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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure the reason stuff like this isn’t called language is because language is circularly defined as something only homo sapiens does.

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Where did you learn this definition? It's the first time I hear something like this. I very much doubt that it's a generally accepted definition.

It's more a de facto definition than an official definition. Finding reasons that animal communication is not "Language" seems to be a hobby of linguists, in my experience.

Really? Does that mean the term 'alien language' is meaningless?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_language

I think we anthropomorphize aliens. We expect individuals that communicate, but intelligent life could take many forms.

Psychic ocean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

Distributed beings like coral or slime molds

You're pretty sure? Well, that's convinced me. (/s)

I'm not going to debate this topic here, but for what it's worth you're coming across as somebody who has chosen their stance and is cherry-picking their evidence and anecdotes to suit their biases.

While I agree with your suspicion that a lot of animals are more intelligent than most give them credit for, you're not arguing for that viewpoint well. You might want to revisit how you make your points.

I mean wikipedia is free but yes this is how it is defined:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language

https://www.britannica.com/topic/language

I’ve never seen a definition of language in a scientific context that frames it in any other context other than something humans do. Please feel free to show me otherwise. Whether or not you are convinced isn’t really my concern - this is a well known scientific thing.

A simple search on google scholar turns this up:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240572231...

For such a "well known scientific thing" I certainly haven't heard of it nor can find any evidence of your claim. Yes, most papers use communication instead of language, but that's because until more recently there has been little evidence that shows any other species communications have sufficient complexity to be called a "language." E.g. having words and sentences rather than signals with a given meaning.

There is even a scientist claiming mushrooms have language https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.2119... !

I didn’t mean “the word language is never used in a scientific text,” I meant there has never been a case in science where science has ever said “this thing $organism is doing is language.” You could get pretty nitpicky with the examples you provided - however I made a new year’s resolution not to fall into these silly little semantics traps on this site that I’m now failing, so I’ll bow out.

Language is a system of grammar and syntax for converying meaning. Until you find evidence of those, calling something language is a baseless opinion.

The closest we currently have to evidence of non-human language use I know of, comes from attempts to teach language to apes, (which is an example of some scientists saying "$organism is doing language", which you claim never happened) The general criticism was that the great apes did fairly well learning semantics but show limited to no syntactic ability.

We do see semantic capabilities in other species and there's long been reason to suspect semantic content in whale songs. Deciphering the Alphabet of whale songs is a great step towards figuring out the semantic structure. When we do, I wouldn't be surprised if we find syntactic structures as well. Until then, calling whale song language is speculation.

Do you have specific examples of places where we have both syntax and semanti

Yes - prairie dogs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/magazine/can-prairie-dogs...

Combining semantic symbols is behavior we have evidence of in other species, but without evidence of structure impacting the relationships between the meanings we still don't have sytax. That seems like a good candidate for where we might find syntax given the apparent semantic richness, but we still have a lot of work to do deciphering prairie dog communication before we can make a scientific claim one way or the other about if it is language.

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