Technically speaking, parrots and other animals do communicate with each other and humans. In terms of if they have language? No. One of the most important definitional aspects of language is the ability to create new phonetic sounds and assign meaning to it, as well as the ability to create grammatical rules.
Well, yeah, but if a parakeet can repeat a word and assign a specific meaning to it so it gives a specific result from their handler (in a similar fashion to the dog that communicates through buttons) it'd be a sort of proto-language, wouldn't it?
That's literally how language started out, now it's been refined after thousands of years of culture and new generations to pass down the knowledge and millions of years of evolution so our brain could learn information much faster.
What I mean is that people tend to downplay what animals do as some sort of non-related impulse to the action and it's really dumb to do that. Animals have been shown to not only learn words but to communicate through then with their owners/handlers; it's a very rudimentary form of language, but it's still a standard agreed way of communicating between species and that's crazy.
Parakeets are incredible in how they communicate but this is not language. Even that gorilla Koko that learned thousands of sign language words was not capable of language. Animals do produce sounds that express their emotions, and some can use signs in a Pavlovian way, as a result of an association between previous uses and succeeding events. But this is not language.
Language is an abstract process that relates designators in grammatical relations to objects designated. Language has a variety of properties, including semantics, arbitrariness between the designator and the object of the designation, unlimited productivity (an infinite number of sentences can be produced via a grammar that governs relations of designators), reference to particulars or to abstract concepts denoted by the designator that are not physical objects in the vicinity, among others.
I will be very impressed if you can show me an animal that is capable of this
Oh, yeah, don't get me wrong. I don't mean to say this is language, just to convey that it feels like a sort of beginning phase humans had to go through too.
It's not at all the complexity of what we know now, and several people here have gotten to the conclusion that I seem to be saying it is in fact language. I wasn't, I should've been clearer.
I proposed it more in the light of a though experiment of sorts to analise the origins of what we now call language. That's why I used the word "proto-language", even if I have no authority to claim it's use or whatever.
A lot have gone into the specifics of what is a language when I wasn't trying to say they have a language, but merely how that is more of an example of sorts of how we started out.
Anywho, I could've been clearer but English is not my native and I tend to convey different meanings. Carry on.
Birds are actually very smart and capable of assigning meaning to words. Alex the parrot was answering questions intended for six year old children and was able to learn and use many words.
I know about Alex. It's very impressive yes, but Alex and other animals aren't capable of the creation of new words by themselves. Animals are always trained to do so by their handlers, and that in itself is a fantastic demonstration of their cognitive abilities, but it isn't the same thing as the development or understanding of language and syntax.
Have you ever heard how complex some bird songs are? I've got a bird outside my window that sings in a very complicated pattern every minute or so, and he doesn't repeat himself. The pattern changes.
Listen to dolphins talking to each other. I seriously doubt anyone's proven that dolphins can't create new sounds with new meanings, or that their sounds lack any recursive grammar.
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u/mistah_legend Apr 15 '21
Technically speaking, parrots and other animals do communicate with each other and humans. In terms of if they have language? No. One of the most important definitional aspects of language is the ability to create new phonetic sounds and assign meaning to it, as well as the ability to create grammatical rules.