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worst part for me as a swede is that it ends up being interpreted to mean "neander speaker", since "thal" becomse "tal" which means speech in swedish..
so not only is there the standard "neanderthals stupid and primitive" association, but also there's the added layer of implication that they spoke weird!
They did speak weird though! Analysis of their airways suggest that they had a much higher-pitched voice than our kind, and probably had a harder time with consonants. So their language would have certainly been different. Although we have no way of knowing if parts of their language still lives on in our speech today.
Men visst, "talare" blir lite roligt på svenska
yeah but like, they most likely weren't going "unga bunga, gurg want hunt mammoth, gurg make pointy stick, ook ook"
No, but we probably sounded something like that way before there were neanderthals and modern humans though. At some point, somebody figured out how to tell their peers that they're going to have to hunt for something big