animal language

Certain animals gecticulate, babble and use very simple syntax to convey meaning. Primates, cetaceans, pinnepeds, elephants and birds seem to be the language champions of the animal kingdom.

Our cognitive abilities and the manouverability of our vocal tracts are, famously, second to none. We can say that human language is strongly informational, in the sense that it is open to interpretation. Most animal (and machine) languages are more like sets of preprogrammed instructions. Thus, a useful demarcation between animal and human language is the ability to rearrange words in order to convey new meaning. The more inflexible, whole sentences of animals are only weakly generative.

Andrew Brown (1989) Apocalypse Birds. Acrylic on canvas.

Andrew Brown (2005) Figure.Inks and charcoal on paper .

GORILLA LANGUAGE AND PERSONHOOD

JACOB BRONOWSKI

Polish born British Physicist and Polymath
(1908-1974)

Jacob Bronowski (1978: 32) makes a distinction between information, which is open to interpretation, and preprogrammed instruction. In his view “animal and machine languages are essentially instructions.” According to Bronowski (1978: 34-35):

[A]nimals address their species at large, or possibly even members of another species, either to frighten them off or to communicate with them, but they do not, so far as we an tell, address themselves. The internalization of language is a human phenomenon of profound importance.

For Bronowski (1978: 28) animal language is “a code of signals” rather than real language. The point of departure (1978: 36) is “productivity or generativity” of real language.” The inflexible whole sentences of animals which have instructional force are very different from words which can be rearranged to convey new meaning. Accordingly (1978: 43-44) only human beings:

are able to make, to internalize, and to exchange with one another utterances which have a purely cognitive content… The animal sentence has been progressively broken down so that the sentences that we exchange contain words: words which either stand for objects in the outside world or for actions. This analysis of the outside world is bound up with human language. It is closely related to the visual imagination in human beings, and by its means we dominate and conjure the external world.

Bronowski, Jacob (1978) The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. Yale University Press, Princeton.