[Xmca-l] Re: language and simply communication

[Andy Blunden]

Your story of the turkey and the pole cat reminds me of 
Trevor Noah's autobiography. Born from an African mother and 
a white father he was "born a crime" but he turned out to 
have a gift for language and so long as he spoke to people 
in their own accent and idiom he was accepted as "one of us" 
in any of the communities in apartheid South Africa,

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 1/01/2019 7:02 am, James Ma wrote:
> Andy, formal linguists would use the so-called "design 
> features" of language to refer to properties marking off 
> human beings from other creatures on earth. For example, 
> when someone says something to you, you're free to give an 
> answer in the way you like. Should you choose not to do 
> so, that is in itself an answer. This is called the 
> "stimulus-free" property in linguistics, but it doesn't 
> rule out taking into consideration the social relationship 
> you may have with the interlocutor. However, non-human 
> creature communication is confined to signalling, 
> inherently different from human language and still perhaps 
> incomprehensible (or even astonishing) in many ways. For 
> example, the mother turkey's protective instinct is only 
> triggered by their baby turkey's "cheep-cheep" sound. When 
> a mother turkey sees a polecat (their natural predator), 
> she immediately goes into attack mode, even at the sight 
> of a stuffed polecat. What's more, if you make the stuffed 
> polecat produce the same "cheep-cheep" sound, the mother 
> turkey turns out to be a protector of that polecat!
>
> James
>
>
> */_______________________________________________________/*
>
> /*James Ma *Independent Scholar 
> //https://oxford.academia.edu/JamesMa /
>
> *
> *
>
>
> On Fri, 21 Dec 2018 at 02:54, Andy Blunden 
> <andyb@marxists.org <mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
>
>     James, interesting that you use the term "simply
>     communication" to distinguish the natural use of signs
>     in the animal kingdom from the exclusively human use
>     of language. I am interested though in getting to what
>     exactly that difference is, which cannot easily be
>     captured in words like "communication" versus "language".
>
>     I don't think the distinction can be captured in terms
>     of language structure, either. For example, it may be
>     the case that only and all human language is
>     recursive, where as systems of animal calls are not,
>     but this is a purely *external* differentiation. It is
>     not the *essential* difference, the "difference which 
>     makes a difference," so to speak.
>
>     Vygotsky gives us the clue when he shows how children
>     acquire words in the process of learning to "command
>     themselves," and how as a result, the entire
>     perceptual field of a human being is structured (as
>     Hegel believed) by signs, mainly words, not just
>     colour and movement. So the difference which makes a
>     difference is the *conscious control* of sign-use,
>     which is gradually acquired in cultural development
>     (both ontological and phylogenetic).
>
>     So even a single-word sentence like "Mine!" can be
>     language, whereas the 50-odd distinctive calls used by
>     gorillas do *not* constitute language.
>
>     What do you think?
>
>     Andy
>
>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>     Andy Blunden
>     http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>     On 21/12/2018 7:56 am, James Ma wrote:
>     ...
>>     Second, animal utterances, however eloquently
>>     produced or approximated like human ones, are simply
>>     communication.  It would be rather absurd for formal
>>     linguists to think of animal utterances as language,
>>     given that in a strict sense no animals are in effect
>>     as able to sustain a conversation as humans do!
>>
>>
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