My hypothesis is that, if you look hard enough, you’ll find almost all systems necessary for Language in other animals. Specially basic communication and basic logic. With human-exclusive development were mostly “wiring” them together into Language.
I’ll give you guys two examples, both with bonobos.
They seem to have simple syntax. They’re able for example to vocalise “A” then “B” to communicate something that is both “A” and “B” at the same time; e.g. “pay attention to me” + "I’m excited/“worried” = “come help me quick!”.
And at least one of them was able to play pretend. That implies rather strong ability to abstract and handle logic; something like “object exists, object is not here, but I’ll pretend the object is here because it’s fun”.
But you don’t see them combining both things together. Their vocalisations are mostly practical; and they can’t abstract the process of conjoining vocalisations, that would allow recursiveness. That recursiveness would allow also smaller (in both time and meaning) vocalisation units, since it they could be used together.
If that hypothesis is correct it solves a big chicken-and-egg problem we currently have: if Language appeared first for communication, then who was the first Language-able human communicating with? The answer is that they could still communicate with other humans, because even if they didn’t have Language, they’d already have non-linguistic systems that are superficially similar enough. All the advantages associated with Language would appear gradually, as more people are able to use it.
And of course, HN comments gotta make me cringe and facepalm.
When the topic is large models, those bloody HN muppets go out of their way to cherry pick definitions of intelligence so they can sealion their idea that those systems are “intelligent”. But when it comes to Language development, suddenly fine-grained distinctions don’t matter, right? Naaah, then screw definitions. Let’s conflate “communication” with “language”, what could go wrong? And if someone points out the difference, disregard it, with the same disgusting stubbornness of a dog insistently eating their own vomit!
I won’t quote the comment chain, but it’s rather easy to find for anyone with masochistic tendencies. Instead I’ll address something here.
“Language” is not simply “communication”. Language has a specific structure, something like, where small and contrastive elements are combined into higher order elements, recursively. For example:
- articulations → phonemes → morphemes (spoken)
- gestual movement → gestemes → morphemes (sign)
- morphemes → words → phrases → utterances (both)
Like playing with legos but using the blocks to build even bigger blocks, you know.
You see this structure in spoken languages, sign languages, even when writing. But it’s pretty much exclusive to human beings. The nearest of that we see among other animals are composed vocalisations in chimps and bonobos, but even then it’s quite a few steps sort. (They can combine A+B, but not A+B+C+… indefinitely, or use the set as an element for a new combination.)
And humans don’t even use Language all the time to communicate, dammit. Non-linguistic communication is a thing, and extremely common. Rolling your eyes to convey “this makes me cringe”, that “mmmh” to convey “I’m listening, go on”, raising your hands to convey “that’s it!”, those aren’t language, but they’re things humans do. And they resemble rather closely non-human communication, by the way.
