Confronting Friends and Family

[Hovik]

Animals don't use language, at least so far as we know up to this point. Many different studies have been done on the capacity of animals to have language, and none have satisfactorily met the requirements. There are several that have a few of the criteria (bee communication is actually pretty neat in that it has a few of the less-found aspects of language such as displacement), but no animal communication system meets all of the baseline requirements for it to be considered language.

If you mean to say that no other animal communication is complex enough as human language, then I agree with you (though not without a doubt).

But you know that animals do communicate with each other - mostly in non-verbal ways, perhaps - like the variety of bird calls, through smell, sounds, dancing, gestures, body language, changing their colors, and so on. By doing such things, they are technically sending and receiving information between each other in ways that are not fully known to us.

The point is, just because the animals are not uttering words and sentences, doesn't mean that they are not using language.

Other animals just use a different language than ours, but they do use language.

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Animal communication falls under the first definition of language (see above) because they communicate their thoughts and feelings through signals, voice sounds, and gestures, among other things. Even though they are not using words, those activities are still considered to be language. If you disagree with that definition, then I'd like to ask you, what is your understanding of the word "language"? And how are animals not using language?

You and I are basically completely on the same page. I understand that other animals have complex systems of communications, but none of them are as complex as or expressive as human language (as far as we're currently aware).

I believe we'd be arguing semantics if anything at all. I don't agree that animals use what we would describe as language because it isn't language. I should point out that a dictionary definition, while useful, does not match up with the linguistic definition of language. Dictionaries report usage only, and so it would be sensible that it reflects scientific as well as layman definitions of words. That's just how they're used.

As far as linguistics is concerned, a language is a system of communication which is sufficiently complex to produce a non-finite set of novel utterances. Our language (and I mean language in the broadest sense of "all human languages") allows for the recursive nesting of elements within elements such as when we nest noun phrases into noun phrases e.g. [[the boy]'s ball] or when we use complementizers such as "that" or "if". As I've said before, this is not a trivial point. These features allow us to produce a theoretically infinite number of novel utterances. We're also able to freely create new lexical items (words, essentially).

Another important aspect of language is in the fact that abstractions and grammar can only be acquired through social contact. That perhaps speaks more to the human propensity for cultural transmission, but I argue that it's an important aspect of what makes language language.

I would basically argue that while other animals may use words, they don't appear to use "sentences."

Edit: Thinking more about the gorilla sign issue, Annik raised a pretty good point as well. The appearance of grammar in gorilla sign is really a result of the handler's interpretation due to the fact that sign-based systems have that sort of propensity. Koko, for example, can sign concepts together to associate them, for example CAT and HAPPY, to indicate that "Cat makes me happy." However, this doesn't constitute a grammar, only a relationship of emotion to stimulus. Interestingly, I would posit that this might be how human language began, but that's a whole different discussion.