Concept
Animal language
Overview
Animal languages are forms of communication between non-human animals that show similarities to human language. Animals communicate through a variety of signs, such as sounds and movements. Signing among animals may be considered a form of language if the inventory of signs is large enough, the signs are relatively arbitrary, and the animals seem to produce them with a degree of volition (as opposed to relatively automatic conditioned behaviors or unconditioned instincts, usually including facial expressions).
The current academic consensus is that animal communication systems lack key aspects that might define them as languages (or equivalent to human languages), one such aspect being humans' creation of new patterns of signs under varied circumstances. Humans routinely produce entirely new combinations of words. Some researchers, including the linguist Charles Hockett, argue that human language and animal communication differ so much that the underlying principles are unrelated. Accordingly, linguist Thomas A. Sebeok has proposed to not use the term "language" for animal sign systems. However, other linguists and biologists, including Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, assert that an evolutionary continuum exists between the communication methods of animal and human language.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct succession without any intermediate inflectional elements to modify their meaning. Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Animal language is.
Naturalists, as we have seen, try to arrange the species, genera and families in each class, on what is called the Natural System. But what is meant by this system?
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
States what Animal language is.
Whenever this is done, what is now sensible may be called a "sign" or "symbol," and that of which it is intended to call up the "idea" may be called its "meaning." This is a rough outline of what constitutes "meaning." But we must fill in the outline in various ways. And, since we are concerned with what is called "thought," we must pay more attention than we otherwise should do to the private as opposed to the…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Animal language is.
Philosophers who discussed Animal language
Related ideas
- Operant conditioning
- Morpheme
- Noam Chomsky
- Nervous system
- Linguistics
- Phoneme
- Syntax
- Occam's razor
- Steven Pinker
- Bonobo
- Bee
- Theory of mind
- Cornell University
- Equivalence relation
- Animal communication
- Productivity (linguistics)
- Animal consciousness
- Kanzi
- Koko (gorilla)
- Yerkish
- Displacement (linguistics)
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Language.