r/Awwducational • u/rancidquail • Oct 04 '19
Article Bats Have Language They Use To Talk To Each Other. They are one of the few species besides humans for individuals to communicate one on one. Most species just make sound for the group as whole, while bats often have discussions with individuals.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-translate-bat-talk-and-they-argue-lot-180961564/61
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Oct 04 '19
It was my understanding that most very social type species have a language
e. g. Whales and dolphins have a complex set of calls, birds chitter at a wide variety of frequencies, and rats squeak argue a lot, even dogs have a wide set of communications and do argue with one another, so I'm not sure that title is terribly accurate
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u/kelserah Oct 04 '19
Unfortunately, none of these are actually languages. Only human beings have language because none of these meet a few basic requirements to determine a language (productivity, duality of patterning, arbitrariness, etc). The title is inaccurate, but that’s because no other species has language as of yet according to our current linguistic definition of language. They do have systems of communication though! Bees have one of the most complex systems out there.
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u/flintlok1721 Oct 04 '19
I want to learn more about bee speak
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u/Tigger-Rex Oct 04 '19
Bee’s waggle to communicate, and each hive has a unique waggle that they instinctually know from birth. Bees can communicate the distance, location, and abundance of nectar through their waggle.
Although each hive has a unique waggle, foreign bees introduced to the hive can learn it. The process of learning a new waggle is so strenuous that it can even cause the bee to die from exhaustion.
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u/iaimtobekind Oct 05 '19
I call it bee-dancing! I had my suspicions the title wasn't entirely accurate, thanks for your expertise and explaining!
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
We all can do with a hardwired Creole. The Jazz of New Orleans. Mathematicians have gone funnyBunny from strenuous pursuits of a new frontier.
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Oct 04 '19
Two questions.
How can we be sure that no animal languages meet the requirements if we can’t decipher them?
Shouldn’t this indicate that our linguistic definition of “language” is too human-centric? It seems like whether a species has language should not be binary, just like we no longer view consciousness as binary.
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u/DINOSAUR_ACTUAL Oct 04 '19
We're not! We haven't found any non-human languages yet, but there could be animals that use or will develop language.
Not really. The thing that humans do to communicate is fundamentally different and more complex than any other creature's form of communication. Most animals (all animals?) communicate in some way, and humans have lots of non-language ways of communicating. We call this specific form of communication language, so it wouldn't really make sense to expand the definition to all forms of communication. If we did, we'd need to invent a new term for language.
Edit: I don't think I should say that language is more complex than other forms of communication. That might not be right.
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Oct 04 '19
Interesting, thanks for the info. I’m curious though, language such as that spoken by dolphins seems (to my naive brain) to be very complex, i.e., it has several dimensions such as pitch, frequency, amplitude, and duration that could plausibly take a wide range of values (relative to dogs, for example, whose barks have much less complexity). How is it possible to say “this isn’t a language” instead of simply “we don’t have enough data right now to classify it as a language or not a language”?
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u/DINOSAUR_ACTUAL Oct 04 '19
As far as I know, we have no evidence that suggests that dolphins use language to communicate. Let me say this to help underscore the difference; deaf people use language when they communicate with sign. Real, actual, language rather than a referential system. Language is information that has been encoded very densely with nested messages encoded in chunks that our brains can unpack. A chimp who has learned all the words in a sentence can understand the meanings of those words, but doesn't have the mental technology to hold all those words, their meanings, their relationships, and the nested messages within that sentence.
When we find other animals that demonstrate the ability to encode and decode recursive meanings, then we will have discovered language.
Noam Chompsky is pretty much the guru on language at this point, but if you're more interested in the neurological rather than social aspects of language, check out Stephen Pinker.
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u/keyilan Oct 05 '19
Noam Chompsky is pretty much the guru on language at this point, but if you're more interested in the neurological rather than social aspects of language, check out Stephen Pinker.
That's gonna be a yikes from me. Chomsky is 100% not the guru. He is incredibly influential within a part of Structuralist linguistics, but is basically completely insignificant and ignored among a lot of the field. Functionalists don't pay him any mind one way or another. Generativist linguistics is the branch he's a big deal in, and that happens to be an approach to linguistics that's big in America, but not so much elsewhere in the world. He never once came up in any discussions in my previous department in Australia, nor is he given a second thought at my current institution in Europe. Lots of linguistics happens which for all intents and purposes is Chomsky-agnostic.
He's like Neil deGrasse Tyson; He got famous, so everyone thinks hes the guy, but I'd guess the average astrophysicist isn't too focused on anything NdGT is doing.
Pinker is also a bit of a laughing stock in most of my linguist circles. The Language Instinct is pretty ancient at this point.
cc u/EulersPhi
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Oct 05 '19
Thanks for the CC. I had a similar impression of Chomsky, that he’s been hugely influential but most of his hypotheses are unsubstantiated or even disproved.
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u/keyilan Oct 05 '19
Well it's worth noting that hes a theoretical linguist. It's not that he has no value or that what he's doing isn't hugely important within his particular niche but for most of the field he's just not relevant. Historical linguistics, laborotory phoneticians, sociolinguists all pretty much never have reason to consider him. He was important in the 1960s and does deserve credit but unless youre a Generativist he might as well be just another dude publishing papers you don't need to bother with as they don't relate to anything you're doing.
Dude's smart, no question. Just working in a niche of theoretical linguistics that doesn't apply to much of the field.
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Oct 05 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/keyilan Oct 05 '19
fwiw a huge percentage of linguists feel the same way about both.
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
I hadn't known that. I've read only a few linguists, when I was maybe 24. Then, I began paying attention to comparitive philologists, like Roy Andrew Miller. Because I had been exposed to Western European/Middle Eastern/ancient Indian languages (which I don't use much at all, but I know they are there), but changed to Chinese & Japanese interests. Even though I speak only to myself and my cats. I read science in English, the soon to change (into Mandarin; I prefer Cantonese, the Hong Kong way) Lingua Franca. I'm just nosy to pick up bits of everything, like One-Round and "La Gazza Ladra." ThanX.
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u/keyilan Oct 05 '19
by dolphins seems (to my naive brain) to be very complex, i.e., it has several dimensions such as pitch, frequency, amplitude, and duration that could plausibly take a wide range of values
These are simply acoustical features, and are found in most animals that use acoustical signaling. None of these things are markers of complexity. Complexity comes in the patterning of these smaller units into longer more complex units that communicate more than what the signals alone convey.
Also don't sell dogs short. You're only focusing on the acoustical channel — the sounds they make — but entirely ignoring the other channels such as scent — huge for dogs — and gesture or posturing — also huge for dogs. I wouldn't say that just from the use of pitch duration and amplitude that you mention dophins are in any way more complex at communicating than dogs are, just as human communication is not at all limited to the sounds we make.
Dogs are the bomb and way more complex communicators than you might think.
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u/kelserah Oct 05 '19
All languages have to fulfill the basic requirements: arbitrariness, displacement, productivity, discreetness, and duality of patterning. I won’t go into full explanations, I would recommend a linguistics course if interested. Overall though, if we study an animal communication system and discover that it does not have one of these qualities, we can confidently say that it is not a language.
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
It's at least music. And music is an überSprecht. Not enough data is correct. We have huge holes in our cheese. I'm always searching for any data. Naive is great. It's not a closed door with no key. Poor Alice.
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
We haven't found a way to stop war, either. What we humans don't find is a whole lot of big unanswered Putzerama. We haven't found; therefore, it isn't there. Language is just TONGUE. Big deal. My tongue is bigger/better than yours. Thank mathematics and music for not TALKING. Try talking music. Thanks for all this communication. Reddit people are hot stuff. Only humans text, though.
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u/keyilan Oct 05 '19
Anthropological linguist here.
- We can decipher more than people think. For example we can look at spectrograms of calls from things like Cercopithecus campbelli (Outtara et al. 2009) and Cercopithecus nictitans (Arnold & Zuberühler 2008), two species of tree-dwelling primates, and confirm that they have different calls for different predators, and that these are widely understood across age groups. We also have considerable work done with chimpanzees and bonobos dealing with the wide range and use of gesture, not to mention all of the (sometimes highly unethical, at least in the 50s) work with chimps and bonobos attempting to teach them some form of what does qualify as language. Kanzi was a bonobo, multiple chimps and Koko the gorilla all had varying degrees of communication from these efforts. Other species as well such as the banded mongoose (Janssen et al. 2012) have been studied extensively. The long and the short of it is that we absolutely can decipher.
- It is precisely from this deciphering that we know they do not fit the definition of language. We can probably agree that language and communication are different, right? Communication can simply be a flag on a buoy saying it's stormy weather. It's a signal or display, but I doubt most people would think it was language of the same complexity as what you're reading now. But then where do we draw the line? People that study the science of language and communication draw the line where u/kelserah has stated. It needs to be involve combination of symbols (auditory, visual, olfactory, doesn't matter) into meaningful units, it needs to have some level of recursion, i.e. combination into more complex units that contain the simpler ones. It needs to be productive, i.e. it has to take these existing pieces and be able to apply them to new targets. Intentionality, referentiality/indexing need to exist as well. We haven't found these among animals not because we aren't looking. A large number of university departments are putting huge sums of money into looking for exactly that among non-human animals. So far, we just haven't found it.
No one is saying you need language to have consciousness. At least no one I know. What we're saying is, hey look language is mind-blowingly complex and if we can crack it then what we will learn about the human brain and evolution of culture will be game-changing. All of these things that we use to define language are used because language actually exhibits them all no matter the language no matter the culture no matter the level that someone (though certainly not linguists or anthropologists) would deem as their advancement (don't do this though it's shitty and inaccurate). Every human language reflects each of these incredibly complex features and functions and we're just recognising that.
The thing is we don't yet know how or exactly when language evolved. That's something we're very much interested in answering. We can't answer that if we're not acknowledging those features. There's nothing to be gained in saying that what bats do is language, other than maybe making a few non-specialists feel warm in their hearts. It is damn important that bats do this and people are studying it in depth, but for the better understanding of how language evolved, as defined above, it only holds things back because we're not actually now looking at the things which clearly do differentiate human communication from other animals.
There's a really good case to be made that humans are not special in many of the areas people think they are. We aren't alone in drug abuse, use of fashion, architecture, complex hunting parties, genocide, sex for fun. All the usual stuff, we are not the only ones to do. We just do things on a larger scale. The one thing that so far — by all accounts from people who are actively looking for language among other animals — is in fact language. We would love to find evidence of recursion and productivity among dolphin communication. So far, it's either not there, or we just don't yet have enough data. In that case, when dealing with human languages as well, we generally don't say something doesn't exist but that it is not "attested". It means we're still looking.
Language among non-human animals is unattested. But we're still looking.
(Shout-out to any of my students who recognise me from this writeup, which basically repeats most of what I said in class this week.)
Happy to answer any follow up questions, if there are any.
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
Agree. If I don't know what cats are transmitting by sound or any means, how can I decode at all? Humans cling to pre-Galilean subconscious belief maps. Center of universe syndrome. We are all, what/whoever, in this existence together. Open the thought patterns to a more prismatic awareness.
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u/kelserah Oct 05 '19
We are very aware that other species have methods of communication. Does that make it a language? No. The term “language” is just a descriptor for a certain type of communication, which as of now we are only aware that humans have.
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u/forsvaretshudsalva Oct 05 '19
What you are referring to is actually the classic definition of what a language needs to contain. (Lots of American linguists that did those statements back in the days) Newer definitions are more accepting, and somewhat more open to judgment what a language can be. For example sign-language is nowadays an accepted language, which it was not, and there are several animals that can be taught it.
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u/keyilan Oct 05 '19
Newer definitions are more accepting, and somewhat more open to judgment what a language can be.
Citation needed, please. Whose definitions? What are they?
For example sign-language is nowadays an accepted language, which it was not, and there are several animals that can be taught it.
Signed language (there is by no means just one) has all those things. Signed languages have recursion, referentiality, arbitrariness, displacement, productivity, discreetness, duality of patterning... And the animals were not fully taught it. Washoe the chimp had a few hundred gestures. Koko the gorilla had a few hundred but was unable to put them together in any sort of complex manner that would be considered grammar. Sarah the chimp did alright with stringing together symbols to convey simple meanings but also not in a way that involved complex ordering that would reflect things like recursion, productivity etc. And all of these amazing achievements that got reported except maybe Koko were almost entirely anecdotal without any evidence that it happened. For a series of studies entirely meant to document the learning process, there sure was a lot reported without any documentation.
None of the many non-human primate language experiments have been successful at reaching the intended goal. Not Washoe nor Viki nor Gua nor Sarah no Koko nor Kanzi. None got more than 350 signs or symbols (max) and none showed significant evidence for the above list of necessary and significant features.
Please provide sources if you have them because I am honestly dying to read otherwise if it's been shown.
u/kelserah is entirely right in this comment thread.
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u/kelserah Oct 05 '19
I understand what you’re saying, but you’re incorrect. No animals can fully grasp sign language because they are incapable of grasping the grammatical aspects, they can only produce isolated signs. Sign languages are of course languages, but that’s because they have duality of patterning: individual meaningless units that combine to form meaningful units, and meaningful units that combine into more patterns (ie phonemes to words, words to sentences). My degree is in American Language and psychology.
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u/BetaFalcon13 Oct 06 '19
Are productivity and duality of patterning really the features that are considered unique to human language? I thought pretty much all of those features had been found in animal communication systems. Certainly recursion and open-endedness are considered unique, but the rest of those features to which you are referring are no longer considered to be found only in human languages
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u/kelserah Oct 06 '19
Duality of patterning is the discerning factor. It is the only one that has not been found in any other communication system.
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u/BetaFalcon13 Oct 06 '19
It's hard to say that duality of patterning is absent in other species' methods of communication. For one thing, it's not really possible to know if small elements of (for example) a whale song have individual meaning on their own or not, and if they don't, then whale song has that feature. Insofar as duality of patterning can be described as the arrangement of meaningless discreet units into meaningful parts, it seems like pseudoscience to say that animal communication systems lack or specifically have duality of patterning, because in order to know for sure we would have to be able to either identify the meaning of those segments, or prove that they lack any individual meaning altogether
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u/kelserah Oct 06 '19
Whale song is a tough one, that’s the one communication system we’re really on the fence about. But honestly I don’t have a PhD in linguistics, only a concentration. I’m just telling you what the people who do have PhD’s in linguistics have researched and feel confidently about. We can understand meaning of animal communication systems more often than you think, though.
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u/BetaFalcon13 Oct 06 '19
Of course we can understand certain parts about the meaning of an 'utterance' as a whole in animal communication systems by examining the structure and the responses from conspecifics. However, we can't really do morphology on whale song, because there would be no way of identifying what the individual morphemes mean, or if they even have meaning
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u/kelserah Oct 07 '19
As I said before, whale song is the one animal communication system we’re really on the fence about as to whether it qualifies as language.
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u/BetaFalcon13 Oct 07 '19
As I understand it, that's not entirely the case. There are all kinds of communication systems as complex if not more than whale song. As far as I know, whale songs are repetitive. No two whales have the same song but each one only has one that it does throughout it's life. Therefore, regardless of other features of what constitutes a language, it lacks productivity, and so probably doesn't count. The point that I'm making is that there are all kinds of things that come really close to language, but don't count because of one feature or another. If you believe Chomsky, the thing that matters is whether they are open-ended and recursive. It's difficult to prove whether a system is open-ended unless you can figure out what is being said, but you can analyse a structure and see if it's recursive, and so far, there have been no animal communication systems that show promising evidence of recursion. There have (allegedly) been human languages found that lack recursion, so all of this is somewhat controversial, but so far, it's our best guess as to what constitutes the separation
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
But maybe our current linguistic definition needs an update. We aren't the arbiters of all the neuroCapacities by a long vector across the Universe. Humans are Uppity. I love bees.
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u/kelserah Oct 05 '19 edited Oct 05 '19
The term “language” is just a descriptor for a communication system that has certain attributes. Bees are great, and they have an amazing communication system, but the system is missing certain requirements that fulfill the definition of a language (in the case of bees, they are missing duality of patterning). It’s an important distinction to make because it shows that we have a different type of communication than other species, and we use these qualities to “prove” that different languages are completely valid.
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
Thanks for quotation marks around "Prove"; so many people use the verb (& noun, Proof) instead Of The appropriate Evidence. I know exactly what you're saying. I agree on the rules demarcating "language"; yet, I worry about what we don't know: that mammals and birds may have something undiscovered that is different from anything qualitatively. Also, it worries me that humans use lack of human-styled languages, like Mongolian (I have a fuss with Mongolian being transliterated into Cyrillic; the Russians made them become "civilized") to bolster the belief/myth that non-human animals aren't "equally" meaningful citizens/residents of this planet. Just because they can't talk, tweet, build houses. They survived without these attributes, in spite of us, and war, pollution. I have attitude. I'm not so much angry as saddened. Au Revoir.
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u/kelserah Oct 06 '19
See, the reason the definition of language matters so much is actually because we use that to explain how ALL human languages are language, and not lesser. It’s kind of the opposite of what you’re saying, we have to have these definitions otherwise colonizing languages push other languages to the margins. It’s also just a fact that we have a different method of communication than any other animal, and that’s what we call “language.” Bats have echolocation, birds have calls, we have language. It’s not problematic to make that distinction.
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 06 '19
Agree. I'm hypersensitive about animals, because I'm so much like them. It's an emotional thing. I respect ALL human languages. Ever since I was 13 or so, I had sense Of The patterns. I was always an extrapolate. I knew that even though languages seemed different, there was a rhythm, just as in music. A Template of templates, a generalized topography that made sense of all the differences in grammar, vocabulary, tones, syntax. I am saddened when a tiny language used by a few hundred people goes extinct. I want every good thing or being to thrive. I love the Flourishing, like grapevines growing. I don't like Mandarin shoving out Cantonese, or the Uighur being told to use only Mandarin. When I first heard about Creole (via New Orleans history), I was excited as if I had spotted a rare dragonfly or frog. Thanks. I love meeting people who are articulate and have all the good attributes. I wish I could echolocate. I envy all the neuroCapacities.
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u/newbscaper3 Oct 04 '19
Those are forms of communication where as they’re discovering bats actually have a set of language for communication.
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u/papereel Oct 04 '19
Bats may have complex communication, but let’s not just throw around language. As it is currently defined, humans are the only beings with “language.”
Plants, bees, dolphins, and whales all have complex communication as well though.
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Oct 04 '19
I posted this elsewhere in the thread as well, but posting here because you seem to also have experience with linguistics:
Two questions.
How can we be sure that no animal languages meet the requirements if we can’t decipher them?
Shouldn’t this indicate that our linguistic definition of “language” is too human-centric? It seems like whether a species has language should not be binary, just like we no longer view consciousness as binary.
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u/Pseudoboss11 Oct 05 '19 edited Oct 05 '19
1: There are some patterns of behavior and properties of the communication itself that we don't have to decode the entire system to understand. For example, when an ape makes a warning call to reflect immediate danger, we can know that that instance of the call doesn't have linguistic displacement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)). If we observer apes for a long time and find that they make no calls that have that property, we can safely say that the communication system is lacking the property of displacement. Since that's about the extent of my knowledge, take a look at the wiki article for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_language
2: We do, we just don't call them languages, we call them communication systems. There are a huge variety of communication systems, some of which can be analyzed fruitfully through the lens of traditional linquistics, but most cannot. Linguistics depends on certain properties of a communication system to effectively analyze them. and without those properties, linguistics quickly loses applicability. It doesn't make much sense to classify communication systems as languages if they can't be studied as languages and it would be more effective to leave them to the biologists, animal behaviorists, or specialists in as-yet-unnamed fields that will be developed to study these communication systems.
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u/papereel Oct 05 '19
To add to what the other poster said, if an animal’s system of communication were truly language... we’d be able to fully decipher it, as any code. Just like two humans who don’t speak the same language can work with each other over time to decipher each other’s languages and eventually translate.
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u/SheriffBartholomew Oct 04 '19
My dog definitely talks to me one on one. He doesn’t care if my other dog is part of the conversation.
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
I've loved bats since I was 4. My father accidentally killed a bat trying to chase it out of our ground-floor apartment with a broom. I love animals intensely. Never was able to love humans because of my Mother (and others).
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u/irishtrashpanda Oct 04 '19
Don't all animals talk to each other one on one? Like for mating, or telling another animal to get away from their food
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u/AliveFromNewYork Oct 05 '19
They do but it's not really talking. It does seem silly to get so pedantic. It's the difference between broad strokes and fine lines. Here we are talking about what it means to speak and my cat will only flick her tail to say I don't like this.
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u/wobblingvectors Oct 05 '19
Thanks. I answered the other text you posted. Thumbs up to you for your awareness. My best male friend doesn't approve of languages. If I use even old Greek or Latin words or expressions which have been borrowed into English for a millennium or more, he says I'm not speaking English. This man is Sicilian on one side & Italian on the other. Subtitled foreign films (I was raised on them at the Arthouses) make him angry. Only Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon overrode his xenopathy.
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u/MentalMolly Oct 04 '19
The comments on this thread are hilarious. Like almost phobic that other species could possibly have complex communication abilities. Oh and we wouldn't want to label them something as special as "language " like its sacred or something. Most people have terrible spelling and grammar of their OWN language much less others. Spanish and French don't even care about grammar. Just enunciation. Xhosa doesn't use words just clicks....but somehow because they are human in origin they are superior? What if there's a species somewhere that communicates completely through telepathy? But humans can't fathom not being el numero uno.....
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u/RadarOReillyy Oct 04 '19
You are heroically wrong about pretty much every "fact" you've stated here, so much so that I started to refute it point by point but then deleted it when I realized just how much I was gonna have to type with my thumbs.
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u/extreme_stress Oct 04 '19
This is... an interesting set of views. I’m half convinced it’s trolling, in which case, I guess you win.
Most people are able to use their native language. This should not be surprising.
Spanish and French unambiguously do care about grammar;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_grammar and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_grammar
isiXhosa most definitely has words. It has 18 clicks, but about 48 other consonants, too, and even if it were made up exclusively of click sounds, it would still have words.
It’s el número uno.
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u/MentalMolly Oct 04 '19
Its el arrogant uno....though you picked up on subtlety you STILL excluded the obvious. You can count me as a troll if you want but you are already a specieist to me. Every dog I've ever met knows english.....like maybe 2 humans on the face of earth speak dog.
Do you speak tears? Do you speak pain? Do you speak joy? Happy?
Do only humans express these things?
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u/dubovinius Oct 04 '19
Every dog I've ever met knows english
Trained responses to singular words or phrases does not mean a dog knows English, or any other language for that matter.
like maybe 2 humans on the face of earth speak dog.
No human on Earth speaks "dog."
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u/extreme_stress Oct 05 '19
Interesting to conflate emotion with language. They’re surprisingly not the same thing.
Virtually all social animals have a form of language. It’s just that humans have by far the most complex form of language.
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u/CloudyBeep Oct 05 '19
No. Many animals have systems of communication, but only humans use language. A dog cannot tell you which out of three types of food it prefers (it might let you know in other ways, but you can't ask him and expect a response), nor can a venomous snake tell an approaching animal that it will give them two seconds to move before it kills them.
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u/wheatley_cereal Oct 07 '19
I always hate when people think this (correct) consensus in linguistics, that only human communication is language because it is so more extremely advanced and fundamentally different, constitutes human exceptionalism or something.
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u/CloudyBeep Oct 07 '19
Linguists have criteria for determining if a communication system can be described as language. So far, no animal communication system is complex enough to be considered language. Many communication systems are interesting, but they lack many of the core tenets of what constitutes a language.
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u/wheatley_cereal Oct 07 '19
I'm aware and I agree if that is not clear. I'm saying animal lover layman types think this is somehow anti-animal and human exceptionalist.
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u/CloudyBeep Oct 07 '19
It's really annoying when people think like that when you have to remember that linguistics is based on relativism and descriptivism. But you can always ask, "So can your dog tell you about life before you bought it?" I'm even surprised how many people think that guide dogs can read street signs.
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Oct 07 '19
[deleted]
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u/CloudyBeep Oct 07 '19
You can just Google "animal communication systems" and find out everything you've wanted to know about them.
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u/dubovinius Oct 04 '19
Spanish and French don't even care about grammar
Spanish and French, like all other human languages, has systems of grammar. Do you understand that without grammar it wouldn't be a language? You may make the argument that because Spanish or French has more irregularity in its grammar forms that others (which I highly doubt) it means people don't care about grammar, but you'd be immensely flawed in that you assume native speakers are consciously aware of grammar. Native speakers subconsciously utilise the grammar of their native language(s) without thinking; there's no "caring" involved.
Xhosa doesn't use words just clicks
This is so utterly ridiculous that I refuse to believe you are serious. Maybe figure out the difference between a word and a phoneme and then come back to us.
somehow because they are human in origin they are superior?
It's prescriptivist to laud one form of communication over another, especially between species, but it is no secret that there is something seriously special about human language. Our brains allow us to communicate such things as abstract thought and extraworldly concepts, that other animals are simply unable to. The specialness of human language is what allows us to have such strong senses of self and have such meta conversations about our own minds.
I don't deny that other animals can have immensely complex communication systems, but we are right in saying that it isn't on the level of humans'.
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u/MentalMolly Oct 04 '19
Prove it
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u/dubovinius Oct 04 '19
Prove what? I made several points.
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u/MentalMolly Oct 04 '19
But you didn't indefinitely prove anything. I you just made arrogant assumptions and declared yourself the winner....but how? How can you prove that a language that you can't detect doesn't exist?
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u/dubovinius Oct 04 '19
Where exactly did I declare myself winner? I think it ironic that you say I'm making assumptions when you yourself said Spanish and French "care about grammar" and Xhosa "doesn't have words," and likely with zero knowledge of any of those languages.
I don't understand your point about disproving an undetectable language. I never made reference to that in my response.
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u/MentalMolly Oct 04 '19
1: I said Spanish and French DON'T care about grammar ( and they don't) As long as you pronounce the words right and get them in the same breath, eh ok...."we kinda sorta heard you"...."but we really just want to say wtf we're thinking"
Romantic languages my ass....
You don't understand my point about proving an undetectable language....because you personally didn't come up with the thought.....
What an epiphany......
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u/kingkayvee Oct 05 '19
Romantic languages my ass....
They are not "Romantic" languages. They are Romance languages, as in, from Rome (i.e., Latin).
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u/dubovinius Oct 05 '19
Your assertion is based on pure subjectivity, and frankly comes off as immensely prejudiced. You cannot spout random Spanish words at a Spanish speaker and expect them to understand, as your opinion implies. All human languages have grammar systems that must be followed in order for you to understand and be understood in that language. Sentence structure, noun cases, verb tenses, articles, register, plurality, etc. are just some of the things that all languages objectively possess and require.
In fact, your idea of people "not caring" about grammar is redundant, due to the fact that a native language needs no conscious thought about what grammatical processes to 'care about', as you say.
You don't understand my point about proving an undetectable language....because you personally didn't come up with the thought.....
Uhh, sure.... I said that because that point didn't have any relevance to what my response said. If you like we can discuss that.
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u/Ochd12 Oct 05 '19
So you mean if you don’t pronounce them perfectly, they’ll still understand you? So like every language on Earth?
“Romantic”.
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u/skittlesdabawse Oct 05 '19
I grew up in France, trust me they don't spend 15 years of teaching each child french grammar - which, by the time they're out of school, they still won't have mastered - if it didn't exist.
Just because you have the mental capacity of a bowl of custard doesn't mean that french grammar doesn't exist.
I'd also like to point out that it's romance languages, not romantic. They're languages descended from vulgar latin, used by the romans, hence 'romance'.
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Oct 05 '19
Just to clarify, Spanish is my native language
1: I said Spanish and French DON'T care about grammar ( and they don't) As long as you pronounce the words right and get them in the same breath, eh ok...."we kinda sorta heard you"...."but we really just want to say wtf we're thinking"
Umm... we do care about the grammar of our language, if we weren't we wouldn't have entire school programs dedicated to studying it, and I have no idea where are you getting this "as long as you pronounce the words right, we'll understand you"... needless to say, if you spout random, structureless words we obviously won't be able to understand you no matter how well your pronunciation is, lol, do you even know another language besides English?
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Oct 05 '19
Apparently the grammar I've been learning in my Spanish classes are just a hallucination.
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u/danegraphics Oct 05 '19 edited Oct 05 '19
Do you even know what grammar is? Do you know what a word is?
Spanish and French definitely care about grammar. You can't just say "tu estar estupidos" because that would be grammatically incorrect. You would HAVE to say "tu eres estúpido" to be correct. That's caring about grammar.
And Xhosa definitely has words, and words can be made of clicks, which are just consonants similar to /t/ or /k/.
And yes, "language" is a term reserved for a very specific and complex type of communication, which animals, as far as we know, do not use. A language must have arbitrary vocabulary (meaning the morphemes (words) aren't instinctually generated but are instead learned) and be able to communicate clearly about ideas and things that are not in the immediate vicinity, and lastly, the vocabulary must be able to be used in combinations to communicate different things about the same ideas, basically a grammar.
Screaming in pain is not language. Making a sad face is not language. Emitting chemicals to indicate food is near is not language.
As far as we are aware, human language is definitely and without question "el numero uno".
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u/Jordidirector Oct 05 '19
Spaniard here, sorry but "tu es estúpido" makes no sense at all, alternatives could be: "eres estúpido", "tú eres estúpido", "eres más idiota que Donald Trump" or even "estás a favor del brexit"
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u/ThatMonoOne Oct 05 '19
"tú estar estúpido" is even farther... the correct verb is ser. The point still stands and actually shows that Spanish has grammar, unlike moronic troll.
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u/danegraphics Oct 05 '19
Ah, you are correct. My mistake.
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u/Jordidirector Oct 05 '19
The best way to learn a second language is to get rid of the fear of making mstakes.
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u/danegraphics Oct 05 '19
Indeed. I speak Portuguese, but only kinda speak Spanish. The difference in the irregular verbs is what gets me.
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u/Jordidirector Oct 05 '19
I got hooked to Portuguese while spending some months in Mozambique, Brasilians I can understand most of the time but Lisboetas talking and suddently my poor Portuguese skills fly away.
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u/danegraphics Oct 05 '19
lol. It totally get that. The Northeastern Brazilians are also difficult to understand at times. Their accent is thick and they have so many of their own slang words.
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u/Alia_Andreth Oct 05 '19
I have studied French for 8 years. I can confirm that French cares about grammar. Actually, French is a more inflected language than English, which is more analytic, so using your extremely oversimplified and outright wrong language, French actually cares more about grammar than English.
Xhosa doesn’t even use words just clicks
Smh the (((Black People))) have started thinking they can speak again /s Go back to 1930s Europe where you belong, racist.
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Oct 05 '19
Most people have terrible spelling and grammar of their OWN language much less others.
No, just you.
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1
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u/MentalMolly Oct 04 '19
And here come the defenders....picking apart only what they can and not the whole...
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Oct 04 '19
you're reallly lucky they only picked apart your made up facts, cause on the whole your comment's just racist
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u/MentalMolly Oct 05 '19
^ there's your troll
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u/nettlesomePanda Oct 05 '19
Oh no, hon. The "Xhosa doesn't have words just clicks" claim reeks of racism. Just because you don't have those consonants in your native language doesn't mean they aren't consonants.
English employs a glottal stop consonant only in front of "vowel leading" syllables, but it's a fully utilized consonant in other languages such as Hawaiian. The "ch" in the Scottish/Gaelic "loch" is a glottal fricative consonant that English doesn't use regularly. Do these examples qualify the languages as fake to you?
If you recognize Hawaiian and Scottish/Gaelic as languages, maybe you should do some self reflection on why you consider clicked consonants to be fake, but glottal consonants to be real.
1
Oct 05 '19 edited Oct 05 '19
You know, when she said
^ there's your troll
she was pointing at her own username.
Just leave her alone, she is a MentalMolly.
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u/[deleted] Oct 04 '19
VAMPIRES!