Re: OT hominids

Paul Bennett wrote:

> The last time I read anything about bee communication, bee "dances"
> provided nothing more than bearing and range information to nectar
> sources, in a stereotypical, formulaic way. That's IMO even less like
> language than birdsong -- at least some birdsong is capable of
> expressing  more than one notion.
>
> Ants, on the oher hand, seem to communicate via something at least
> potentially approaching the complexity of real language; a combination
> of  sign language, touch language and chemical language. As far as I
> know,  though, it's even less well understood than bee dances or birdsong.
>
> I'd really like to get up to speed with the latest research on dolphin
> language. It seems they're capable of describing things using sonar
> "pictures", and that they have matrilinear personal names, as well as
> obviously having enough of a language facility to understand
> combinations  of sign and vocal language from humans.
I think that in order to qualify as a language comparable to "natural"
human languages, at the very minimum you need to have words that express
what one thing is doing with another thing -- transitive verbs. You also
need some way of naming new things by combining existing elements
("phonemes" or their equivalent) in new combinations, and to be able to
talk about events remote in time and space. It would be interesting if
dolphins or some other kind of social animals had a communication system
with this sort of expressive potential (I wouldn't rule out the
possibility just yet), but as far as I know this set of features is
unique to human language. The ability to talk about future or potential
events seems to be an especially useful one.

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