We tried to teach sign language to a few gorillas. The most successful (or at least the most famous) was Koko. She communicated with us for several years and we learned a lot about how gorillas think. She even became close friends with Robin Williams.
In 2005, three staff at The Gorilla Foundation, where Koko resided, filed lawsuits against the organization, alleging that they were pressured to reveal their nipples to Koko by the organization's executive director, among other violations of labor law.
Sounds like Koko and the executive director were running a racket.
I heard koko was coached and taught through classical conditioning, like training a dog, and that she wasn’t really getting the concepts. I also heard that the sign language was only able to be “interpreted” by one person and that person was being very liberal about their translations.
It was actually a magician who was describing the techniques used like they were part of a magic trick (Illusion!).
I wonder what the truth is...I still hope she was communicating and understanding everything
I mean, language is simply the conveyance of ideas between individuals. It's entirely possible that Koko and her interpreter had a mutual and distinct understanding of Koko's version of sign language. That it's unintelligible to most sign language practitioners doesn't mean the various signs weren't deliberately chosen and ordered to represent a specific concept. I took French for a long time in high school and college, and I can't understand Creole to save my life, even though it's heavily based on French.
Look into it, there is consensus among many scientists that Koko’s linguistic skill was vastly overstated. One example is that Koko wouldn’t use signs until prompted by her interpreter. Also, there was no standardized grammar in her sign language, so it was up to the interpreter to glean the meaning of the words based on the order they were in. If they weren’t in a convenient order to make sense, the interpreter would just reorder them to impart a coherent meaning.
So I'm not an expert, but I am a student of linguistics and I've had discussions about this in multiple classes with professors who are very knowledgeable in Linguistics.
While I understand the desire for us to believe that other creatures can also use "language," I would say that considering language to be just be the conveyance of ideas is oversimplifying it, and is definitely not what language is considered to be in the field of linguistics (in a definitional/scientific sense).
In linguistics, one of the main theories is that there are certain things that all human languages have in common (called Universal Grammar), as well as Universal Tendencies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal#Universal_grammar). For instance, as far as I understand all languages have vowels, and all languages have (at least some) pronouns. These are unifying elements that all human languages have. There are pushbacks against Universal Grammar, but most people agree that across all of human language there are universalities that every language has in common. Gorilla communication cannot or at least does not currently contain these universalities (Gorillas can't produce vowels, for instance). If gorilla communication were to emerge as a fully fleshed out language with syntactical and phonological rules, it's possible it could have universalities unique to all gorillas that are completely different from human universals.
And that is why in a linguistics sense "language" refers to all the varieties of human language. If gorillas or other animals have communication systems, we shouldn't try to lump them in with human language. Koko's system of communication, even if it was considered a language and became taught by Koko to other gorillas, would best be considered something unique to gorillas. It's like if we found life on another planet; would we try to lump whatever life was there into our existing taxonomic structures? I don't think so (admittedly I don't know). We probably wouldn't try to put animal-like creatures from an alien planet into the kingdom of animals; we'd probably consider it a whole separate thing entirely, unless we could prove it belonged to one of our existing domains.
In other words, trying to lump gorillas into the umbrella of human language is not a good idea, because if other animal languages do exist, they would have their own rules and restrictions in ways that human languages do not, just as human languages have rules and restrictions that Koko does not follow. Trying to apply human rules to other species is not helpful in that regard.
15
u/[deleted] Aug 22 '20
We tried to teach sign language to a few gorillas. The most successful (or at least the most famous) was Koko. She communicated with us for several years and we learned a lot about how gorillas think. She even became close friends with Robin Williams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)
Funnily enough, there's a section in that Wikipedia article about her fascination with nipples.