4 ms·

Some animals have provably some sort of language, and most probably have them for tens of millions of years, or their ancestors did. No reason to believe there

by jajko 2y ago

Some animals have provably some sort of language, and most probably have them for tens of millions of years, or their ancestors did. No reason to believe there was no language before those 135k. Clearly you don't need something very special and unique to us. Now where is the threshold when we consider something a proper language and something... less lets say I don't know. Science probably doesn't have a clue neither. The evolution was probably very gradual, ie every 1000 years the complexity grew up by a notch, on average. Compound it to a million years.

tgv 2y ago
Any social species must have a language. Ours is much more complex than what we've encountered in other animals. Our language developed because of its ease of transmission, its capability to convey complex concepts, and because we discovered writing. But there probably are a few qualitative biological differences between us and other species that are essential for the difference in language capacity. Those haven't evolved much, I suspect.
- mcswell 2y ago
  I agree to a certain point, but writing (invented in the past few thousand years) has not led to more complex languages. I've worked on languages for which there was, until a few decades ago, no writing system, and they're every bit as complex as long-written languages. The qualitative differences between human languages and any animal "language" (scare quotes intentional) include recursion and breadth of vocabulary, and likely a lot of other things to. Recursion and the ability to learn a large vocabulary are probably biological and unique to us, the other things might or might not be unique to us
mcswell 2y ago
"some sort of language" covers a wide range. Some song birds learn their songs, but the songs are stereotyped--the bird sings pretty much the same thing over and over, and there's no evidence that Bird A is communicating anything to other birds beyond "This is my territory, stay away!" to males and "Hey girl!" to females. Modern human languages are several steps above this on the Chomsky hierarchy, with at least context-free phrase structure, and in some cases reportedly context-sensitive phrase structure.

by jajko 2y ago

tgv 2y ago

Any social species must have a language. Ours is much more complex than what we've encountered in other animals. Our language developed because of its ease of transmission, its capability to convey complex concepts, and because we discovered writing. But there probably are a few qualitative biological differences between us and other species that are essential for the difference in language capacity. Those haven't evolved much, I suspect.

mcswell 2y ago
I agree to a certain point, but writing (invented in the past few thousand years) has not led to more complex languages. I've worked on languages for which there was, until a few decades ago, no writing system, and they're every bit as complex as long-written languages. The qualitative differences between human languages and any animal "language" (scare quotes intentional) include recursion and breadth of vocabulary, and likely a lot of other things to. Recursion and the ability to learn a large vocabulary are probably biological and unique to us, the other things might or might not be unique to us

mcswell 2y ago

"some sort of language" covers a wide range. Some song birds learn their songs, but the songs are stereotyped--the bird sings pretty much the same thing over and over, and there's no evidence that Bird A is communicating anything to other birds beyond "This is my territory, stay away!" to males and "Hey girl!" to females. Modern human languages are several steps above this on the Chomsky hierarchy, with at least context-free phrase structure, and in some cases reportedly context-sensitive phrase structure.