People And Animals

Language And Its Usage By Both People And Animals
By Mary Anne Winslow

Language can be considered the major characteristic which separates man from other living creatures. For Descartes 'it is a very remarkable thing that there are no men so dull and stupid, not even lunatics, that they cannot arrange various words and form a sentence to make their thoughts understood; but no other animal, however perfect or well bred can do the like'.

The presence of a language in a non-human species would clearly be inconceivable a philosopher such as Descartes. Whilst it cannot be argued that the human languages are very complex systems with many rules and infinite possibilities of utterances, there are some methods of communication of animals that are comparable to human language, which thus casts some degree of doubt on this supposed human-specificity of language. Semanticity is a suggested test for the language ability of any species. It is the use of symbols to 'mean' or refer to objects and actions. Some writers have claimed that semanticity is exclusively human. Whilst it is possible that animals may only be able to communicate about a total situation, it is difficult to be certain; as is shown by the calls of the velvet monkey. I am therefore going to consider several examples of non-human animal communications, both vocalizations and other methods, and test them for semanticity.

Gibbons are several species of our closest surviving non-human kin. Like humans, they communicate in various ways, including posturing and gesturing, but the most language-like of their communication is their system of calls. Investigations of the gibbons of northern Thailand have shown that these gibbons have a stock of at least nine different calls. One of these is emitted typically when the group is surprised by a possible enemy and takes the form of a high pitched shout; it is often repeated by those who hear it and all act accordingly in order to avoid the danger of the enemy. An entirely different sort of call occurs in connection with friendly approaches among young gibbons, and reinforces the notion of play.