Language and Thought

[bumab]

Dialects have been demonstrated in various groups of orcas and whales. They (animals and human observers) can tell the different groups based on their vocals.

[C1ay]

Dialects have been demonstrated in various groups of orcas and whales. They (animals and human observers) can tell the different groups based on their vocals.

Interesting, I notice you did say dialects though which to me is kind of like a southern draw versus that northern twang, both still being american english. I wonder if there are lower animal species though that have the equivalent of totally different languages like we do, like english versus chinese, to the extent that two distant animals of the same species do not understand the meaning of each others sounds.

[Kirk Gregory Czuhai]

Here's another thought for discussion.

 

Humans have literally thousands of languages. I think I remember seeing somewhere that there are more than 6000 languages in use today. As a species, we cannot universally communicate with each other.

 

i find this 6000 figure somewhat hard to believe! unless you are talking about extinct languages. English has pretty much taken over as the language of choice for most of commerce and science and enginering although, french, spanish, and german are still strong in the developed countries and yes you have your dialects but each has its prefered dialect that is taught in the schools.

 

mathematics is a universal language amoung mathematitians although among programmers this is less so with their languages but even this is becomming more standardized.

 

What about animals? Does a squirrel from France understand an american squirrel?

i am sure they are not arguing over whether its "American lip locks!"

Do dolphins from waters north of the equator understand dolphins from 'down under'?

"down under?"??!?

To what extent are languages for various animals species wide?

 

What do you think?i think when it comes down to it, as long as

its the same species, their different language will not be the reason they may go

extinct!

:friday:

[C1ay]

i find this 6000 figure somewhat hard to believe! unless you are talking about extinct languages. English has pretty much taken over as the language of choice for most of commerce and science and enginering although, french, spanish, and german are still strong in the developed countries and yes you have your dialects but each has its prefered dialect that is taught in the schools.

Here is one source:

 

6,000 languages: an embattled heritage

 

Are the vast majority of languages doomed to die out in the near future? Specialists reckon that no language can survive unless 100,000 people speak it. Half of the 6,000 or so languages in the world today are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people and a quarter by less than 1,000. Only a score are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.

 

More...

 

6000 languages should find more.

 

BTW, is there a reason for inserting your comments inside of the quote when you quote someone. It makes your comments look like they are the comments of the person your are quoting instead of your own. In a way it projects the appearance of putting words in someone else's mouth :friday:

[Queso]

yeah that hella confused me....oh by the way kirk i searched your last name and found a picture of santa clause playing a classical guitar, who was that?

[lindagarrette]

To me it looked like you specifically stated that the calls animals use to communicate are not language. In fact, it looks to me that your statement would even exclude things like sign language since it falls under "other means of communication".

It's possible that whale songs are language. I'm not sure about bird calls. Sign language has words and grammar so it qualifies A language must be learned, and must belong to a particular group or subgroup of beings to the exclusion of others who have not learned it.

[Turtle]

___I recall reading more than one reference to how birds learn calls, & reference to regional differences. One ornithologist was talking about how he could recognize movie locations through the crow calls in the background audio.

___Speaking further of crows, they are widely held to be the most intelligent of birds. Recently a crow in some experiments made her own tool by bending a straightened wire into a hook in order to get a snack from the bottom of a test tube. Crows can also count to at least ten; the anecdotal evidence often given is a crow flying up into a tree from the barn when a group of men (11 men) come to the barn & the crow wouldn't come down when just 10 men left but waited 'till the last did.

___Anyway, I tend to think bird calls are language. :friday: :eek:

[C1ay]

___I recall reading more than one reference to how birds learn calls, & reference to regional differences. One ornithologist was talking about how he could recognize movie locations through the crow calls in the background audio.

___Speaking further of crows, they are widely held to be the most intelligent of birds. Recently a crow in some experiments made her own tool by bending a straightened wire into a hook in order to get a snack from the bottom of a test tube. Crows can also count to at least ten; the anecdotal evidence often given is a crow flying up into a tree from the barn when a group of men (11 men) come to the barn & the crow wouldn't come down when just 10 men left but waited 'till the last did.

___Anyway, I tend to think bird calls are language. :friday: :eek:

There's actually been quite a bit of research and documentation of wild turkey calls because of the hunting community. There are volumes of books showing what the various turkey sounds mean and the devices that can duplicate those sounds. They clearly have a specific set of sounds that have specific meanings to the members of the group. Duck communication has been studied just about as thoroughly with the same resulting documentation on their calls. IMO, there is plenty to support the belief that the communications between these animals is language.

 

Now what about that bee thing? Bee scouts can clearly communicate to their hive mates where they have located food. IMO, the fact that they can convey information to each other implies language. What do you think?

[aurumdeus]

Birds, and other creatures, can definately communicate, whether through 'spoken' language or some other way. has anyone notices how a forest full of birds can take flight simultaneously, without a sound or other obvious message to initiate this? large schools of fish move perfectly in unison, without communication, and of course theres the 'sixth sense', which nobody can deny exists.

 

a similar thing can happen between people, leading people to question the existance of telepathy etc.

[Turtle]

Now what about that bee thing? Bee scouts can clearly communicate to their hive mates where they have located food. IMO, the fact that they can convey information to each other implies language. What do you think?

 

___Well now C1ay you know I want to say yes bees have language, but I know if I do then I may have also said they think & then they are intelligent & then...and then I'm not sure.

___So, until we further flesh out the thought business, I think bees have language but as we can't even settle on our own thought/language connection, I withold saying they think. :friday:

[lindagarrette]

___So, until we further flesh out the thought business, I think bees have language but as we can't even settle on our own thought/language connection, I withold saying they think. :friday:

A crow is a bird. Not all birds are crows. Bees have a means of communicating. Not all means of communication are language. Language is a form of communication. Communication is not the same as language. Language has words and grammar. Bees' language does not have words or grammar. Bees do not have a language. Bees have another means of communicating that is not language.

[gubba]

G'day Linda,

 

Thanks for attempting to maintain some precision in our terminology on this thread, but then I think you mentioned a past acquaintance with some formal linguistics, hopefully not quite so distant as mine. Effective systems of communications do not necessarily need to be thought of as languages, indeed one could make a case that to persist in doing so both devalues the meaning of the term "language" and indicates a poverty in our imagination when dealing with this issue that is so central to our self-perceptions.

 

Still when claiming that "language has words and grammar", I'd feel the need to preface the assertion by the term human. cheers gub.

[C1ay]

A crow is a bird. Not all birds are crows. Bees have a means of communicating. Not all means of communication are language. Language is a form of communication. Communication is not the same as language. Language has words and grammar. Bees' language does not have words or grammar. Bees do not have a language. Bees have another means of communicating that is not language.

It still looks to be like you are at odds with the references I listed since they all call animal communication language. I think we can all agree that none of the animal species except for humans have words or grammar as we understand them. They do have consistent sounds or movements that have specific meanings in the same way that words do to us. This is supported by the fact that we can discern that they are actually passing meaningful information to each other. Now maybe I've misunderstood but I cannot find a single definition from any source that limits it to that which has words and grammar only. Perhaps you can point me to such a reference.

[gubba]

G'day Turtle,

 

With our dichotomous tradition of logic so firmly entrenched in western culture I maintain that we still find it difficult not to think in absolutes. Thought is opposed to instinct, patterned behaviours full of communicative import are either languages or not. A moment's pause and one may see that such thinking is not necessarily helpful when focused on biology. Our ability for independent thought is a productive development of our instinctive ability to respond advantageously to stimuli and our language ability a product of our intelligence being pushed by our need to communicate into taking advantage of and further developing some of our instinctual modes of communication.

 

I, for one, find the study of animal "languages and intelligences" for the want of better terms fascinating and a challenge to our tendency towards hubris, however it is a mistake to equate other species' behaviours with our own. Just as whales and bees are some of the current representatives of evolutionary branches that have long diverged from ours, so their current solutions to similar challenges of response to stimuli and communication have a long history of their own.

 

"Thought" as "Language" is a concept that surely encompasses more than just human behaviour but that fact should make it obvious that any unitary definition of the concept is doomed to failure and liable to tempt many of us into making vacuous comparisons between the intelligences of species where no such rating would be valid. cheers gub.

[gubba]

G'day Biochemist,

 

I'm afraid I have to disagree totally with any defence of a strong Whorfian relativism. I've run out of time for now, but we are not prisoners of our language frameworks, surely language drift, for one, cancells that out immediately! cheers gub

[Turtle]

G'day Turtle,...

"Thought" as "Language" is a concept that surely encompasses more than just human behaviour but that fact should make it obvious that any unitary definition of the concept is doomed to failure and liable to tempt many of us into making vacuous comparisons between the intelligences of species where no such rating would be valid. cheers gub.

___G'day Gubba. I'm in enough accord with your above quoted statement to say that in general I agree. :friday: In particular I was thinking in terms of just "what more" than human behavior does thought & language encompass & came to the idea that context plays an important role. Not just cultural context as we have discussed, but situational context as well, eg. how does one think about something they encounter which is outside their previous experience linguistically.

___Did I make that clear as mud? :eek:

[gubba]

G'day turtle,

 

why do you think we develop new connotations to our labels for concepts? Look at the jargon that appears to mushroom from each significant new stimulus. Shakespeare would be lost in seatle or silicon valley but I defy you to convince me we aren't still practising the same lingo. I suspect we often overmystify our conundrums in our search for the ultimate.

 

Your raising of situational context is germaine to this thread as context is the arena for our intelligence and, what in your opinion, may be two vital, closely entwined tools of our brains? More fundamentally, how have we evolved to our present practises in the world as we perceive it now? Before we developed language as we practise it today, we must already have possessed sophisticated, communicative systems in response to our developing sociability, probably in some feed back loop encouraging greater communicative skills encouraging greater sociability in a typical Darwinian scenario. In a way we had primed ourselves to take advantage of grammatical communications whenever the opportunity arose. Grammar as patterns of meaningful units that enable continuous, arbitory rearrangements of the units to continuously communicate new meaningful messages. No wonder our brains exploded? cheers gub,