71–80 of 141 posts
> One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined into longer sequences, like words into sentences. I would think that syntax is a structure to the sequence of symbols, not just a sequence in any order. For example: Thag ate Fish Fish ate Thag have different meanings.
Recent smol thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088
In the Calls of Bonobos, Scientists Hear Hints of Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601682 - April 2025 (2 comments)
Bonobos' calls may be the closest thing to animal language we've seen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088 - April 2025 (12 comments)
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I think that you might be taking that example in bad faith.
Really? How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women, and if you really feel the need to use "blonde" as your adjective, but insist it's a sexless "person", then how about "blonde engineer" instead of "blonde dancer"?! I've got nothing against blonde dancers, and am far from politically correct myself, but in a scientific article about language and Bonobos, couldn't they have chosen a more approp…
Really seems like you're trying to enforce your own form of political correctness here - "PC" is associated with certain progressives, but the problem is policing language and picking fights over trivial nonsense.
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By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. which is problematic. However arguably humans existed from tens of thousands of years and only really started to make huge technological leaps when writing existed. Prewriting culture is still quite fascinating and complex (ex: Homer or Olmec/Maya art) but it does seem to be stuck at a certain level. I think Egyptian civilization provides a fascinating mid point…
>By that metric Native Americans are basically animals.. The Cherokee had an extremely well developed written tradition, so I don't think that inference would follow at all.
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If that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true. We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation. Going back to Ancient…
...but is there another species that writes things down for other individuals in their species to reference?
Which is why people look into specific elements of language not just huge generalizations.
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Really? How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women, and if you really feel the need to use "blonde" as your adjective, but insist it's a sexless "person", then how about "blonde engineer" instead of "blonde dancer"?! I've got nothing against blonde dancers, and am far from politically correct myself, but in a scientific article about language and Bonobos, couldn't they have chosen a more approp…
> How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women Never, because men's hair is "blond". But seriously, the original quote does not call the person "a blonde," (which indeed might offend some) but instead uses "blonde" as an adjective to describe the dancer, which is perfectly acceptable. You can have a "blond man" or a "brown-haired man" just as easily as you can have a "blonde woman".
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Language is not just "communication" and not every communication is language. Bees and ants communicate information chemically, but they're not using a structured language. Dogs may growl to intimidate or yelp if they get hurt, and that surely communicates information, but whether they are using a structured language is a matter of research.
Honey bees do the waggle dance though: https://animalwise.org/2011/08/25/the-honeybee-waggle-dance-...
Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
Which could apply to anything in future.
Reinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my o…
Anyway this also excludes all the humans that never wrote anything, which is most of them. If anything our verbal history is our strongest and most ancient culture.
It is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion. Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the wo…
I don't think anyone denies that communication is not unique to humans. It is clearly not. But what is (apparently - as far as we know) unique to humans is language, meaning the capacity to combine concepts in an infinitely recursive manner to represent an infinity of concepts and ideas. On top of that, we also posses the ability to communicate (verbally, through sign, or more recently through writing) those combined…