That’s a standard pose for an attractive woman. Blackhair is
wondering if the redhead is sexually attracted to whatever
animal that is.
Funny that people *think* without declination. It seems when we translate speech to caveman speech “me do dumdum thing” the implication is the don’t have sophisticated language (why not??? who knows…) but surely the ability to *think* as Noam Chomsky would attest there is inherent consistent grammar.
Okay… I’m overthinking it, but “me do dumdum thing” in *thought* balloons really seems *weird* to me.
Note the long hair and the lounging pose of the buffalo: He has raised a Hippie son! One who won’t help hunting said buffalo or building new huts but lay lazily in the shade and lament about oppressive parents. In a time, when your next meal depends on dangerous hunting and a lot of good luck on top of the hard work this is worrying indeed, even more so since Hippie culture will arise several thousand years in the future and grow out of a society with bountiful resources.
Yeah, a bestiality joke is all I get out this. But that would be really bizarre for a newspaper strip.
That’s definitely a “draw me like one of your French bison” pose.
What’s a Hippie?
Woozy is right. It’s my understanding that pidgin languages develop a full syntax within one generation, which would make all the ‘me no get it’ stuff mostly incorrect.
I think we just have to accept the comics trope there, just like the doctor with a reflector on his head.
What facet of grammar is missing from his (thought (thoughten? thunken?)) utterance that makes you think his is less than a complete language? “Me worry bout him” –> “I worry about him” So he uses “Me” for the first person singular nominative instead of “I”, and his version of the preposition is “bout” instead of “about”… note he does use the objective “him”.
;-p
lark– the fact that the words are in English indicate it the language is english. And english uses the nomative. For some reason the trope of caveman talk exists (I honestly don’t understand why). But I think of it as speech pattern much as say a foreign accent. It always confused my when ze french charactoor wiz ze french akscent would think in a thought bubble *with a french accent*. Surely they don’t *think* of themselves as having a french accent.
So caveman is not as illogical but it still seems weird. Althought the entire trope never made sense in the first place.
Lots of varieties of English would beg to differ (and I’d maintain that Caveman English is one of them) — as long as they are grammatically complete, you can’t really argue with the choice of words — or even sounds — used to achieve those grammatical markings.
I’m with you on the foreign accent thing. I complained about it in Th Zookeeper’s Wife, and I’ll complain again about it in Coco (to say nothing about the assertion that no Mexican’s life (even the dead ones!) is complete without a relation to a big border they all have to cross). The first movie I remember this becoming a thing in was Chokolat, and something about the pretentiousness of showing a small French village with everyone in it speaking in stupid Fraunsh Akzents just summed up everything I hated about that movie.
“Lots of varieties of English would beg to differ (and I’d maintain that Caveman English is one of them) — as long as they are grammatically complete, you can’t really argue with the choice of words — or even sounds — used to achieve those grammatical markings.”
But I’d argue caveman English *isn’t* a language or a variety. The trope is they are primitive and childlike so their language is primitive and childlike. But that just doesn’t make any sense.
Me worry about BOTH of them, as they are both wearing fursuits.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
“It seems when we translate speech to caveman speech ‘me do dumdum thing’ the implication is the don’t have sophisticated language (why not??? who knows…)”
In the case of the ’80s cult classic movie “Caveman,” it’s obvious that the caveman language invented for the movie was deliberately kept simple for the benefit of the audience who had to understand the simple cave lingo dialog in order to follow the movie and still enjoy the comedy. When you script the entire movie in a made-up language with no translation scene except for one small gag of such well into the second half of the film, then simplicity is a must for that language.
In places such as this comic, I guess it’s just a cliche of the trope.
I’ve noticed that “primitive” languages seem to be much more complex than modern languages. Some very ancient languages have not just singular and plural but also “dual” forms of the noun so there’s different forms of the noun for one, two, and more than two things. They have more voices, like Ancient Greek’s active (“I teach”), passive (“I am taught”) and middle (“I self-educate”). Everything has masculine, feminine and neuter forms, like the number one in Ancient Greek which is “heis”, “mia” and “henna” respectively; no pattern that matches anything else. There’s the nominative case, the accusative case, the genitive case, the dative case, the vocative case and I forget what else. Some languages have five different tenses, not just past, present and future. Over time, languages get simplified. Latin is much simpler than Greek. Modern English is much simpler than Old English. And Chinese would be VERY simple if it weren’t for the tones and the character set.
Mark: all natural languages have roughly the same complexity level. If you squash it down in one place it tends to pop out somewhere else, like a balloon.
English is in no way simple; it has a huge vocabulary and a ton of irregular verbs (and nouns) and a lot of strange grammatical constructions. Latin is a lot more straightforward.
Language is complex because it adapts to the needs of the speakers. For example, a newborn knows only how to announce “I need something”. Coincidentally, this is true for newborn lots of things, not just people. Kittens are cuter (to us, anyway) when they do it. As children grow older, and need to express more complex ideas, their language grows more complex to match. The ones who go to graduate school learn entirely new complexity to match their studies… the construction and vocabulary grow ever more impenetrable to those who do NOT need to express graduate-level conceptualizations.
Note that this is true not for just the spoken and written languages. Some fields have their own language associated… comic strips being a good example. Motion pictures, too, particularly animation… where it becomes obvious because American animation styles and Japanese animation styles have different grammars. Then there’s videogames… how do we tell the players what they are supposed to do, without treating them like idiots? (Again, different grammars in games that originate in Japan and the US).
A joke about primitive vocabulary appeared today in SMBC:
Comics I Don't Understand 
That’s a standard pose for an attractive woman. Blackhair is
wondering if the redhead is sexually attracted to whatever
animal that is.
Funny that people *think* without declination. It seems when we translate speech to caveman speech “me do dumdum thing” the implication is the don’t have sophisticated language (why not??? who knows…) but surely the ability to *think* as Noam Chomsky would attest there is inherent consistent grammar.
Okay… I’m overthinking it, but “me do dumdum thing” in *thought* balloons really seems *weird* to me.
Note the long hair and the lounging pose of the buffalo: He has raised a Hippie son! One who won’t help hunting said buffalo or building new huts but lay lazily in the shade and lament about oppressive parents. In a time, when your next meal depends on dangerous hunting and a lot of good luck on top of the hard work this is worrying indeed, even more so since Hippie culture will arise several thousand years in the future and grow out of a society with bountiful resources.
Yeah, a bestiality joke is all I get out this. But that would be really bizarre for a newspaper strip.
That’s definitely a “draw me like one of your French bison” pose.
What’s a Hippie?
Woozy is right. It’s my understanding that pidgin languages develop a full syntax within one generation, which would make all the ‘me no get it’ stuff mostly incorrect.
I think we just have to accept the comics trope there, just like the doctor with a reflector on his head.
What facet of grammar is missing from his (thought (thoughten? thunken?)) utterance that makes you think his is less than a complete language? “Me worry bout him” –> “I worry about him” So he uses “Me” for the first person singular nominative instead of “I”, and his version of the preposition is “bout” instead of “about”… note he does use the objective “him”.
;-p
lark– the fact that the words are in English indicate it the language is english. And english uses the nomative. For some reason the trope of caveman talk exists (I honestly don’t understand why). But I think of it as speech pattern much as say a foreign accent. It always confused my when ze french charactoor wiz ze french akscent would think in a thought bubble *with a french accent*. Surely they don’t *think* of themselves as having a french accent.
So caveman is not as illogical but it still seems weird. Althought the entire trope never made sense in the first place.
Lots of varieties of English would beg to differ (and I’d maintain that Caveman English is one of them) — as long as they are grammatically complete, you can’t really argue with the choice of words — or even sounds — used to achieve those grammatical markings.
I’m with you on the foreign accent thing. I complained about it in Th Zookeeper’s Wife, and I’ll complain again about it in Coco (to say nothing about the assertion that no Mexican’s life (even the dead ones!) is complete without a relation to a big border they all have to cross). The first movie I remember this becoming a thing in was Chokolat, and something about the pretentiousness of showing a small French village with everyone in it speaking in stupid Fraunsh Akzents just summed up everything I hated about that movie.
“Lots of varieties of English would beg to differ (and I’d maintain that Caveman English is one of them) — as long as they are grammatically complete, you can’t really argue with the choice of words — or even sounds — used to achieve those grammatical markings.”
But I’d argue caveman English *isn’t* a language or a variety. The trope is they are primitive and childlike so their language is primitive and childlike. But that just doesn’t make any sense.
Me worry about BOTH of them, as they are both wearing fursuits.
Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
“It seems when we translate speech to caveman speech ‘me do dumdum thing’ the implication is the don’t have sophisticated language (why not??? who knows…)”
In the case of the ’80s cult classic movie “Caveman,” it’s obvious that the caveman language invented for the movie was deliberately kept simple for the benefit of the audience who had to understand the simple cave lingo dialog in order to follow the movie and still enjoy the comedy. When you script the entire movie in a made-up language with no translation scene except for one small gag of such well into the second half of the film, then simplicity is a must for that language.
In places such as this comic, I guess it’s just a cliche of the trope.
I’ve noticed that “primitive” languages seem to be much more complex than modern languages. Some very ancient languages have not just singular and plural but also “dual” forms of the noun so there’s different forms of the noun for one, two, and more than two things. They have more voices, like Ancient Greek’s active (“I teach”), passive (“I am taught”) and middle (“I self-educate”). Everything has masculine, feminine and neuter forms, like the number one in Ancient Greek which is “heis”, “mia” and “henna” respectively; no pattern that matches anything else. There’s the nominative case, the accusative case, the genitive case, the dative case, the vocative case and I forget what else. Some languages have five different tenses, not just past, present and future. Over time, languages get simplified. Latin is much simpler than Greek. Modern English is much simpler than Old English. And Chinese would be VERY simple if it weren’t for the tones and the character set.
Mark: all natural languages have roughly the same complexity level. If you squash it down in one place it tends to pop out somewhere else, like a balloon.
English is in no way simple; it has a huge vocabulary and a ton of irregular verbs (and nouns) and a lot of strange grammatical constructions. Latin is a lot more straightforward.
Language is complex because it adapts to the needs of the speakers. For example, a newborn knows only how to announce “I need something”. Coincidentally, this is true for newborn lots of things, not just people. Kittens are cuter (to us, anyway) when they do it. As children grow older, and need to express more complex ideas, their language grows more complex to match. The ones who go to graduate school learn entirely new complexity to match their studies… the construction and vocabulary grow ever more impenetrable to those who do NOT need to express graduate-level conceptualizations.
Note that this is true not for just the spoken and written languages. Some fields have their own language associated… comic strips being a good example. Motion pictures, too, particularly animation… where it becomes obvious because American animation styles and Japanese animation styles have different grammars. Then there’s videogames… how do we tell the players what they are supposed to do, without treating them like idiots? (Again, different grammars in games that originate in Japan and the US).
A joke about primitive vocabulary appeared today in SMBC:
