22
votes
Which animal is closest to having language and why?
This is a little like asking which species of elephant is closest to having the ability to fly. Animal communication is a long long way from human speech.
The closest are probably the "usual ...
- 564
13
votes
Which animal is closest to having language and why?
Human language is doubly articulated.
That means that for every word (written or sounds), a regrouping of existing sounds (phonemes and morphemes) is used to produce meaning.
Double articulation ...
- 758
9
votes
Which animal is closest to having language and why?
As James K says, nothing is 'close' in a general sense. A number of animals can do things that are somewhat similar to "using language". Parrots are (in principle, not automatically) good at ...
- 83.3k
8
votes
what is the essential difference between human languages to other earthly animalia languages?
The general consensus is, there isn't just a single "essential difference"—most linguists don't like using the word "language" to refer to non-human communication, because it's so fundamentally ...
- 68.3k
6
votes
Accepted
what is the essential difference between human languages to other earthly animalia languages?
There is a classic list of "design features" of human language proposed by Charles Hockett. These are not essential properties of human language, rather, they are observations about human language. ...
- 83.3k
5
votes
Are some languages more advanced than others?
Some languages make it more difficult (impractical, though maybe not impossible) to express some concepts.
For example, most European languages have a wide range of tenses for verbs, including ...
- 159
4
votes
Are some languages more advanced than others?
If you mean full-blown natural languages, the answer is negative unless you introduce a notion of advanceness which will handicap some languages with respect to others (e.g. by setting (the length of) ...
- 504
4
votes
Accepted
What would be the obstacles to creating a language composed of all the words of all the human languages existing today?
Languages are more than just collections of words, and you're going to run into many problems at many levels.
Let's pick one really obvious problem: What counts as a word? The single Yupik word "...
- 2,645
4
votes
Accepted
Deriving context from alien signal
Without context, you have no way of deciphering this. Try to free yourself from your humanocentric view of sequential, audio-oral language transferring concepts that are familiar to you. There are ...
- 2,363
4
votes
Which animal is closest to having language and why?
Research done by Con Slobodchikoff suggests prairie dogs have a sophisticated communication system that can convey detailed, varied information in their calls.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/...
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4
votes
Octopuses and Non-phonetics
Signed languages, such as ASL, generally rely entirely on vision and not at all on sound. There are quite a few of them by this point and they're widely used among deaf people.
- 68.3k
4
votes
Has grammar ever been observed in animal communication?
In a number of cases, animal sound outputs can be analyzed into "components" that can appear to have structure, e.g. a "song" is multiple "phrases" each of which has some repeated elements e.g. "a b c"...
- 83.3k
2
votes
what is the essential difference between human languages to other earthly animalia languages?
Some animal "languages" are able to encode fairly complex information - for example, bees can communicate locations with their dances. However, all animal languages are restricted to a very limited ...
- 1,495
2
votes
Deriving context from alien signal
We could probably use some sort of word embedding technique. This could detect semantical relations such as synonymy, antonymy and so on, but there's no way of knowing if they would correspond to our ...
2
votes
Accepted
Language of Dolphins
I can't answer your question about current research, but here are a couple of older references. In 1986 a linguistics grad student, Esmé Hoban, at the University of Hawaii spent time observing ...
- 12.5k
2
votes
Do animal sounds have linguistic symbols or classifications?
The IPA is actually for describing the sounds we can make with our vocal tracts, and which also are part of human language. As such, it's inappropriate for describing animal sounds, just as it's ...
- 4,678
1
vote
Are some languages more advanced than others?
For sure, there was an advance in linguistic capabilities from great apes to humans, and this advance is determined by some genes. One gene, termed "The language gene" in popular science and FOXP2 in ...
- 30.4k
1
vote
Language of Dolphins
I can't really give an answer, because I haven't read and digested the scientific literature on the topic, and I'm a linguist, not an animal behaviorist. There are some references: an article that ...
- 83.3k
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