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 Home > By Career > Arts, Law and Languages > Languages
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Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using
complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of
complex communication. The scientific study of language in any of its senses is
called linguistics.
The approximately 3000–6000 languages that are spoken by humans today are the most
salient examples, but natural languages can also be based on visual rather than
auditory stimuli, for example in sign languages and written language. Codes and
other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as those used
for computer programming can also be called languages. A language in this sense
is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. The English word derives
ultimately from Latin lingua, "language, tongue", via Old French. This metaphoric
relation between language and the tongue exists in many languages and testifies
to the historical prominence of spoken languages.[1] When used as a general concept,
"language" refers to the cognitive faculty that enables humans to learn and use
systems of complex communication.
The human language faculty is thought to be fundamentally different from and of
much higher complexity than those of other species. Human language is highly complex
in that it is based on a set of rules relating symbols to their meanings, thereby
forming an infinite number of possible innovative utterances from a finite number
of elements. Language is thought to have originated when early hominids first started
cooperating, adapting earlier systems of communication based on expressive signs
to include a theory of other minds and shared intentionality. This development is
thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume. Language is processed
in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca’s and Wernicke’s
areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and
children generally speak fluently when they are around three years old. The use
of language has become deeply entrenched in human culture and, apart from being
used to communicate and share information, it also has social and cultural uses,
such as signifying group identity, social stratification and for social grooming
and entertainment. The word "language" can also be used to describe the set of rules
that makes this possible, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those
rules.
All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate a sign with a particular
meaning. Spoken and signed languages contain a phonological system that governs
how sounds or visual symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes,
and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are used to form phrases
and utterances. Written languages use visual symbols to represent the sounds of
the spoken languages, but they still require syntactic rules that govern the production
of meaning from sequences of words. Languages evolve and diversify over time, and
the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages
to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had for the later
stages to have occurred. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor
is known as a language family.
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Cuneiform is one of the first
known forms of written language,
but spoken language is believed
to predate writing by tens of
thousands of years at least.
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The languages that are most spoken in the world today belong to the Indo-European
family, which includes languages such as English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi; the
Sino-Tibetan languages, which include Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and many others;
Semitic languages, which include Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew; and the Bantu languages,
which include Swahili, Zulu, Shona and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout
Africa.
Definitions
The word "language" has two basic meanings: language as a general concept, and "a
language" (a specific linguistic system, e.g. "French"). Languages other than English
often have two separate words for these distinct concepts. French for example uses
the word langage for language as a concept and langue as the specific instance of
language.
When speaking of language as a general concept, several different definitions can
be used that stress different aspects of the phenomenon.
A mental faculty, organ or instinct
One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans
to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and produce and understand
utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans
and the biological basis of the human capacity for language as a unique development
of the human brain. This view often understands language to be largely innate, for
example as in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, Jerry Fodor’s extreme innatist
theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied by studies of language within
a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.
A formal symbolic system
Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical
rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses the fact that
human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules
that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of
language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure. Some proponents of this
view of language, such as Noam Chomsky, define language as a particular set of sentences
that can be generated from a particular set of rules. The structuralist viewpoint
is commonly used in formal logic, semiotics, and in formal and structural theories
of grammar, the most commonly used theoretical frameworks in linguistic description.
In the philosophy of language these views are associated with philosophers such
as Bertrand Russell, early Wittgenstein, Alfred Tarski and Gottlob Frege.
A tool for communication
Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans
to cooperate. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the
fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their
environment. This view of language is associated with the study of language in a
functional or pragmatic framework, as well as in socio-linguistics and linguistic
anthropology. In the Philosophy of language these views are often associated with
Wittgenstein’s later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as G. E.
Moore, Paul Grice, John Searle and J. L. Austin.
What makes human language unique
Human language is unique in comparison to other forms of communication, such as
those used by animals, because it allows humans to produce an infinite set of utterances
from a finite set of elements, and because the symbols and grammatical rules of
any particular language are largely arbitrary, so that the system can only be acquired
through social interaction. The known systems of communication used by animals,
on the other hand, can only express a finite number of utterances that are mostly
genetically transmitted. Human language is also unique in that its complex structure
has evolved to serve a much wider range of functions than any other kinds of communication
system.
The study of language
Main articles: Linguistics and History of linguistics
The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the
first grammatical descriptions of particular languages in India more than 2000 years
ago. Today linguistics is a science that concerns itself with all aspects relating
to language, examining it from all of the theoretical viewpoints described above.
Language can be studied from many angles and for many purposes: For example, Descriptive
linguistics examines the grammar of single languages so that people can learn the
languages; theoretical linguistics develops theories how best to conceptualize language
as a faculty; sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes,
such as differentiating regional or social groups from each other; neurolinguistics
studies how language is processed in the human brain; computational linguistics
builds computational models of language and constructs programmes to process natural
language; and historical linguistics traces the histories of languages and language
families by using the comparative method.
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Early grammarians
The formal study of language began in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian
who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. Pāṇini’s systematic classification
of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as
nouns and verbs, was the first known instance of its kind. In the Middle East Sibawayh
(سیبویه) made a detailed description of Arabic in 760 AD in his monumental work,
Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), the first known author
to distinguish between sounds and phonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system).
Western interest in the study of languages began as early as in the East, but the
grammarians of the classical languages did not use the same methods or reach the
same conclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world. Early interest in language
in the West was a part of philosophy, not of grammatical description. The first
insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue, where
he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in the world of
ideas. This work is the first to use the word etymology to describe the history
of a word's meaning.
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Ancient Tamil inscription at the
Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur
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Around 280 BC one of Alexander the Great’s successors founded a university (see
Musaeum) in Alexandria, where a school of philologists studied the ancient texts
in and taught Greek to speakers of other languages. This school was the first to
use the word "grammar" in its modern sense, Plato had used the word in its original
meaning as "téchnē grammatikḗ" (Τέχνη Γραμματική), the "art of writing," which is
also the title of one of the most important works of the Alexandrine school by Dionysius
Thrax.
Throughout the Middle Ages the study of language was subsumed under the topic of
philology, the study of ancient languages and texts, practiced by such educators
as Roger Ascham, Wolfgang Ratke and John Amos Comenius.
Historicism
In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by William Jones sparked
the rise of comparative linguistics. Bloomfield attributes "the first great scientific
linguistic work of the world" to Jacob Grimm, who wrote Deutsche Grammatik. It was
soon followed by other authors writing similar comparative studies on other language
groups of Europe. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European
to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt, of whom Bloomfield asserts:
"This study received its foundation at the hands of the Prussian statesman and scholar
Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767—1835), especially in the first volume of his work on
Kavi, the literary language of Java, entitled Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts
(‘On the Variety of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence upon the Mental
Development of the Human Race’)."
Structuralism
Early in the 20th century, de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a "semantic
code." Substantial additional contributions similar to this came from Hjelmslev,
Émile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson, which are characterized as being highly systematic.
Language and its parts
When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally
seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings and a code connecting signs with
their meanings. The study of how signs and meanings are combined, used and interpreted
is called semiotics. Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters or symbols,
depending on whether the language is spoken, signed or written, and they can be
combined into complex signs such as words and phrases. When used in communication
a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender through a channel to a receiver who
decodes it (a signal).
Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other communication
systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meaning that there is no
predictable connection between a linguistic sign and its meaning; the duality of
the linguistic system, meaning that linguistic structures are built by combining
elements into larger structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build
words and words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language, meaning
that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed are discrete units,
e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished from each other and rearranged
in different patterns; and the productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that
the finite number of linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite
number of combinations.
The rules under which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called
syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, words and
phrases is called semantics. The division of language into separate but connected
systems of sign and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure
and is now used in almost all branches of linguistics.
Semantics
Languages express meaning by relating a sign to a meaning. Thus languages must have
a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning—the English sign "dog" denotes,
for example, a member of the genus Canis. In a language, the array of arbitrary
signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected
to a meaning is called a lexeme. Not all meanings in a language are represented
by single words-often semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax
of the language in the form of grammatical categories. All languages contain the
semantic structure of predication—a structure that predicates a property, state
or action that has truth value, i.e. it can be true or false about an entity, e.g.
"[x [is y]]" or "[x [does y]]."
Sounds and symbols
Main article: Phonology
The ways in which spoken languages use sounds to construct meaning is studied in
phonology. The study of how humans produce and perceive vocal sounds is called phonetics.
In spoken language meaning is constructed when sounds become part of a system in
which some sounds can contribute to expressing meaning and others do not. In any
given language only a limited number of the many distinct sounds that can be created
by the human vocal apparatus contribute to constructing meaning
Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes. All spoken languages
have phonemes of at least two different categories: vowels and consonants that can
be combined into forming syllables. Apart from segments such as consonants and vowels,
some languages also use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for
example, use stress, pitch, duration and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these
phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments they are called suprasegmental.
Writing systems represent the sounds of human speech using visual symbols. The Latin
alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) is based
on the representation of single sounds, so that words are constructed from letters
that generally denote a single consonant or vowel in the structure of the word.
In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole
syllable In logographic scripts each sign represents an entire word. Because all
languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known
to exist. In order to represent the sounds of the world’s languages in writing,
linguists have developed an International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent
all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages.
Grammar
Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements (morphemes) within a language can
be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are
free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called words, and
if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes. The way
in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language is governed by rules.
The rules obtaining for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The
rules of the internal structure of the phrases and sentences are called syntax.
Grammatical categories
Grammar contributes to producing meaning by encoding semantic distinctions in forms
that are systematic. The predictability resulting from systematization allows language
users to produce and understand new words and meanings by applying their knowledge
of the language’s grammatical categories.
Languages differ widely in whether categories are encoded through the use of categories
or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal.
Such universal categories include the encoding of the grammatical relations of participants
and predicates by grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate,
the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical
person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and
those about whom they are speaking.
Word classes
Languages organize their parts of speech into classes according to their functions
and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic
distinction between a group of words that prototypically denote things and concepts
and a group of words that prototypically denote actions and events. The first group,
which includes English words such as "dog" and "song," are usually called nouns.
The second, which includes "run" and "sing," are called verbs. Other common categories
are adjectives, words that describe properties or qualities of nouns such as "red"
or "big".
The word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically verbs
are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates.
In a sentence such as "Sally runs," the predicate is "runs," because it is the word
that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally." Some verbs such as
"curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John." A predicate that can only
take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two
arguments is called transitive.
Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions that
serve to join two sentences and articles that introduces a noun.
Morphology
Many languages use the morphological processes of inflection to modify or elaborate
on the meaning of words. In some languages words are built of several meaningful
units called morphemes, the English word "unexpected" can be analyzed as being composed
of the three morphemes "un-", "expect" and "-ed". Morphemes can be classified according
to whether they are roots to which other bound morphemes called affixes are added,
and bound morphemes can be classified according to their position in relation to
the root: prefixes precede the root, suffixes follow the root and infixes are inserted
in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or elaborate the meaning of the
root. Some languages change the meaning of words by changing the phonological structure
of a word, for example the English word "run" which in the past tense is "ran".
Furthermore morphology distinguishes between processes of inflection which modifies
or elaborates on a word, and derivation which instead creates a new word from an
existing one - for example in English "sing" which can become "singer" by adding
the derivational morpheme -er which derives an agentive noun from a verb. Languages
differ widely in how much they rely on morphology - some languages, traditionally
called polysynthetic languages, make extensive use of morphology, so that they express
the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example the Greenlandic
word "oqaatiginerluppaa" "(he/she) speaks badly about him/her" which consists of
the root oqaa and six suffixes.
Languages that use inflection to convey meaning often do not have strict rules for
word order in a sentence. For example in Latin both Dominus servos vituperabat and
Servos vituperabat dominus mean "the master was cursing the slaves", because servos
"slaves" is in the accusative case showing that they are the grammatical object
of the sentence and dominus "master" is in the nominative case showing that he is
the subject. Other languages, however, use little or no inflectional processes and
instead use the sequence of words in relation to each other to describe meaning.
For example in English the two sentences "the slaves were cursing the master" and
"the master was cursing the slaves" mean different things because the role of grammatical
subject is encoded by the noun being in front of the verb and the role of object
is encoded by the noun appearing after the verb.
Syntax then, has to do with the order of words in sentences, and specifically how
complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases,
that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Below is a graphic
representation of the syntactic analysis of the sentence "the cat sat on the mat".
The sentence is analysed as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb and a prepositional
phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition and a noun
phrase; and the noun phrases consist of an article and a noun.
Language and culture
"The Tower of Babel" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Oil on board, 1563.
The Tower of Babel symbolises the division of mankind by a multitude of tongues
provided through divine intervention.
Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community,
are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speak them. Humans use
language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group and difference
from others. Even among speakers of one language several different ways of using
the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups
within a larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists,
ethnolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways
of speaking vary between speech communities.
A community's ways of using language is a part of the community's culture, just
as other shared practices are, it is way of displaying group identity. Ways of speaking
function not only to facilitate communication, but also to identify the social position
of the speaker. Linguists use the term varieties, a term that encompasses geographically
or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures,
to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. Linguistic anthropologists
and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language
is used and understood within a particular culture.
Languages do not differ only in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar, but also through
having different "cultures of speaking". Some cultures for example have elaborate
systems of "social deixis", systems of signalling social distance through linguistic
means.In English, social deixis is shown mostly though distinguishing between addressing
some people by first name and others by surname, but also in titles such as "Mrs.",
"boy", "Doctor" or "Your Honor", but in other languages such systems may be highly
complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance,
in several languages of east Asia, such as Thai, Burmese and Javanese, different
words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or
lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the
lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest.
Origin
Skull of Homo Neanderthalensis discovered in La Chapelle Aux Saints, France. It
is unknown whether Neanderthal humans had language.
Theories about the origin of language can be divided according to their basic assumptions.
Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one can not
imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have
evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These
theories can be called continuity based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that
language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found
among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared fairly suddenly in the
transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity
based. Similarly some theories see language mostly as an innate faculty that is
largely genetically encoded, while others see it as a system that is largely cultural,
that is learned through social interaction. Currently the only prominent proponent
of a discontinuity theory of human language origins is Noam Chomsky. Chomsky proposes
that 'some random mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower,
and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate
brain'. While cautioning against taking this story too literally, Chomsky insists
that 'it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about
evolutionary processes, including language'.[22] Continuity based theories are currently
held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development.
Those who see language as being mostly innate, for example Steven Pinker, hold the
precedents to be animal cognition, whereas those who see language as a socially
learned tool of communication, such as Michael Tomasello see it as having developed
from animal communication, either primate gestural or vocal communication. Other
continuity based models see language as having developed from music.
Because the emergence of language is located in the early prehistory of man, the
relevant developments have left no direct historical traces and no comparable processes
can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to
see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to
what pre-human language must have been like. Alternatively early human fossils can
be inspected to look for traces of physical adaptation to language use or for traces
of pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour.
It is mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication
systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general, but scholarly
opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of Homo some 2.5 million
years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems
(proto-language) as early as Homo habilis, while others place the development of
primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago)
or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago) and the development of language
proper with Homo sapiens sapiens less than 100,000 years ago.
Linguistic analysis, used by Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California,
Berkeley, to estimate the time required to achieve the current spread and diversity
in modern languages today, indicates that vocal language arose at least 100,000
years ago.
Natural languages
Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of
studying them falls under the purview of linguistics. A common progression for natural
languages is that they are considered to be first spoken and then written, and then
an understanding and explanation of their grammar is attempted.
Languages live, die, polymorph, move from place to place, and change with time.
Any language that ceases to change or develop is categorized as a dead language.
Conversely, any language that is in a continuous state of change is known as a living
language or modern language. It is for these reasons that the biggest challenge
for a speaker of a foreign language is to remain immersed in that language in order
to keep up with the changes of that language.
Making a principled distinction between one language and another is sometimes nearly
impossible. For instance, there are a few dialects of German similar to some dialects
of Dutch. The transition between languages within the same language family is sometimes
gradual (see dialect continuum).
Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not possible to make a well-defined
distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty
may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or
August Schleicher for a longer discussion.)
The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer
distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.
A sign language (also signed language) is a language which, instead of acoustically
conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns (manual communication,
body language) to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation
and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to fluidly express
a speaker's thoughts. Hundreds of sign languages are in use around the world and
are at the cores of local Deaf cultures.
Artificial languages
An artificial language is a language the phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary of
which have been consciously devised or modified by an individual or group, instead
of having evolved naturally. There are many possible reasons to construct a language:
to ease human communication (see international auxiliary language and code); to
bring fiction or an associated constructed world to life; for linguistic experimentation;
for artistic creation; and for language games.
The expression "planned language" is sometimes used to mean international auxiliary
languages and other languages designed for actual use in human communication. Some
prefer it to the term "artificial" which may have pejorative connotations in some
languages. Outside the Esperanto community, the term language planning means the
prescriptions given to a natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even
"natural languages" may be artificial in some respects. Prescriptive grammars, which
date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, and Chinese
are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle
ground between naive natural selection and development of language and its explicit
construction.
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Mathematics, Logics and computer science use artificial entities called formal languages
(including programming languages and markup languages, and some that are more theoretical
in nature). These often take the form of character strings, produced by a combination
of formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.
A programming language is a formal language endowed with semantics that can be utilized
to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer, to perform specific
tasks. Programming languages are defined using syntactic and semantic rules, to
determine structure and meaning respectively.
Programming languages are employed to facilitate communication about the task of
organizing and manipulating information, and to express algorithms precisely. Some
authors[who?] restrict the term "programming language" to those languages that can
express all possible algorithms; sometimes the term "computer language" is applied
to artificial languages that are more limited.
Animal communication
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The ASCII Table, a scheme for
encoding character strings.
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Figure-Eight-Shaped Waggle Dance of the Honeybee (Apis mellifera) indicating a food
source to the right of the direction of the sun outside the hive. The abdomen of
the dancer appears blurred because of the rapid motion from side to side
The term "animal languages" is often used for non-human systems of communication.
Linguists and semioticians do not consider these to be true "language", but describe
them as animal communication on the basis on non-symbolic sign systems, because
the interaction between animals in such communication is fundamentally different
in its underlying principles from human language. According to this approach, since
animals aren't born with the ability to reason the term "culture", when applied
to animal communities, is understood to refer to something qualitatively different
than in human communities. Language, communication and culture are more complex
amongst humans. A dog may successfully communicate an aggressive emotional state
with a growl, which may or may not cause another dog to keep away or back off. Similarly,
when a human screams in fear, it may or may not alert other humans of impending
danger. Both of these examples communicate, but both are not what would generally
be called language.
In several publicized instances, non-human animals have been taught to understand
certain features of human language. Karl von Frisch received the Nobel Prize in
1973 for his proof of the sign communication and its variants of the bees. Chimpanzees,
gorillas, and orangutans have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language.
The African Grey Parrot, Alex, which possessed the ability to mimic human speech
with a high degree of accuracy, is suspected of having had sufficient intelligence
to comprehend some of the speech it mimicked. Though animals can be taught to understand
parts of human language, they are unable to develop a language.
While proponents of animal communication systems have debated levels of semantics,
these systems have not been found to have anything approaching human language syntax.
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