Topic ID #6436 - posted 12/8/2009 12:17 AM
Jennifer Palmer
Webmaster
Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys
Jennifer Palmer
Webmaster
Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys
Campbell’s monkeys appear to combine the same calls in different ways, using rules of grammar that turn sound into language.
Whether their rudimentary syntax echoes the speech of humanity’s evolutionary ancestors, or represents an emergence of language unrelated to our own, is unclear. Either way, they’re far more sophisticated than we thought.
“This is the first evidence we have in animal communication that they can combine, in a semantic way, different calls to create a new message,” said Alban Lemasson, a primatologist at the University of Rennes in France. “I’m not sure it has strong parallels with humans, in the way that we will find a subject and object and verb. But they have meaningful units combined into other meaningful sequences, with rules imposed on how they’re combined.”
Read the full article here.
Campbell’s monkeys appear to combine the same calls in different ways, using rules of grammar that turn sound into language.
Whether their rudimentary syntax echoes the speech of humanity’s evolutionary ancestors, or represents an emergence of language unrelated to our own, is unclear. Either way, they’re far more sophisticated than we thought.
“This is the first evidence we have in animal communication that they can combine, in a semantic way, different calls to create a new message,” said Alban Lemasson, a primatologist at the University of Rennes in France. “I’m not sure it has strong parallels with humans, in the way that we will find a subject and object and verb. But they have meaningful units combined into other meaningful sequences, with rules imposed on how they’re combined.”
Read the full article here.
Post ID#16438 - replied 12/8/2009 12:31 AM
FireArch
Moderator
Cool. All we need to find now is that they have "art" and there will no longer be any need to distinguish humans from the other members of the primate family, as so many people still want to do, save for the capacity to totally destroy a small blue-green planet through sheer negligence....
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