Pigs can’t say hi
Animal language researchers marvelled to find out how much Nim
Chimpsky, a chimpanzee was linguistically capable. Chimpsky was given
his name as a pun on Noam Chomsky, the foremost theorist of human
language structure and generative grammar at the time, who held that
humans were “wired” to develop language.
Human language differs from animal communication in many ways. While
humans use language to produce an infinite number of unique sentences as
a form of communication, animals lack this ability. Animals communicate
by signal codes, which mean they have a limited number of statements,
generally as simple responses to certain situations. The natural sounds
and gestures produced by all nonhuman primates show their signals to be
highly stereotyped and limited in the type and number of messages they
convey. Human language, on the other hand, is a true language – a system
of arbitrary signs which allows us to convey unlimited interactions.
For one, human language differs because it has form and meaning,
which means, it has a structure which combines sounds, gestures,
letters, and written words which when put together have a certain
significance or meaning. Secondly, human language differs because it is
creative, meaning that we can (with language) produce (and understand)
an infinite number of new sentences which have never before been spoken;
we can lie and joke and even talk about things that don’t make any
sense.
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Dolphins have shown the ability to
understand and act on certain commands |
Thirdly, human language differs because it has displacement, which
basically means that we as humans can talk about things in the past and
future, and things that are either right in front of us or miles away.
While some animals, like bees, have shown signs of limited displacement,
and while certain apes have been able to acquire a number of sign
language messages, animal communication is restricted to very simple
messages like “look out” or “danger!” Animals cannot say “look out, I
saw a snake in that tree yesterday” or make jokes, lie, and talk about
the imaginary (which linguists refer to as the ability to use tropes).
Many researchers have tried to teach primates language, and while
some chimps and apes have been more successful than others in language
acquisition, the end result has always shown that primates can only
learn language to a certain extent, and usually only things related to
stimulus-controlled phenomena like eating and drinking.
Language was only rarely spontaneous with these animals, they usually
displayed redundancy and imitation, and no research shows them to have
the same ability of language learning like a human child. Gua was a
chimp in the 1930s that was raised as a child along with the
researcher’s own baby son. Gua understood more words than the human boy
at sixteen months, but never learned any more than that, while the boy
of course did. Dolphins have shown the ability to understand and act on
certain commands, but they have not displayed understanding for “novel
utterances, metaphors, jokes, and lies.” Not to mention the fact that
producing spoken human language is simply impossible for these animals.
Dolphins, as well as apes and other animals have no way of
communicating about the past, expressing their feelings, lying to each
other, and among other things, talking smack about their enemies. Human
language, however, differs because it gives us the ability to do all of
those things and more. It is a Chomskian business, not ‘chimp’skian.
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