Curiosity #26 Do animals have any Language?
Did you know "Cats only make their signature meow sound while communicating with humans or to get human attention".
Well but that doesn't explain that they have any language or not. Well thats what this article is about.
Hey everyone , welcome to next episode of curiosity , Lets get started.
Almost all Animals communicate. Example : Crabs wave their claws at each other which means they are healthy and ready to mate. Cuttlefish creates pattern in their skin by chromatophores to give the warning signals. Honey bees perform complex dances to let other know the location and quality of food source. All these animals communicate very well and precisely,
but, do they have any language?
To answer that we need to know what are the criteria associated with language. Language consists of 4 different criteria. They are "Discreetness" , "Grammar", "Productivity" and "Displacement". Discreetness means generating new ideas by combining various individual words or sounds. Grammar is the set of rules that tells you how to combine the individual words or sounds. Productivity is the ability to use all these to make a meaningful message and displacement is the ability to talk about past, future and fiction event not present time.
So does animals fulfills any of these criteria? well not all the animals fulfill these criteria, Like crabs and cuttlefish only communicate about current conditions expressing their physical and mental state. But some animals do fulfill the criteria like Bees perform their complex dance moves to inform other bees about quality and source of food, which shows the sign of "Displacement" criteria.
Something similar is done by prairie dogs, which lives in towns. They are usually hunted down by number of larger animals including humans. They can warn each other about the predators size, shape , speed, and can identify human predators as well and even warn about what the person is wearing or carrying a gun.
Chimpanzee and Gorillas are great communicators too. They even have their own modified sign language. They show properties of "discreetness" By combining multiple signs and making a meaning full communication with their sign language.
There are many other sophisticated animal communications like dolphins uses whistle to identify age, location , name and gender. They can also understand grammar as well.
But note that none of these animals shows all the four properties of Language. All the animals only communicate about a specific topic like bees talk about food, prairie dogs talk about predators, and crabs talk about them selves and the never ending list goes on and on
So we can finally say, Human language stands alone due to the complex combination of grammar and productivity with discreetness and displacement. We can produce infinite number of messages from finite number of words. We can understand complex sentences. We can talk about imaginary things and even lie.
So thats it guys , end of the episode. Hope you all liked it. If you did , please dont forget to upvote, comment and resteem guys.
Other works by me:
I find it interesting that whales groups have their own songs, and essentially, dialects that are passed down to children. Pretty amazing.
yup absolutely amazing