3. COMMUNICATION
The exchange of feelings, thoughts, information, news, feelings,
thoughts, information and news between people, in every
conceivable form and way, from person to person is called
communication. For communication to take place, the information to
be transmitted must be understood by both the sender and the
receiver. Animals communicate using signals, which can include
visual; auditory, or sound-based; chemical, involving pheromones;
or tactile, touch-based, cues. When we talk about distinctions
between human language and animal communication, we are
considering both in terms of their potential for intentional
communication.
4. PROPERTIES FOR HUMAN LANGUAGE
There are mainly six properties that make the human language
different from the language of animals.
• REFLEXIVITY
• DISPLACEMENT
• ARBITRARINESS
• PRODUCTIVITY
• DUALITY
• CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
5. REFLEXIVITY
Humans are clearly able to reflect on language and its uses, we
call it reflexivity. The property of reflexivity accounts for the fact that
we can use language to think and talk about language itself, making
it one of the distinguishing features of human language. Indeed,
without this general ability, we wouldn’t be able to reflect on or
identify any of the other distinct properties of human language.
6. DISPLACEMENT
The property of displacement allows the users of language to talk
about things and events not present in the immediate environment.
It is this property that allows human beings, unlike any other
creature, to create fiction and to describe possible future worlds.
Displacement of language refers to the ability of human language to
communicate throughout time and across space. In animals,
language is primarily an exchange between stimulus and response,
the meaning conveyed by animal language.
7. ARBITRARINESS
Arbitrariness of language is the fact that the symbols we use to
communicate meaning to not have any natural form or meaning in
and of themselves. For example, all of the words you are reading
right now do not have a natural essence to them, but we have
assigned these words to their particular meanings. The word table is
not a table itself; rather, it is a word we have agreed means or
signals for the idea of a table.
8. PRODUCTIVITY
This property basically is related with forming new sentences and
actions etc. by using already existing words of our language. It
involves the infinite utterances made by the person. Production is a
system in which something new or already existing is created
therefore in language productivity can be defined as the quality of
forming new sentences, showing different actions to make
understand different meanings etc. In children, this productivity
property is very strong as children are capable of forming new
utterances which are unique and never heard before.
9. DUALITY
Language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously. At
one level, there are distinct sounds and at another level, there are
distinct meaning. For example, we can produce individual sounds
like p, n, and i. Individually, these discrete forms does not have any
intrinsic meaning. However, if we combine them into pin then we
have produced a combination of sounds which have a different
meaning than the meaning of the combination nip.
10. CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
Language is acquired in a culture with other speakers and not from
parental genes. This property of human is cultural transmission
wherein a language is passed on from one generation to the next
within a cultural setting. Human beings are not born speaking a
specific language even though it has been argued that they are born
with an innate predisposition to acquire language.
11. TALKING TO ANIMALS
Because of these properties that make human language complex,
animals cannot understand human language. However, there are
some exceptions like riders can say "Whoa!" to horses and they
stop and a variety of circus animals go up, down and roll over in
response to spoken commands. Animals produces a particular
behavior in response to a sound stimulus, but does not actually
“understand” what the noise means.
12. CHIMPANZEES AND ANIMALS
The genetic similarity between humans and chimpanzees led to studies on
teaching chimpanzees human language. In the 1930s, two scientists reported
on their experience of raising an infant chimpanzee together with their baby
son. The chimpanzee, called Gua, was reported to be able to understand about
a hundred words, but did not “say” any of them. In the 1940s, a chimpanzee
named Viki was reared by another scientist couple in their own home, as if she
was a human child. These foster parents spent five years attempting to get Viki
to “say” English words by trying to shape her mouth as she produced sounds.
Viki eventually managed to produce some words, rather poorly articulated
versions of mama, papa and cup. In retrospect, this was a remarkable
achievement since it has become clear that non-human primates do not
actually have a physically structured vocal tract that is suitable for articulating
the sounds used in speech.
13. Chimpanzees have shown the ability to communicate using ASL to
human observers and other chimpanzees about the normal course
of surrounding events. They use signs to create natural language
categories; for example, they will sign "dog" when shown many
different species of dogs and "shoe" whether it be a slipper or a
cowboy boot. They can invent new signs and combine signs to
metaphorically express something different, for example: calling a
radish "cry hurt food" or referring to a watermelon as a “drink fruit”.
They can comprehend and produce novel prepositional phrases,
understand vocal English, translate words into ASL and even
transmit their signing skills to the next generation without human
intervention.
