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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

So how does this explain how whales, dolphins or parrots have language despite no hands?

My layman's take is that TFA is probably wrong and that language started with song. Gestures are probably the origin of communication (see also: speakers of non-mutually-intelligible languages tend to instinctively make gestures, often created on-the-fly to mimic some intended meaning or desire), but language is different. Meaning in language is encoded in a mutually-intelligible format that is passed down memetically rather than genetically (which is why you see different "accents" in genetically-similar but geographically-separated populations in all of the aforementioned species). We instinctively recognize the resemblance between a given gesture and the object or action it's mimicking, but the meaning of language (like the connotation of particular elements of song, like note progression, which again varies between cultures) has to be acquired.

Again, speaking out of my a*. Feel free to tear apart.

That is similar to my beliefs about the origin of language too.

It doesn't attempt to. To the extent that whales/dolphins/parrots have language, it evolved independently from human language. There is no particular reason to assume it evolved along the same path.

Good point about dolphins ans whales, but, if you've ever watched parrots, they have feet and a beak/tongue that can grasp and manipulate in a way that's analogous to human hands.

The same way it explains the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

It's stretch to call what any of them have a "language".

I think that your statement is more of a stretch, than the idea that quite intelligent, social creatures aren't using a language that we simply don't understand.

I'd love to know what the local ravens are saying to each other; there is quite the variety of calls, and quite situational.

Corvids are able to recognize individual humans who were helpful to them (or harmful) and share that with others, it's hard to see how that can happen without language ("watch out for the weird standing monkey with the yellow feathers on top, he's likely to throw a stone at you").

The crows that live nearby are wary of me, probably because of two incidents (they saw me standing next to a crow's body, which I'd come across during a walk; and, on another walk, a branch had suddenly broken out from under another crow as I passed the tree it was in). I hear a particular call whenever I pass by them now, though I basically never see them anymore.

My ravens are still wary of me, but they always have been. Somewhat less so in the last while, since I've been putting peanuts out for them; they'll still move away when I get close, but not far, and not until I've gotten fairly close. I really want to know what one's got against my little security cameras though... I've got video of one taking one off the railing I put the peanuts on, and (I assume) the same guy has been working to knock another off the driveway gate post. https://youtu.be/y3C-Tf8FeVA

My son and his girlfriend had a great encounter with one, driving down the Dempster Highway in Yukon. It surfed the wind on the hood of their Jeep for something like 45 minutes, and hopped close enough to grab cat treats when they stopped for a bit. That's on YouTube as well.

We have known for decades now that bottlenose dolphins understand language, and I mean the regularities that distinguish it from ordinary communication because we tested them with an artificially constructed one. And I mean tested comprehension rather than production. Lot easier to write off results of the latter.

The idea then that these highly social animals have the ability to understand an artificially constructed language but don't use one naturally is highly suspect. Especially when everything we can observe indicates it. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...

"Comprehension, at levels far above chance, was shown for all of the sentence forms and sentence meanings that could be generated by the lexicon and the set of syntactic rules, and included the understanding of: (a) lexically novel sentences; (b) structurally novel sentences; (c) semantically reversible sentences that expressed relationships between objects; (d) sentences in which changes in modifier position changed sentence meaning; and (e) conjoined sentences (Phoenix). Additional abilities demonstrated included a broad and immediate generalization of the lexical items to different exemplars of objects; an ability to modulate the form of response to given action words, in order to apply the action appropriately to new objects, to different object attributes, or to different object locations; an ability to carry out instructions correctly despite changes in the context or location in which a sentence was given, or in the trainer providing the instructions; an ability to distinguish between different relational concepts; an ability to respond correctly to sentences given with no objects present in the tank until 30 seconds after the instruction was given (displacement tests); and an ability to report correctly that the particular object designated in a sentence was in fact not present in the tank, although all other objects were (Akeakamai).

......

The comprehension approach used was a radical departure from the emphasis on language production in studies of the linguistic abilities of apes; the result obtained offer the first convincing evidence of the ability of animals to process both semantic and syntactic features of sentences. "

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