“Imagine a dog. He’s a very thoughtful dog and he can hear humans barking," says Bellos. "He can hear that amongst the funny noises humans make there are a number of signals with fixed meanings like ‘walk,’ ‘sit, ‘heel,’ and he ponders as to whether the rest of the noise they make is just barking.”
It's a joke, of course, but one with a point. For Bellos, the condition for the existence of a language -- “what we think of as a language" -- is its translatability. "So the boundary between our species and others is indeed an unbridgeable gulf until we learn to translate them.” The gap between human and dog is not about grammar or syntax, but about how deeply we can grasp each other's meaning.
Broadly, a language is a mode of expression. "The argument that only human language is language and that animal communication systems, however sophisticated they are -- and some of them are quite sophisticated -- are not languages because they consist of discrete signals is a circular argument," he argues. "It’s a self-fulfilling thing. And I think we should be a little bit more interested in the complexity and the variability of animal communication systems and less rigid about this distinction between what is a language and what is not a language."
- David Bellos
It's a joke, of course, but one with a point. For Bellos, the condition for the existence of a language -- “what we think of as a language" -- is its translatability. "So the boundary between our species and others is indeed an unbridgeable gulf until we learn to translate them.” The gap between human and dog is not about grammar or syntax, but about how deeply we can grasp each other's meaning.
Broadly, a language is a mode of expression. "The argument that only human language is language and that animal communication systems, however sophisticated they are -- and some of them are quite sophisticated -- are not languages because they consist of discrete signals is a circular argument," he argues. "It’s a self-fulfilling thing. And I think we should be a little bit more interested in the complexity and the variability of animal communication systems and less rigid about this distinction between what is a language and what is not a language."
- David Bellos
No comments:
Post a Comment