This split enabled the behaviorist tradition to dominate animal psychology for much of the 20th century.
And how did we arrive at this categorical distinction becoming axiomatic? As you say, by way of Descartes, who was a devout Christian who famously tried to derive the existence of God from the fact of his own consciousness.
Far from being a separate and distinct reason for downplaying animal consciousness, my sense is that animal language is downplayed precisely because it would imply consciousness, and we're working within a system that axiomatically believes animals are not conscious.
But I don't see what that has to do with consciousness, to me animal language is much closer to consciousness than human language. Consciousness is all about emotions, not language, and animal language that humans also has is directly tied to emotional expression. Our ML models managed to mimic human language before animal language, human language is more robotic.
Sci-fi shows tend to also do this, robots talk with voices that lacks the animal components of humans and instead just do the human language. So the popular view is that animal language is the conscious parts and human language is the computational/intelligence part.
Obviously? There’s no reason to assume that. It is known that cetaceans acquire their language and dialects through social learning. It was very recently discovered that some whales even have names for each other. Their language may be different from ours, but it is not just emotions.
And then of course there are primates, elephants etc…
Maybe some animals have language closer to humans, but it is far from the common definition for "animal language".
They do not teach language like humans because they are not humans. However studies show that some animals do teach their young language.
Many bird species, such as zebra finches and canaries, learn their songs through a process similar to human language acquisition. Juvenile birds listen to adult tutors and practice their songs, receiving feedback and adjusting their vocalizations accordingly.
Dolphins and whales use complex vocalizations for communication. Mothers and other group members have been observed teaching calves specific calls and whistles, which are essential for social interactions and identification within pods.
Meerkats exhibit teaching behaviors where older members demonstrate specific alarm calls and foraging techniques to pups. These calls convey different types of information, similar to vocabulary teaching in humans.
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I suppose we mean the ability to learn language.
more like Aristotle