Are animal signals ever like words? - Can Animals Grammar? #5
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- čas přidán 25. 04. 2024
- Are animal calls meaningful? Are they words? Animated signal profiles of prairie dogs, monkeys, insects and more.
Subscribe for parts 6-8: czcams.com/users/subscription_...
Sources for claims: docs.google.com/document/d/1t...
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~ Shortly and sweetly ~
In previous parts we met animal signals from elephant calls to jacky dragon actions. Are these anything like human words? Let's get into the semantics of some suspiciously meaningful animal communication systems.
Please watch parts 1 through 4 for background and buildup. This one falls in the middle of building up from syllables (last time) to sequences (next time).
~ Resources ~
Art, animation and music by me. My sources document backs up claims and gives credit for images, fonts and sounds:
docs.google.com/document/d/1t...
In that same document I link to groups focused on animals, their habitats and the people who care for them. There's a narrative tie-in that I hope works at the end of the series; meanwhile I'll just mention and link:
docs.google.com/document/d/1t...
Prairie dogs may be talking about our size and shape?
Imagine getting fat shamed by a prairie dog.😂
Sounds like my ex and her girl friends 😏
Hey, the prairie dogs aren't judging, they are just making sure that the others know what to look for. Think about it, one prairie dog says, "human! A big one!" and another prairie dog says, "human! A small one!" Now the whole colony knows that there are two humans to be on the lookout for.
I still think some animal linguistics researchers would claim a large chunk of human communication wasn't language if you somehow managed to get them to study it without knowing they were studying humans.
Yeah, I mean, "the bees aren't using language, they're planning journeys" lolwut.
That's what I was thinking. "Sorry, ASL isn't a language because it doesn't have vocalizations." "Sorry, Sfyria isn't a language because it doesn't have enough distinct vocalizations." "Sorry, Toki Pona isn't a language because it doesn't have enough distinct words."
The bee one especially annoyed me. "Oh, it's not talking, it's just mapping out their journies for one another!" So then, they're communicating directional information nonverbally? ...How is that not language again?
Yeah, these researchers are collectively coming across as very human-centric elitists. Like they're reaching for excuses to discount any finding that would suggest language in anything non-human. It all feels very unscientific of them to keep moving the goalposts like this. And I suppose that tracks since they are a lot closer to the humanities side of academia. I think these linguists need to step back and think of things like how scientists searching for life on other worlds do. That life - and language - need not resemble life on hearth - or in this case, human language - at all.
But this is true in any case. Paralinguistics and ‘body language’ etc. aren’t generally considered language even fully knowing they are human
Let's play semantics with animal words.
Wuff wuff * wiggle * high-quack
@@92Nizo *wiggle wiggle* woff
eAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Speaking with animals is so easy, even 1st level Druids can do it!
But do they have language when the druid isn't around, or does the spell grant the animals capabilities they otherwise wouldn't have?
@@justforplaylists The spell grants animals intelligence when cast. This is why druids can also speak to both plants and rocks at higher levels, which obviously have no brains in the first place.
just cast a D8!
@@alexv3357 Arte made a 3 part doku serie. Plants whitout brains are not dumb. Ther use smart trics, and communicate, ther know ther surroundings, even can hold alive ther neightbors if ther got 0 sunligth, or water. But ther work simbiotic way. The plant pick out the healty other plant to "eat" it.
Stone's are smart in Star treck, but probably not a doku ;)
@@lifigrugru6396 Plants are not rocks, yes, they are alive, they grow, they move, they respond to their environments, they communicate, and so on, but so do bacteria. Plants don't have brains and don't have symbolic language, which is why the spell _Speak With Plants_ exists.
I still find it fascinating that animals can convey complex meanings, words/grammar or not.
I think this is because many animals have a lot of emotional intelligence (something not really measured or considered by most people) that coupled with familiarity with their social unit allows them to communicate in this way with one another.
My coworkers also use primitive words and signs. So... yes! Animals can speak!
I was just think about you, what timing. My dog ran off yesterday and I'm off to continue looking for her- sure wish we had better communication!
I hope you find your doggo safe and sound!!
I hope you find her soon, all safe and sound ❤
I have difficulty understanding why anyone would not be interested in this subject.
Saaaame!
Big mood
I've heard from several CZcamsrs that their views started to suddenly drop some time ago. By now I'm pretty sure the problem is the CZcams algorithm.
@@92NizoI'm pretty sure it's because CZcams is promoting shorts content everywhere, even in search results
Not that I agree with them, I find it fascinating personally, but it's like people being uninterested in astronomy. The people I've talked to have explained their lack of interest as coming from a place of, "we have so many problems and mysteries down here," and they struggle to see the relevance of such distant phenomena. I think for many linguists, there is still so much work to be done to understand human language that spending our time debating whether or not animals "speak" seems like a, pardon the pun, semantic debate. As a result, the people who study animal communication tend to do so from an observational/descriptive perspective, biologists and other people studying animal behavior, rather than linguists trying to branch out beyond human language. Given the embarassments covered in a previous video, the field is also broadly still very skeptical of any claims that animals communicate in a way that we would qualify as language. This makes it harder to publish on the topic, as your reviewers are more likely to be more critical of your research. End result is that linguists studying animal communication tend to be a niche group.
This one really got me thinking about the difference between communication and language. If language is just a sufficiently complex form of communication, exactly how complex does it need to be in order to count as language?. A lot of animal communication seems to be debunked as language just because they do not contain every single element that human languages have.
Take this with a big grain of salt since I'm not a linguist but I would peg the biggest difference between communication and language as the fact that with a language, if you come up with an idea you can find a way to express it so that others who understand the same language will be able to understand the idea you are trying to get across. Communication that isn't language probably isn't nearly as flexible.
@@avastos9740 You don't have communication if you can't express your idea to whoever you're communicating with, so by your definition, communication is language. "Flexibility" as a measure of language is pretty arbitrary and prone to bias. If an animal communicated using language with the simplicity of Toki Pona there's a good chance an English researcher wouldn't deem it "flexible" enough to qualify, especially since they'd have a hard time parsing out the nuances in the first place.
The difference is whatever I have to find in a desperate attempt to continue feeling special and not just a product of the randomness of evolution.
My perspective as a cat dad/companion (I raised him from a kitten, I'm comfortable with him seeing me as his "Mom") is that we (people who interact with animals a lot) develop pidgins with them. We each learn what signals work and what the others' signals mean.
Can we carry on long in depth conversations about the existential terror that is existence? No, but that's not what pidgins are for. Pidgins develop to facilitate trade and interactions between groups who lack a common language.
Here's a linguistic hypothesis, pidgins are "natural" language. Animal languages are pidgins. They are sets of signals (vocal, visual, postural, etc) that indicate desires, dangers, intents, and responses. (Not an exhaustive list) They either develop generically over generations or memetically over individuals and experiences.
if you think about it, animal "languages" are closer to poetry
How do you mean? Poetry sits comfortably within the range of human languages, so I don't exactly know what you mean.
Arik Kershenbaum has a couple chapters about animal communication and language in his book "The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy". I highly recommend it.
Man I love some of the stuff here. Linguists seeing non-human animals make and understand requests and making out like it isn't language because it doesn't do all the same things human language does.
The explanations and examples here are awesome!
It's unambiguous that animals can use sounds and other signals to communicate thoughts. If that's your definition of language then the vast majority of animals have language. However human language takes it a step further by being modular, it can convey information that neither the speaker nor listener has ever heard before. It's not a reliance on an established and limited set of signals, and that's what animals might or might not do.
Linguists are in the business of semantics and it really does depend on the definition of ‘language’. Not just their being foolish
@@PlatinumAltaria Not being too scientific about it - but maybe that example is a hint that non-human animals can understand language and abstract concepts on a deeper level. My late dog had a toy (a soft plastic pig that made a snorting sound when he chewed on it) and he knew it as "pig", so when I asked him to "Look for the pig, where is it?" he would go to the pig and take it into his mouth (I used this also for other toys and food), so there wasn't just a connection to the pig. Once I tried (never before did it) to ask him for the pig, but with a snorting sound instead of the word ("Where is (snorting)?") and he immediately went there.
Generally he understood human language very well and there were countless situations where it was clear that he understood way more than actively trained words and he put them into context with our actions (i.e. he knew that talking alone about something in a human conversation doesn't mean something immediately had to happen - he rather listened more closely (when we humans were planing the day and he heard something interesting), watched and then went on with what he was doing before; plus, we could ask him to choose between options, also in new situations, and he understood "later" and "I'm sorry").
I think at least basic concepts for language are understood by dogs and potentially also other (domesticated and wild) animals as well.
On CZcams is a dog, Bunny, who uses voiced buttons to communicate, and she also creates new expressions (like "big water" for "big waves" due to the missing button) to convey her thoughts und uses simple grammar (the latter is trained, but she also does make use of it in new constructions).
I think that distinguishing between declaratives and requests/commands/warnings leads to unwarranted underestimation of the legitimacy of ape language. Both declaratives and requests/commands/warnings are communications about circumstances. What is a declarative but an utterance about one's circumstances which lacks immediate importance? Apes will never "say" "Nice weather today" as the shrewdness can see individually that the weather is nice. The difference between non-instructive declaratives and requests/commands/warnings then reduces to a difference between utilitarian communication and small talk.
I would also argue that a warning is a declarative. If I come walk into a room and say "The house is on fire," I would expect people to get up and leave. Saying "eagle" is simply stating there is an eagle, it just happens that they have a response to that word like we have a response to "the house is on fire"
One distinctive feature of humans language is that different groups of humans have different languages. Has anything like that been observed in animals? Have we seen different populations of the same species use different signals for the same purpose. That would lead us to understand that these language are not innate but developed and learned.
We already know that through whales, birds and dolphins.
Not a lot of species are as widespread as humans are, so that's not necessarily a good metric. If a species is only found in one small island you wouldn't expect them to have dialects.
british people exist tho
Yes, with prairie dogs fer example
Gah, you've got me hooked bad! I gotta know!
I feel like I've been inundated with clickbait so much that I've forgotten how wonderous legitimate intrigue can be!
I missed your videos so much!
One side question is that behaviors for animals have a purpose. To vocalize a warning is useful for the species, especially when it lives in a group. Shouting warnings is less useful for creatures with solitary lives. Nature will not waste resources on communication that does not solve a problem. Each species will only have communication to the level for which there is a benefit.
Humans have gone all in with brain power to solve challenges that are handled with speed, claws, sharp teeth, etc. in other species. Language and tools are the mechanism we use for carrying over knowledge from generation to generation. So the other question is what types of language/communication are useful for each species.
I suppose the argument there has more to do with extremity, how far does their linguistic abilities go, how much are we missing simply because we are too arrogant to consider the possibility that the “lower life forms” are more complex than we thought.
@@stinkymccheese8010 I am not questioning how smart animals are, but what biological factors lead to language. Humans make sounds that are not words, shouts, cries, grunts. Did these evolve into language slowly over time getting more and more complex? Or was it a leap in evolution, a mutation that allowed humans to do what no other animal can do? There are many amazing mutations in animals, like how electric eels can generate powerful electric charges, or luminescence of fireflies. Humans can't do either of these amazing things, but instead is language our special mutation?
If language is a slow evolution of existing vocalizations, then possibly we can breed or evolve this ability into another animal. If it is a mutation, then can we graft it into another species? Share the apple from the garden of Eden with another.
What forces of nature, or community drove the growth of language in humans? Since language doesn't leave fossils to find, it is more difficult to see it's origins.
You're misunderstanding evolution. There is no goal. If something evolves and is a detriment but the organism reproduces anyway, the trait continues on. It's more likely the organism won't reproduce as well as another one, but it's far far away from a guarantee.
Take a look at the recurrent laryngeal nerve. That's a definite waste of energy and a detriment in a huge number of organisms.
@@frankfox6904 I wouldn't say language is our special evolution, but rather pattern matching. We're great at finding and remembering patterns, and I don't just mean visually. Language is all about patterns.
Word order in sentences is one of the biggest parts of language. In English we have the adjective order (I can't remember it atm), and reading the sentence "I have a big, blue ball" sounds fine, but "I have a blue, big ball" sounds wrong because size comes before color. Things like these aren't told to us, we just recognize that pattern and commit it to memory, then follow that memory. And that's just one pattern in one language.
And while word meaning isn't a pattern, it is something we memorize similar to one. A baby will see a pattern of "ball" and the round thing you gave it, and memorize it. An adult on the internet might see a pattern of a new word being used, like "yeet" or something, and memorize that it is used in that context. Both are pattern matching.
Now, why did we get so good at pattern matching? Hard to say. Maybe we started getting good at it by seeing patterns in where prey would be based on weather and other factors. Or, maybe seeing patterns helped us make tools via trial and error (errors being patterns to avoid lol). But as we were living in groups, maybe seeing patterns in how others acted helped. This is all speculation, but it's fun to think about regardless imo
@@Mohenjo_Daro_ I don't know if language can be reduced to pattern matching, but you give a good discussion on how pattern matching is a skill used for language. It does open the idea that the parts for the build up of language in the video may also be represented by another set of requirements. Instead of "sounds, morpheme, word, sentence", maybe it is 'signals, pattern recognition, abstraction, and problem solving'. Which skill used by language is missing, or needing to be improved in animals? What is needed to transition from displays of emotion or requests for food, to talking about the weather and who is your favorite team?
This also gets back to my original post of what do animals need to talk about beyond the basics? Is there value for their species to discuss abstract ideas? Or are they better off focusing on what is needed for survival?
And the more I hear about hominid communication, the more convinced I am that manual language preceded aural language.
*oral
@@oyoo3323 Not quite, oral is with the mouth, aural means sound based.
@@Great_Olaf5 ah, I see.
It seems to me that an alarm call has to be sort of condensed...short and quick to elicit a rapid response. If a prairie dog's alarm call carries information about size shape and color I have to wonder how much information is carried by their more casual interactions... People get sensitive when you seem to imply that animal communication is "language" so I try to avoid that word and, instead, try to observe that all living things exchange information with their environment and some of them exchange pretty complex information at a pretty high speed. There seems to be a wide spectrum of abilities and I'm not even convinced that human language is at the end of the spectrum.
idk abt u but my therapist told me im very far on the spectrum
I hear Prarie dogs all summer. Now I'm afraid they are judging my shape as a human. 😢
I’m very conflicted with the buttons ppl use for dogs
Why?
Why?
I'm personally not against them, but I believe they should be used in a larger training apparatus.
If after teaching your dog which words mean what, you take away the buttons and YOU need to give them back in order to understand your dog: you lost the plot.
I keep chickens. They have "words" for come over, food, run away, laying an egg, back off, and different tones to each depending on distance and where the threat or the food might be. Quicker, rapid calls indicate urgency, where as lower toned, slower calls show interest in something or a meaning like "almost time to go back in".
If you use their words, they will come, go, or hide.
The roosters crow...to show pride, to call the flock to a certain spot, or plainly sometimes because they want me to let them out. They certainly know how to get my attention.
Cats have their own grammar, as well as a bunch of non verbal cues. So do dogs and most mammals to an extent. The more time you spend with an animal, the better you understand them, and the better they understand you. You learn their language as well as them learning yours. The more time I spend with animals the more I realize the real root of all language is cooperation in a shared territory & it goes back longer than we've been human.
Among us humans, laughter is a call and we instinctively know what a baby is crying about. We also quickly learn what our pets vocalizations mean. Could this be an inheritance from a time before language?
I think this is probably just our ability to connect patterns.
Like how pidgeons can learn traffic lights
5:15 how would someone argue that making plans and sharing them with your group isn't linguistic?
Thanks a bunch for the arachnid warning, many don't even try and even shove them or other creepy crawlies face first into thumbnails!
I'm also very interested to see more of this, the next episode sounds super cool
This is one of my favourite series of videos!
We live on ten acres northwest of Cheyenne, WY, and have prairie dogs on our land. It's fun and interesting to sit on the porch and watch them.
great series! difficult to grasp but fascinating
your work is brilliant, keep up with these videos ❤
This is all so fascinating! Thank you for making this series. I’m really looking forward to learning more.
7:05 snakes, eagles, and big cats? allegedly, that's the origin of the dragon myth
The thing is that we must to stop thinking "like humans". There are millions complex sistems for comunication in life, as we can understand.
Sorry for my limited english grammar. I have not got english skills, as you may observed.
Anyway, you've got it.
Yay, new episode!!
I love this series
Fascinating.
Thank you so much for the spider warning. It's one that people often just don't think about when making videos so the consideration is deeply appreciated
Prairie dogs definitely communicate in a way that can be called linguistic. (It sounds like you have watched the same videos about them that I have.)
Wow, just found this channel. our voice is so so similar to max Miller from Tasting History that I had go and check you weren't him!
i know its multiply the problems, but mainly by bugs (could be primal to) chemicals travel signals to. Great work!
There is an arbitrariness between the signifier and signified in human language (deSaussure). This doesn't exist with animals. So the same concept, like a tree, is rendered as the sound "tree" in English, "albero" in Italian, "etz" in Hebrew, etc. But all vervet monkey calls to signify large cats is the same. Until the same type of arbitrariness can be shown in animals, you don't have human language.
Different pods of orcas use different sounds.
Your comment makes no sense. So, because humans have different words for the same concept in different languages, that means the monkeys don't have a shared language, because they have one sound to signify all types of large cat? Humans have different languages so the monkeys don't have language because they don't make certain distinctions? Huh?
That's like saying, "Russian, Greek, and Turkish have their own translations for "flower", but the English don't have distinct words for голубой and синий, and until they do, it's not a human language."
@@accelleratiiincredibus446 The arbitrariness of the signifier-signified relationship means that the association has to be learned socially and is not a genetically determined behaviour. Or another way of putting it, language is mimetic while animal signals are genetic. Thus only humans have language.
There are many important consequences because of this difference. One is that when human communities separate, their spoken languages begin to diverge within a generation. Related is that speakers readily invent new words to describe new things or situations that they encounter in their environment. This is simply not the case with animal signals that change on evolutionary time scales with changing genes.
The example of Orca pods (above) or certain bird species is starting to approach this, but I'm not convinced that enough differentiation is occurring to create a conceptually rich language. Its not like concepts (the signified) are there in the mind waiting for a word (the signifier) to attach to them. The differences between signifiers creates the conceptual richness of the space of the signified.
The biggest consequence of this is that humans, through language, form a "hive mind". Thus only humans have culture, technology, science, etc. No other animal does this.
@@physics1518isn't that a matter of how big the sample is? Most animals aren't as widespread as we are, thus making comparation difficult. In a comparatively smal sample arbitrariness may not be well expressed through divergencies, making it seem like between both parts of the sign there's a necessary link. I think that one needs also to take into account that language has a pragmatic aspect that is explained through environmental factors isn't it? Animals may not have the rapid changes that human societies have in comparison (no need to think of modern societies either, although there is more evident) just because their adaptive strategies are working just fine, making them stagnant in several aspects. We are knows instead for our very flexible adaptive strategizing, which makes our development more dynamic fostering changes. In a way it like we are an excellent case to illustrated sign arbitrariness. Also something doesn't bode well with just explaining necessity through genetics as it seems to me rather vague as an explanation. What is the mechanism/s that make a certain sound exactly the one needed to convey all the group needs to be alert of a coyote? Is that really caused directly by genetic coding? As I say it seems to me like there are more factors to it. Otherwise we end up having to explain why one kind of animal seems to be not affected by the same deterministic genetic "fatality" that order other animals to necessarily attached a certain meaning to a certain sound they can make. It makes seem like we aren't quite animals. Seem more likely that is mulifactorial and that in human beings the factors are differently balanced, sort to speak.
@@rociopaoloni5080 You don't need to make the comparison to other animals to see the difference between animal signals and human language. You can make the comparison of ourselves to ourselves. As animals, we also produce genetically determined signals, vocal signals such as laughing or crying, and visual signals like smiling, frowning or grimacing. These are cross cultural and are understood by all humans. In fact, we share some of these signals with other primates! But this is different than language where, genetically we are capable of a couple hundred phonemes (although any particular language might make use of only a subset). But we string these together in an arbitrary order. Arbitrary from the point of view of genetics, but not arbitrary with respect to the socially recognized conventions of the language, eg. the phonemes c-a-t to form the word "cat", the signifier for the animal, or h-a-t to form "hat", the signifier for the headdress. The first phoneme differs in each, while the second and third are identical. There is nothing genetic that causes me to associate the c-a-t sequence with the cute furry animal that purrs, but there is something that socially conditions me! But tickle me, and I'm going to burst out laughing because I'm genetically wired that way. Language is simply not animal signaling.
I think your comment "It makes seem like we aren't quite animals" is quite telling. There seems to be this resistance to asserting that animals can't use language because that implies that therefore humans aren't animals. We are animals because we do the things that other animals do, but we are unique animals. We're the only animals that can language.
I think this is an example of a problem with human language. We are trying to make well defined categories fit a universe that has no requirement to fit into those categories.
I'm still getting this vibe that we are/have been demanding too much before giving credit
Have you ever heard of that dog Bunny? She was taught to communicate via buttons, but the interesting thing about her is, that she spontaneously comments on things, building her own sentences on the go. I think the last time I checked, she was able to make sentences containing 4-5 words. It's not directly animal grammar, but it's an interesting take on how well animals can learn to understand or use our languages. The CZcams channel of her owners is called "What about Bunny", in case you're interested :)
Love it❤
One of the more interesting and enigmatic primate communications is that of the Gelada monkeys in the Ethiopian highlands. They have a constant murmur of communication that varies and changes, sounding a lot like an out-of-focus discussion taking place, but its completely opaque as to what, if anything is being communicated. One idea is that it's nothing more than a sort of auditory grooming behavior, while other ideas think it's some sort of more meaningful communication. We don't know at all though.
if you know the context humans could get by with various tones of "hey" and probably did for a long time, but wow, "merely emotions" and "meaningful words" have a very different ring, don't you think?
Last week in the netherlands they released instructional videos on understanding cow language.
Fascinating stuff! When you say "human overlaps" do you mean that the signals they make also make sense to humans intuitively? Or are you saying that they overlap with/are similar to signs in certain sign languages?
I'm assuming so, when I look up about it, videos show for example orangutans putting their palms out to ask for food or other things, which is a fascinating thing I never thought about that is almost instinctual that we get.
Hey man
Nice work
Can you make a video about Persian Language?
It would be a cool video too
AHH and NativLang uploading within five minutes of each other on a Friday? Nice!
What's ahh?
@@Starbuck32123 alternate history hub
here before the chickadee mention!
I'm speechless
I think one main issue with teaching animals language is just... their attention span and fear. It may well be that they are neurologically capable of full human speech in a structural sense, but the attention span required to teach them free of their impulsive behaviours makes it a mostly intractable problem.
reminds me of Mandarin. the same word at different speeds and or pitches can convey different meanings. I get the feelings animals articulate themselves within their groups, not just species as a whole in a similar way. They also probably throw a lot more body language into the mix and all that makes the English alphabet sound like boring cave-man grunts
It's really difficult to interpret declarative sentences in a language and manner of expression we don't understand. The common error lies in thinking that, since we cannot identify them, they don't exist.
.... now I wanna learn chimp sign language 😂
I'm curious about how much evidence there is for evolution as a feature of animal communication. It's a crucial feature of human language, and I know there's some evidence for it in some cetaceans, but what is there beyond that? It's important evidence for the capacity for abstract thought: the ability of a community to identify a new concept and, through consensus, represent it with a new word or grammatical construction.
One big question: if we play a recording back to an animal does it hear digital sound differently than analogue. I'm fairly convinced that recordings don't cause dogs or cats to respond as we do. Both hear much better than we do. Just as animals don't see as we do, so it is true with hearing. What do we know about this?
I'm a PhD student in philosophy of biology, but I have this weird heideggerian background from my BA, and I can't help but wonder if we are always starting from an idea of language, human language, that doesn't really capture the essence of human language, and therefore, that does not allow us to see the specificity of language or communication in the biological sense. For example, the distinction between information/knowledge and behaviour doesn't really satisfy me from a biological perspective, as all phenotypes (included linguistic phenotypes) can be conceptualised as being 'informed', always carrying some kind of information that shapes them and their relation with other phenotypes (e.g. behavioural phenotypes, like actions in response to hearing a call or seeing another bee's dance). In this sense, everything that animals say never really say anything about the world in itself, never carry any information about the world, but only information about the organisms themselves, i.e. what their phenotype can be. Like, everything is always part of the organismal system, be it described as a physiological, cognitive, agential or behavioural organisation, or as a set of ecological relations. On the contrary - and here my Heideggerian background comes in - human language would be essentially a different kind of thing altogether. Heidegger says that all language is first and foremost 'poetic', it is a form of building a 'world', it says something about the state of things in general (about humans, about other thinfs, etc.) 'for its own sake'. Only after this world is established, a kind of world picture, then the particular interest of humans come to play, and humans can express ALSO their biological functions (eating, sociality, etc.), but on the basis of something which is not originally biological, that is, something that has nothing to do with the biological functions or needs themselves. For a bee, there is no difference in saying 'the flowers are there' and 'mapping one's way to nectar', because flowers and 'over there' are nothing in themselves, but always only a correspective of what bees need and do, or a (informational) part of their behaviour. On the contrary, flowers are something to us, regardless of whether we smell them or not, whether we have any interest in them or not, flowers appear to us in the mere fact of their reality. And this is what Heidegger really meant when he said that, at the core of being human, and also at the core of language, is a fundamentally metaphysical (non biological) preoccupation, of why there is anything at all rather than nothing at all. These are my philosophical 2 cents! Beautiful video!
I had the same idea although not the knowledge to put it thet way you did. To me it seems like while distinguishing declaratives from something more pragmatical (a call to action) while useful for methodological purposes it also already takes for granted that there's an absolute universal difference between the two instead of being situational. As you say for a bee there's no distinction between declaring for the sake of declaring and making a call to action since that difference is not meaningful for their activities. On the other hand is true that if human language is the thing that these forms of communication are being compared to then it's true that at the absence of this distinction then they couldn't be called "language". But that raises the question of this being true for human language in an absolute sense. Aren't the pragmatic aspects of human language like these forms of communication? As someone said in the comments, if I say "the house is on fire!" I'm formally making a declarative statement but it's obvious that I'm making a call for action and not just stating something because I'm contemplating the existence of fire. That kind of existencial appreciation or doubt is one part of what makes the human language that it's very unique to us but it's not what we are as a whole. If this isn't acknowledged to me it seems like the debate lacks critical thinking.
@@rociopaoloni5080 right, "the house is on fire" is absolutely a call to action - but what about (here again Im referring to Heidegger) silence? here again im referring to heidegger, only a being that can truly 'speak' can be 'silent', where silence is equally meaningful as word. and what silence is more 'silent' of the one that does not even imply an unsaid thing, but the silence that comes from the inability to articulate something - perhaps the despair of wanting to communicate it to others but knowing it will be forever incommunicable? as humans, we aaaaalways have this kind of experiences, and they are not marginal or special, but they are probably central, what gives everything else its shape. ahah im riffing now, but after all, i used to be an existentialist!
Part of the problem is knowing what the heck we mean by any of it.
Neat
And here we are, patiently waiting for the moment this intrepid adventurer will get back to complex social animals and dive into non-verbal communication. Imagine if there was an animal capable of communicating via visual signs, or via non-verbal sounds, or via touch, or via body "language", or via deliberate smell placement... Oh. Wait.
How many parts will this series be in total?
0:00 And also with words, in the case of humans.
i would be curious about the development of human language alongside the development of human interconnectedness. I would be curious to compare the language of a whale that has traveled the world many times to that of one confined to one place from birth, or seeing how well two monkeys of maybe even the same species but from completely isolated populations could communicate.
And also, how our own communications were affected by a need for more and more universality.
In my life, I have exchanged words with many thousands of different people, and I wonder how language was like at a time where maybe only the oldest and most traveled humans might have reached that number
I wonder how long before animal language critiques come out and say the main requirement for "language" is "humans use it"
This probably sounds weird, but I had my cat for 14 years and I'd swear that we could understand each other without even speaking the same language. I think if cats lived as long as humans that I very well could have eventually gotten her to talk. Of course I have a theory as to why some people can communicate so well with animals, it just wouldn't be accepted by modern science.
PRAIRIE DOGS!! Like meerkats (convergent evolution) but eaaaayyy better!! :) #PrairiePower !!!! :) :)
BIG OUNCE !
after this can u pls do a series on Burmese. i really want to expand the knowledge of our culture to the world of languages.
how do i figure out if my cat wants to go outside or wants food without having to waste food first.
For me, vocal animal language would be a lot more interesting than just motion/gesture displays. Gesture displays are more biology than linguistics.
Are these forms of communication instinctual, or learned? Do they vary between different populations, like languages between cultures? Do they evolve over time? These elements are important when considering whether or not these are languages, or merely ingrained behaviors. ='[.]'=
Honestly, if non vocal sign language is language… why not a non vocal bee dance if it conveys accurate distinct information
If a sound or gesture conveys information that another creature can interpret and act upon, even if it's just for survival or reproduction, how can we argue whether the sound or gesture was meaningful? It has meaning for the listener/observer, because they can correctly decode it and take appropriate survival (or reproduction) actions.
I would argue that our definition of "meaningful" is too narrow. A firefly flashes a series of lights that signals to females that he is available to mate, and one or more female fireflies correctly decodes the information and takes appropriate action, whether to seek them out for mating, or moving to avoid him. How is that not a communication of encoded information that is decoded by the observer and correctly interpreted into an appropriate response? How is that exchange not meaningful?
Yeah it's because linguistics deal with human language rather than with communication in general. Linguistics has a more narrow definition of what language is due to this. I'm not expert though so I can't give definitions myself lol but I do see that what's happening. It's not that there's no meaning behind these signals, that they're just noise or random movements but that they are getting compared with words on human language and how words get meaning in that context in order to see how much these forms for communication come close to it. That's also why is a very heated debate, if it was about just communication everybody would agree that communication is indeed happening in this interactions as you already described.
Talking about different calls and signs from animals and not letting us hear or see any of them is criminal!
Can a dozen calls really be compared to 10k to 100k words? (with 10k being incredibly low)
No way.
👍🏻😎👽🐄
>5 videos straight
>⅕ of the usual viewership
>completely uninteresting subject.
C'mon man, you're better than this.
Do ideological (cf. definition as used in critical theory) commitments keep the anti-non-human-language side unswayable by any evidence? That ideology, I’d argue, is Cartesian dualism. Even as the metaphysics has been largely given up, Descartes’s arguments on the nature of animals (i.e., all physical matter, no mental matter) is, I’d say, still a common belief about animals still (e.g., “no thought, only instinct” behaviorism). To wit, nothing will convince some because it goes against ideological structures they may be completely unaware that they are beholden to.
The only thing that would convince is some animal-equivalent to the Turing Test. But is it human chauvinism/speciesism even to imagine such would be possible?
A lesson of Thomas Nagel’s landmark essay “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” is that any exchange of grammar/syllables/words between humans and a non-human is likely to be two beings talking past each other because our phenomenological worlds are just too unaligned to communicate. Bloody hell! Humans talk past each other because of different worldviews all the time. Why shouldn’t we start that such “talking-past-ness” (There’s probably a great German word for this, or there should be if there’s not!) is the default starting position of any human/non-human attempts to communicate linguistically? Failures to find (sufficient) evidence thus won’t be taken as evidence of an absence. Negative results in the frame of “talking-past-ness” (Really, Germans, please get on this, or reply with the answer.) may be because of no language was articulated by a non-human animal or because our and their languages fly past each other like matter and dark matter in physics. It’s a much less biased frame of reference.
Humans are a type of animal. So… yes obviously.
Woof spider
The biggest problem with teaching animals speech is that you'll also be teaching them how to consent.
Why is that a problem? It makes giving medicine to pets a lot easier.
🤨 What do you mean by *_consent_* ?
@@horsepowermultimediato accept something outside their interest, probably.
That depend more on us than it would on them.
Why is this your first thought?
Self report?
6:22 "They ignore nonsense sounds"
Man,maybe humans evolving and making language has really overstayed it's welcome for our species. Now we just make shit up off of something miniscule someone said for the sake for stirring shit up. We really lost what's truly important.
Another month another yapping about animals talking
5 virws after 1 minute. U really did fall off
The algorithm became crap. I watch linguistic videos often and even follow this channel but haven't been recommended any of the videos on animal communication.