37 AM
Thank you P Zed for not including the spurious "h" in "neandertal"! Ever since I took a semester of German in college, I realized that the pronunciation of "neanderthal" was not what it seemed. Even the spelling is simply reminiscent of archaic norms, as there never has been a "th" sound in German. The spelling was merely retained as normal for the time, and is not a guide to pronunciation.
dorkily yours,
autumn
Posted by: autumn | October 22, 2007 1:38 AM
Can we look forward to subsidies for foot power/gravity hybrid cars?
Posted by: Brownian | October 22, 2007 1:58 AM
[snort]
Ogg never win Pro-Cro-Magnon vote!
Posted by: Ks'nyugghla | October 22, 2007 2:11 AM
The "h" in "Neaderthal" is not spurious. It's just old-fashioned. In modern German, the name sake of Homo neanderthalensis is no longer the Neander "Thal" (or "valley") because "Thal" was superseded by "Tal" in the reformed spelling of the early 20th century. I sometimes run across the old spellings in the libretti of Wagner operas, which he wrote back when "Glut" was still "Gluth", etc.
Posted by: Zeno | October 22, 2007 2:27 AM
I don't think PZ appreciates the democrats' religious silliness, but the fact that they don't share most of the other manifestations of Republican insanity makes them the better choice.
Think of it this way: your only choices are get kicked in the shin, get skinned alive, try to choose something else and get stuck with one of the first two (probably the second), or don't choose and get stuck with one of the first two (also probably the second). Which would you pick?
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 22, 2007 2:53 AM
I sympathize with the message, but that material was only good for one frame. I suppose it's up to us commenters to rescue it from extinction. Surely someone can top "Speak softly and carry a femur."
Posted by: Epistaxis | October 22, 2007 3:08 AM
OOps! I nearly very pedantically lost it for the missing 'h'...but then I am mad for yogHurt and coloUr.So you guys know a lot more than me about lexicography, that's why I read this blog, to be entertained as well as informed!
And: it may be a mistake, but didn't I read somewhere that Ginger haired people (red or strawberry I guess you say over the pond) are more likely to be descendants of the Neandertals? Or is that more anti-ginger propaganda?
A concerned Anglo Saxon, yesterday....
Posted by: Monkeys Uncle | October 22, 2007 4:11 AM
The "gh" in yoghurt is to indicate that it's pronounced (in the source language) something like "yoHH-oort" with an indescribable gutteral noise somewhere between a "kh" and an "l". (In French it's "yaourt", for example.) Same with "Baghdad", which in Arabic is not "Bag-dad" but closer to "baHH-dad" or even "bahl-dad".
It's different for "Genghis Khan", incidentally; it should be pronounced neither "Geng-giss" nor "Geng-HHiss" but "Jeng-giss". The "gh" is to indicate that the second G is hard, despite being followed by an "i"; the first G is soft as in "Gerald", "Georgia", "genocide".
Posted by: ajay | October 22, 2007 6:59 AM
I take it that Mr. Ugg's anti-evolution platform is based on the speciesism that his people have suffered for the last 6,000 years.
Posted by: Ex-drone | October 22, 2007 7:02 AM
There was. Linguists date its disappearance to the 9th century :o)
It wasn't so much retained as introduced somewhere over the course of the last few hundred years -- for purely cosmetic reasons, probably to make German look more like fake Greek. This silliness was abolished when German got an international orthography for the first time (no earlier than 1901).
Indeed not, and it never was.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | October 22, 2007 7:52 AM
What do you mean "if a Neandertal were running"?
Posted by: NC Paul | October 22, 2007 8:25 AM
I believe you are referring to a voiced velar fricative which is truly one of my favorite sounds of the world's languages. It sounds like you're gargling butter!
Posted by: micheyd | October 22, 2007 8:36 AM
Also "Ye olde" is really "the olde" the "Y" was a "th".
BTW I would vote for any Neandertaler over Ron Paul!
Posted by: Adele | October 22, 2007 9:29 AM
In the words of Homer Simpson:
"It's funny ... because it's true."
Posted by: Terry | October 22, 2007 9:35 AM
Maybe you can't describe it, but could you at least spell it? It's "guttural", from the Latin word for "throat", guttur.
</ pedant mode>
"Gutteral" noises are made by politicians in the process of slinging sewage at one another.
Posted by: noncarborundum | October 22, 2007 11:27 AM
There's a claymation show on Adult Swim called Moral Orel that hit on an idea similar to this in an episode that aired last year. The series is about an enthusiastically small-minded conservative christian town in middle America, and in the episode in question the town discovers a "missing link" frozen in a block of ice. They thaw him out, "educate" him and turn him into a Limbaugh-like anti-evolution pundit, only to refreeze him and hide his body when his existence starts causing people to ask inappropriate questions.
Posted by: ruhk | October 22, 2007 12:40 PM
"What if a Neandertal were running for the Republican nomination?"
It'd be a considerable improvement over the current field of H. Erectus and H. Habilis?
Posted by: Ian Gould | October 22, 2007 3:38 PM
My father yesterday commented that we need to just abolish both parties and start over. lol Now, if I could just get him to admit that religion is BS and the Bible a mostly badly written work of fiction.. :p
Posted by: Kagehi | October 22, 2007 4:00 PM
It's not unusual for a loanword to retain an archaic spelling. It's why we write Don Quixote with the X of México. Search Project Gutenberg for "Don Quixote" and you will find an English translation of that work. If you want a Spanish text, search for "Don Quijote".
And yet we pronounce it more or less modernly, though usually with the more relaxed H of English; it really should be an unvoiced version of that GH mentioned upthread. Cervantes most likely pronounced the X as SH, as it is in modern Portuguese.
Posted by: Ray C. | October 22, 2007 4:53 PM
So how do we pronounce the adjective "quixotic"?
Posted by: CJColucci | October 22, 2007 5:41 PM
<sing>L'homme de Crôôôôô... l'homme de Maaaaa... l'homme de gnon... l'homme de Crô, de Ma, de gnon, <sing>
Crap, I forgot all the rest. It's pretty funny.
This speculation exists, but is not testable.
Geographically it makes sense, but that's all evidence that exists for or against the speculation so far.
That's the voiced uvular fricative. An audio file of the velar one is available from here.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | October 22, 2007 7:21 PM
Argh! I opened another <sing> tag instead of closing the first one! And the first "gnon" has to be lengthened, too.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | October 22, 2007 7:23 PM
And in modern French, where Quixote is spelled "Quichotte" and pronounced approximately as English "key SHOT".
Another X->Sh is sherry, which came from Xeres (modern Jerez), Spain.
Posted by: noncarborundum | October 22, 2007 7:34 PM
Nowhere is Tom Tomorrow's name acknowledged as the cartoonist.
Copyright laws still exist (unless the Patriot Act has done away with them).
Posted by: L. Roy | October 23, 2007 8:52 AM
See by Science Daily that neanderthals had the speech gene.
There was a science fiction story. This rather unhansome fellow who had written the world convernment constitution was getting ready to be sworn in as the first President of the World. He had previously won all the Nobel prizes, played in the Pro Bowl, set several track records, made himself the richest man in the world and litteraly had to fight the women off with a club.
There was a time machine and scientists went back. When they arrived they startled a neanderthal family and were attacked. They killed the family except for the baby, which a female scientist picked up and brought back to the present. You see, back in those days, selection was really harsh, and humans were something special in comparison to the easy-living humans of today.
Posted by: Jim Thomerson | October 23, 2007 3:53 PM
Wow, have we had such a linguistics-oriented thread here previously?
Posted by: Keith Douglas | October 24, 2007 7:07 PM