Re: Defining "Language"

Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:


> I agree with David that it is important to distinguish natural human
> languages from animal communication systems. Even a sophisticated system
> like those of bees fall very short of human communication. I don't
> imagine that in the secrecy of their hives bees contemplate the universe
> and discuss philosophy or even just exchange the day's gossip!

I've been following this thread half-heartedly at best, so forgive me if this
has been mentioned before, but a property often said to be characteristic of
human language as opposed to non-linguistic modes of communication as found
among other animals is the phoneme/morpheme split: a small closed set of
elements arbitrarily combining to make a large open set of meaningful units.

 Andreas