Language and society.
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I will admit it were better had i written “All SOCIAL beings have language”, but that is not strictly true, since solitary animals also require language for communication with each other upon meeting, and also with other species as necessary. Their body language (and/or vocal) has reason and emotion behind it. A fire alarm has neither, but merely an inanimate mechanical and artificial effect that is constructed by an animal for a specific purpose. It is not a living response.
I can’t see how you are getting “language can only be verbal” from anything I’ve said.
I’d guess that the person that said “words are just sounds” didn’t mean that either. They where probably trying to claim that words are not acts. But that is not always the case. As in “I pronounce you husband and wife”, “I promise I’ll pay you back next week” etc – what they call “speach acts”
Fish live in social groups, they don’t have any verbal language, it’s quite difficult to speak without a voice box or lungs.
I’d agree that telling someone to f*** off is not an act in the same way as shooting them is, but it is more than “just a sound” and conveys a strong message of hatred and contempt.
So you too, BJ, define language as solely verbal in the sense of human spoken language. But we see marine life has language, including fish, which the above article on octopuses makes clear.
Presumably, you reject the term “body language” then.
No I didn’t say that language was always spoken, I also know that an octopus is a cephalod not a fish.
Head lice communicate does that mean that they have language.
By your definition and for of communication is language. Trees communicate, does that mean they have langauge?
So you too, BJ, define language as solely verbal in the sense of human spoken language.
Nobody defines language in that way. If BJ does I promise I will eat my hat.
You see from the articles that i am far from alone in my “loose” use of the word language.
I don’t know enough about fishes to refute you, but i am sure ethologists have written something here too.Book review.
” The Voices of Nature also deals with the thorny question of whether animals have language. I explain that there are two sides to this question. Firstly, whether animals can express something other than their current emotion by controlling what they produce—to determine whether animal acoustic communications contain organizational rules similar to those of human language (syllables, words, syntax, etc.). Based on the scientific work of the last 40 years, I defend the idea that we can describe an animal’s acoustic communication as a “language,” because it’s a handy term to use to summarize a system in which an individual sender produces an information-carrying sound signal, but there are as many languages as there are animal species, each is in its own world.
” Biological evolution is the thread that connects us all, human and nonhuman animals alike, and discovering animal languages is a great way to realize just how interconnected we all are on this planet.”
But will Dr Doolittle talk to the head lice?
And sadly DJP will have to take the trilby out of the air frier, hat is off the menu tonight
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