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I do believe research has proven that Chimps have a language... through gestures. They are also capable of learning sign language.
I think it is pretty darn arrogant to assume that another animal has no language simply because we don't understand their language. Kinda reminds me of stupid people that assume another person is dumb simply because they don't speak the same language.
yes, whatever humans have can be seen in other animals, to a lesser degree because they have less complexity.
I do believe research has proven that Chimps have a language... through gestures. They are also capable of learning sign language.
I think it is pretty darn arrogant to assume that another animal has no language simply because we don't understand their language. Kinda reminds me of stupid people that assume another person is dumb simply because they don't speak the same language.
You're right that language doesn't have to be verbal. Sign language and Morse code are both languages. You're also right that chimps can communicate many messages through gestures. Other animals, like ravens and crows, have quite complex calls and songs. Honey bee waggle and round dances can communicate distance and location.
This is the definition of language I've usually heard though:
However, language is more than a process through which meaning is attached to words or short sentences. Language might be described as the ability to take a finite set of elements (such as words), and using a set of rules (grammar and syntax) to create infinite combinations, each of which is comprehensible. Given this definition, it is perhaps not surprising then that cognitive psychologists sometimes speak of a "grammar of action". BBC - Future - Is language unique to humans?
It's not the only one...but it seems to be a pretty common one. I remember taking a linguistics class about ten years ago. It included studies of non-human forms of communication, and teaching chimps and other organisms human words and sentences. It concluded that, at least according to its definition of language, which I'm pretty sure resembled the above definition, only humans have language. The amount and types of communication that can be done by other animals is too limited for it to be considered language, so far as I know, according to that books' definition. They can still communicate complex messages...but when people talk about "words" in nonhuman methods of communication, they'll usually talk about dozens or hundreds of things that can be communicated...not the infinite amount that humans have.
Regardless of what we call language, there appears to be a big difference between the kind of language humans engage in, and the communication of everything else.
That language gives is the ability to rapidly adapt our whole species, potentially, and store the data outside our DNA in ways nothing else can do...I'm thinking. I kind of look at it like language has unlocked a new form of complex information storage...DNA 2.0, kind of. I see that as a pretty big deal. Also...if we start genetically engineering people, our ancestry may not have anything to do with our DNA anyway...further making our genetics-based classification misleading. The genetic classifications that do a wonderful job for describing most other life ignores a huge amount of important information on humans that's out there: information stored in our languages and memes, inventions and ideas. I would say a self-aware android would be just as much the child of humanity as a human child...and it may not have any genetic similarities to us, because it may not have DNA.
If Human Beings Are Only Animals, Why Do We Care About Morality?
This question doesn't actually compute. Why do we care about morality is a valid question but the above is not.
I guess it is being implied that morality comes from God, which doesn't compute either.
On language - I understand that whales and dolphins have complex language.
Quote:
Dolphins communicate with a language composed with tonal and pulsed sounds. This language is open and hierarchically organised like ours and it is at least as complex as ours or even more.
I'd like to see where that statement came from. ^ I've never heard that before...that dolphins and whales have languages at least as complex as those of humans. I'm pretty skeptical of that.
I'd like to see where that statement came from. ^ I've never heard that before...that dolphins and whales have languages at least as complex as those of humans. I'm pretty skeptical of that.
Your arguments are based on the egotistical viewpoint of a human and 'our' language.
Not just by sign language but do you really think that animals and birds make all those 'noises' for no reason?
The funny thing about our ego is, as many pet owners can tell you, many animals have 'learned' to understand our language to a degree , even though usually simple words, but very , very few of us have ever learned ( or bothered to try) to learn theirs...Jane Goodall being one of the exceptions.
Your arguments are based on the egotistical viewpoint of a human and 'our' language.
Not just by sign language but do you really think that animals and birds make all those 'noises' for no reason?
The funny thing about our ego is, as many pet owners can tell you, many animals have 'learned' to understand our language to a degree , even though usually simple words, but very , very few of us have ever learned ( or bothered to try) to learn theirs...Jane Goodall being one of the exceptions.
he didn't say that. he said less complex than humans.
claiming that any one animal has a less complex communication structure than humans is probably more true than it is false.
Your arguments are based on the egotistical viewpoint of a human and 'our' language.
Not just by sign language but do you really think that animals and birds make all those 'noises' for no reason?
The funny thing about our ego is, as many pet owners can tell you, many animals have 'learned' to understand our language to a degree , even though usually simple words, but very , very few of us have ever learned ( or bothered to try) to learn theirs...Jane Goodall being one of the exceptions.
People have been trying to detect ultra complex language comparable to human language in nonhumans for decades and haven't found conclusive signs of it yet...at least so far as I've heard.
I'm sure every song and call of birds does have a meaning...but that doesn't make any difference.
Here are some characteristics of human language:
Human language is generative, which means that it can communicate an infinite number of ideas from a finite number of parts.
Human language is recursive, which means that it can build upon itself without limits.
Human language uses displacement, which means that it can refer to things that are not directly present.
Generativity
Human language is generative, which means that it can communicate an infinite number of ideas. This is because it is combinatorial: words can be combined in different orders to create different larger meanings of a sentence. Animal communication does not have this freedom; animals communicate within closed systems, with limited possible ideas to communicate. Birds may have different chirps to signify danger or the location of food, but they cannot combine those chirps together to convey a novel meaning. Recursion
Human language is recursive. This means that we can put words, phrases, and sentences inside of themselves without limits. For example, we can say the sentence “Mark likes anchovies.” But we can also put that sentence inside of a sentence: “Carol thinks that Mark likes anchovies.” Then we can put that sentence inside of another sentence: “Greg said that Carol thinks that Mark likes anchovies,” and on and on forever. Obviously, the recursive abilities of language are constrained by the limits of time and memory. But in theory, because units of human language have the ability to be self-containing, we could have an infinite sentence. Animal communication does not have this same flexibility. Displacement
Human language has displacement. This means that through the power of language, we can refer to things that aren’t present spatially or temporally. This is obviously a useful trait (it allows us to ask questions like “Where did I leave my wallet?”), and it is one that is largely missing from the animal kingdom. Bees actually do have limited displacement in their communication: They perform a waggle-dance to communicate to other bees the location of the most recent food source they have visited. However, there is no temporal nuance beyond this. Ants and ravens also have limited displacement systems.
I wish I could find that old textbook of mine...but the above information seems to resemble the information from the textbook I remember.
Those differences are not just an illusion invented by human ego. If there are exceptions...it's probably not because the human ego is ignoring them, but rather that they haven't been discovered yet (or maybe some have been discovered but I merely haven't seen them yet).
Note that at the lower section of the link there are examples such as Chaser the dog who supposedly knows 1,000 words. That's explained by Chaser having been conditioned to respond to those words, rather than having the kind of firm understanding of what those words really mean that would allow Chaser to put those words into new sentences if Chaser had the capacity for human speech.
some people hate themselves so much they look to some super secret squirrel animal connections that are no more real than thebiblegod. but the people are quite similar.
I'd like to see where that statement came from. ^ I've never heard that before...that dolphins and whales have languages at least as complex as those of humans. I'm pretty skeptical of that.
Google. I should have posted the link. I just did a quick search - I'll try again.
Regarding that study, there are people who see the researchers as having jumped to conclusions:
While the findings presented in Ryabov’s paper may seem exciting and new, scientists who have spent decades studying dolphin communication point instead to a poorly devised experiment.
“Dolphin clicks are highly directional, with the energy focused in front of the animal, much like a flashlight,” says Marc Lammers, an expert in dolphin acoustics and an associate research professor at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.
In Ryabov’s study, the sounds produced by the dolphins were measured at about a 90-degree angle, which Lammers says is the very edge of the flashlight’s beam. This in itself would have a dramatic effect on the data recorded, since this angle would produce a decreased amplitude and different waveforms and frequencies than if the sounds had been measured straight on.
“It’s difficult to make a simple human analogy, but it might be somewhat similar to recording a conversation by people in the other room speaking into pillows,” says Lammers. “Probably not how you would try to learn a new language!”
The fact that the dolphins were recorded while their heads were at the surface of the tank introduces even more issues, thanks to the way the air-water boundary reflects sounds. Lammers says that without controlling for these reverberations, there’s no way to determine what sounds were actually produced by the dolphins and what sounds were artifacts of the recording method.
“The Ryabov paper effectively ignores most of what is currently known about the properties of dolphin clicks, how to measure them correctly, and how they are used by animals in various contexts, and instead lays out the author's own ideas for how dolphin communication might work by weaving together some simple observations with various disconnected notions of acoustics, cognition, and language research,” says Lammers. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/...guage-animals/
Decoding Dolphin
To be clear, many researchers believe that dolphins are capable of complex communication. It’s just that we’ve been searching for signs of something like language for decades, and the evidence is still lacking.
Denise Herzing, research director for the Wild Dolphin Project, has spent more than 30 years trying to understand dolphin communication, most recently by developing pattern recognition algorithms to identify reoccurring sounds and structures that could be the basis for language. (Read more about Herzing’s work decoding dolphin communication patterns.)
“We know dolphins are capable of understanding artificially created language, both acoustic and gestural, and abstract concepts,” says Herzing. “However, we simply do not have the data to suggest that they use words or labels in the wild.”
And the fact that the dolphins in Ryabov’s experiment did not seem to interrupt each other? Herzing says we’ve known dolphins can exchange sound back and forth without overlap since 1979.
“Many, many animals across the animal kingdom will avoid signal masking and thus time their vocalizations accordingly,” says Stephanie King, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia and member of the Shark Bay Dolphin Research Alliance.
“This by no means should be compared to human language,” says King.
Moving on to your first link. It first goes to a Quora page. From there are two more links. One of those links goes to research done by The Wild Dolphin Project. They haven't found anything that supports the view that dolphins use human-ish language yet, so far as I saw...but they're still searching and testing.
As it happened in August I was in the water when I heard the "word" sargassum in my bone-conducting headphone, meaning essentially that the computer system heard and recognized the incoming whistle for sargassum and was triggered to say the word "sargassum" in my ear. Since there was not, at this time, a second CHAT box in the water the only explanation is that a dolphin made the whistle that triggered the word in my ear. Again, this is not to say that a dolphin knew what it was saying when it put out this whistle. It may simply be that the dolphin was mimicking this whistle or that the computer heard a close approximation to "sargassum" and triggered. Since we had rigorously tested CHAT and its abilities, it was both exciting and confirmatory. And although the dolphins had previously been playing with sargassum with each other, at the time of the trigger they were going about normal dolphin business. So although I heard a potential mimic, there was nothing to indicate that this "word" was used in context. Through the summer we had other whistles that "sounded" by ear that they were mimics but did not trigger the computer for a match. But as we reviewed the data this winter, it appeared that many whistles did look like mimics but were placed, by the dolphins, in a higher frequency range, one that the system was not designed to hear (dolphins have been known to jump octaves or adjust for background noise). So, as we approach the summer of 2015 our priority is to increase "our" hearing range via the computer, and spend more time in the water exposing the dolphins to a few of these signals and see what they might do. Perhaps the dolphins will do nothing. Perhaps the dolphins will mimic a few times and go chase a fish. Perhaps the dolphins will observe how humans use these whistles between each other to request a fun object and then join in the game by requesting the object using the whistle. This action would give us an indication of their interest and functional understanding. To mimic a whistle is not the same as functionally understanding how a sound can be used to communicate. But it's a start. CHAT Research - Wild Dolphin Project
The second link on the Quora page goes to this page:
That page references the following study as the source of its information:
Investigations of the bottlenose dolphin sounds suggest that this species should have a highly developed hierarchically organized system of acoustic communication. This assumption is based on the high structural complexity of the dolphin signalisation, the peculiarities of its use, and the results of special mathematical and linguistical analysis (Markov, 1978; Markov et al., 1974; Markov and Ostrovskaya, 1978; Markov and Ostrovskaya in this volume). In our opinion, this system can be used for reporting complex arbitrary information. There are indirect corroborations of this standpoint such as some features of the dolphin behavior in the wild and captivity, the results of the experiments on the comprehension of the artificial language by the bottlenose dolphins (Herman, 1980; Herman et al., 1984), but the direct experimental evidence is absent. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10...4899-0858-2_49
I didn't see anything that showed that dolphins have at least as complex as ours or even more. I don't know why that would even be the case, given how more humans have to talk about than dolphins, due to our inventions...despite what the opening Quora link says, but it sounds like they might genuinely have what was called "an open and hierarchically organized language," and be able to use symbols to communicate.
I would wonder if dolphins being capable of using symbols to communicate means they can invent their own words easily. If they can do that...I'll be more than willing to place them in the human category of meme-users. They still wouldn't have our technology...so they still will have more of what they are contained in their DNA than us, whereas more information about us would presumably be contained within our machines, and memes, and massive changes to our environment...but that might only be because they don't have the hands to build those machines, and recording inventions, and world-altering inventions.
The problem is I don't know exactly what "highly developed hierarchically organized system of acoustic communication" means...although it definitely sounds good.
Summary: Okay...I'm still saying humans have their own group...but I'm considering widening it into the human/bottlenose dolphin/possibly some other organisms like crows group...depending on what is learned in the future, or what exists now that I just don't know about.
I still do see human-like language, with its ability to produce infinite meanings, as an enormous step forward though...equivalent to a kind of DNA 2.0, and the development of a new information storage system for the species and I could see reason to separate any organisms that possess that kind of language from other organisms.
Last edited by Clintone; 12-26-2018 at 08:20 PM..
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