Confronting Friends and Family

[Hovik]

It wouldn't be identifiable as language in the same way we think of language because our language is specific to our species. The language (if it can be called that) of another species wouldn't be in any way recognizable.

But it would still express and convey the same quantity and quality of information. My point isn't that you could go to an alien world inhabited by humanoids and learn their language, my point is that they will have language, and it will have exactly the same characteristics as ours has (there'll be a verbal or visual form plus a written form, there'll be pragmatics, etc).

You can't know that. You don't know that. Stop acting like that's some take-as-granted idea.

We have not taught ASL to gorillas. We have taught a different type of sign to orangutangs and gorillas that is much less complex grammatically and lexically than natural language. It definitely does not meet the criteria that formally define language; therefore, what they've learned is not language.

How does it not meet the criteria that formally defines language?

A language is a system of communication that is capable of producing an infinite number of possible novel configurations from a finite set of units and rules. That's a very basic, bare-bones definition of what a communicative system needs to be considered a language. Other considerations are displacement, the ability to discuss events and places removed from the speaker and listener both spatially and temporally, as well as a recursiveness, one of the major reasons why language is capable of producing infinite utterances (i.e. we can say "I saw the man next to the table with the book I bought from the store that is next to Walmart on 13th Avenue in New York in The United States on Earth in the Sol System ... etc."). There are more basic requirements, but those are a couple big ones.

Even though sign systems like Koko's or bird mimicking may seem a lot like human language, they unequivocally fall short of these minimum requirements. Gorilla signing does not have a sufficiently complex grammar to produce anything other than a limited set of configurations.

Linguistics is not physics. I'm not sure what relevance your analogy has to language. Care to elaborate further?

It is derived from physics. So is evolution, so is population growth rates, just about everything is. Given the right starting conditions, language will self develop, just as life itself springs forth from the "right conditions".

If you want to be picky, of course language is constrained to physics. Fucking everything is. That doesn't mean it's analyzable in terms of physics. Language is a system that is dependent on so many factors that you're not going to get the same exact development unless everything that led up to it is also absolutely exact. I don't believe in a deterministic universe and therefore reject such a notion.

That's entirely wrong. First of all, language is dependent on genes.

Then try teaching a language to a feral human.

Festive answered this beautifully, so I'll leave it at that.

Again, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. Pragmatics is observable in looking at natural language in the context of usage. Pragmatic concepts are derived from empirical observation.

Okay, how do we know the speed of light in a vacuum? We observe it. Can we predict it using calculation? No it's a "fundamental constant". Pragmatics are not a "fundamental constant", thus they are predictable, although we don't know what theory predicts it yet.

I fail to see what relevance that has whatsoever to language. What do you mean pragmatics can be predicted? Are you saying that the existence of pragmatics can be predicted? Of course our language has pragmatics, and I would caution to say that languages of other species would have something like it as well. That doesn't mean its form would be predictable. We figure out pragmatics through empirical observation.

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I actually had a mind to study linguistics a couple years ago. Architecture, linguistics, and culinary arts. I've kind of had to narrow it down to just culinary arts.

Still at least someone here is a linguist.

I like being the token linguist. It's a rough job, but someone's gotta do it.