Comparing Systems
Animals certainly communicate. The linguistic question is which design features their systems share with human language.
The Honeybee Waggle Dance
Karl von Frisch won the 1973 Nobel Prize for decoding the dance. A returning forager encodes two continuous measurements:
- The angle of the run gives the direction toward food relative to the sun.
- The duration of the run gives the distance.
This system possesses:
- Displacement: signals refer to distant locations and past journeys.
- Semanticity: signals carry specific, meaningful content.
However, it lacks:
- Discreteness: variation is continuous rather than categorical.
- Duality: no meaningless subunits recombine into larger units.
- Productivity: bees cannot signal novel ideas, such as flying straight up.
Vervet Alarm Calls
Seyfarth and Cheney showed that vervet monkeys use three distinct alarm calls. Each triggers a tailored escape response. Yet three calls yield only three fixed messages.
Great Apes
Apes like Nim and Kanzi learned hundreds of manual signs or keyboard symbols. However, debates focus on syntax rather than vocabulary size.
- Nim mainly repeated prompts and failed to build longer, structured sentences.
- Kanzi demonstrated stronger comprehension of novel spoken commands.
Apes can use symbols intentionally, but they lack recursive grammar.
Common pitfall: Viewing animal communication merely as simplified language. Animal systems are organized along entirely different structural principles.