brb gotta find a literal baby to help me build a rosetta stone for humans and monkeys
"communication" and "language" are two separate things, and the article title mistakenly refers to a certain type of communication as a language when it is not that. This was the main takeaway from the ape sign language experiments - apes can learn to associate signs with objects and actions, but they cannot form sentences, instead what is observed is that the ape brute forces whatever they're trying to communicate by doing the relevant signs in random order until the researcher gives them what they want (usually food or attention).
Still cool that things like pointing are so universal that they cross the species barrier though.
Excuse me while I go and vigorously shake my ass off between two trees
Eh, the article says the people in the study chose from a multiple choice list when identifying the gestures. I'd like to know just how similar those choices were.
Points at bush
Holds up 4 + 5 fingers
Holds up 5 + 5 fingers and rapidly flashes a 1
Honestly, I thought this for a while, and kind of always assumed I'd find the claim in a linguistics book eventually. First time I've seen it written though. Just like, how does anyone think that language just arose as sound alone? Every animals combines sound with sign language, and I'm sure what eventually became words started off as just signals with slight different tones of growls and tongue flapping. Then just developed over generations and generations into better and better distinction using the only apparatus that could focus entirely separately from motor skills (our mouths). That dialectic has seemed just logical for a long time, but never found it laid out. Anyone have a good recommendation for this?
Noam Chomsky talks about this in his books on language, but he draws a line between the kind of communication that is done with body language, gestures etc and human language, asserting that simply adding complexity to gestures and sounds over time through reinforcement (which was the dominant theory of language's evolution for a long time) is not a sufficient mechanism to explain how human language arose and how it is acquired by children today. He argues that true "language" is only possible with a specific adaptation unique to humans (possibly an earlier hominid), and that the evidence for this is that even animals with relatively complex forms of communication, like chimpanzees and apes, cannot be taught simple concepts like grammar. "Me eat" versus "eat me", for example, is a distinction that Koko the gorilla never figured out.
That is not to say that "human language" can't be done with gestures, for example signs languages have existed for basically all human history - but every sign language has grammar and other markers that set it apart from simpler gestures and indicate that something more fundamental than repetition and increasing complexity over time is necessary for their creation.
Interesting, I would say to this that Grammar is the exact sort of complexity that will arise out of the necessity for more and more distinctions. Flipping "eat me" and "me eat" became, at some point, important enough that the relation between a sign and time became important. That is a way that grammar can quickly grow out of "no grammar"
I know I'm looking good when all the dudes on the boulevard keep shaking and eating the leaves off the tree.
