Koko the gorilla could NOT use sign language.

Linguistics professor Bert Vaux, who has lectured on Koko in his class, Social Analysis 34: Knowledge of Language, responded to early claims that Koko was a songwriter, saying, “This scheme is consistent with what [The Language Instinct author Steven] Pinker accuses the animal trainers of doing with Koko and the other ‘talking’ animals – taking utterances of limited content and coherence and augmenting them with more fluid pronouncements from the imaginations of the human handlers.”
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2002/11/21/gorillas-in-the-mix-the-simian/

What about this gorilla?

 
I thought for sure this was a @Scyther thread. The moon landing is a hoax! The earth is flat! Koko the gorilla is a hoax!
 
I know that isn't the case for all dogs. This one guy trained his dog to return whatever dog toy he called out. He kept on training his dog and got to over 200 dog toys.

That isn't language. True language involves a signified and a signifier. That dog isn't abstracting the idea of a particular toy, but simply responding to a command.

If you haven't been introduced to the concept of semiotics, you won't appreciate why this matters.
 
I have taken sign language courses and using your hands isnt language. There are forms. Inflection. Evolution. Room for innovation. Regional variations. This ape does nothing of the kind. It does not understand any rules of language. An ASL observer noted the same thing. They were imagining signs. Filling in blanks with something where there was nothing.
You're right about this but it's a major buzzkill.

The best concise summary of Chomsky's pov on this, imo, is that if apes could use human language they would be using human language. It's very unlikely that there is a population in some presumably very short stage of evolution where they don't do it, yet we can somehow draw it out of them with our own species' language.

But that obviously shouldn't undermine the actual capabilities and learning capacity of apes for communicating with humans. Some bonobos are especially inclined toward it, and it seems a lot like language. I think it would probably take some genetic intervention plus thousands of years of isolating and breeding the best communicators with the largest brains in order to get them using language with grammar- and even that sounds unreasonably optimistic. That roadblock is huge unless there is something amazing locked away in their brains that we've missed.
 
Truth is in the middle.
It's really not though, it's a question of grammar, and they don't have it. They don't have something that's like grammar, either, that we aren't really sure whether it's grammar or not, and they don't have some kind of half-a-grammar. They're just really good at communicating with people and that makes us really happy.
 
It's really not though, it's a question of grammar, and they don't have it. They don't have something that's like grammar, either, that we aren't really sure whether it's grammar or not, and they don't have some kind of half-a-grammar. They're just really good at communicating with people and that makes us really happy.

I guess all of those immigrant Chinese people are like Koko then. They can’t get a handle on grammar either if you held a gun to their head, since Chinese doesn’t have any real grammar to speak of.....
 
I guess all of those immigrant Chinese people are like Koko then. They can’t get a handle on grammar either if you held a gun to their head, since Chinese doesn’t have any real grammar to speak of.....
The Chinese language has a grammar though. Non-human primate communication is not grammatical. And I feel the need to repeat this, because this is an emotional subject (it is for me too, I'm moved to tears at the zoo around primates), the fact that their "language" does not have grammar doesn't mean they aren't really good at communicating, or good at simple abstraction and symbolism. Hell, they everything but grammar. It's remarkable and precious and we're right to love it and keep working with them to improve it. But it isn't language in the sense that we have language.
 
Could you teach the cat symbols HUMANS use to express ideas and wishes? Cats meow in the wild. That isn't something they learned. Raccoons are really smart and opportunistic, how many expressions could you teach them?

I watched a doc on that chimp they tried to teach sign language to, who ended up attacking a lady pretty bad. It was an honest look, and showed how at the end many scientist thought the mimicry was not language.. Like I said, the truth is in the middle.
What does this even mean? lol. My cat meows for food and when to go out. We don't speak the same language even though we can find common ground.
It's really not though, it's a question of grammar, and they don't have it. They don't have something that's like grammar, either, that we aren't really sure whether it's grammar or not, and they don't have some kind of half-a-grammar. They're just really good at communicating with people and that makes us really happy.

By that logic most Africans couldn't speak until Europeans taught them. It's getting weird in here. There are levels, you know? "Grammar" has probably existed for 15,000 years in some form, very primitive prior to 5,000 years ago, but humans were speaking long before that.
 
The Chinese language has a grammar though. Non-human primate communication is not grammatical. And I feel the need to repeat this, because this is an emotional subject (it is for me too, I'm moved to tears at the zoo around primates), the fact that their "language" does not have grammar doesn't mean they aren't really good at communicating, or good at simple abstraction and symbolism. Hell, they everything but grammar. It's remarkable and precious and we're right to love it and keep working with them to improve it. But it isn't language in the sense that we have language.

No, Chinese does not really have grammar, or very very simple, not much above anything Koko would know. That’s why they have so much trouble with grammar in any other language.
 
KOKO left a sign for TS

79998f699ee7dd113c8f974c63732780.jpg
 
By that logic most Africans couldn't speak until Europeans taught them. It's getting weird in here. There are levels, you know? "Grammar" has probably existed for 15,000 years in some form, very primitive prior to 5,000 years ago, but humans were speaking long before that.
Look into Bantu languages
 
I mean, I'm not trying to be rude, but:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar

Like I said, not much above Koko, and you can mix and match pretty much any way you want and it still makes sense. Chinese people over there will even tell you there’s not much to Chinese grammar, if anything at all.

I learned Chinese in China, and the grammar was taught in little more than 1/2 hour. The rest of your Chinese studies is pin yin and characters......thousands and thousands of characters. Very little thought given to grammar. Very simplistic.
 
Look into Bantu languages
Do you know how big Africa is, and how many different tribes there were?

Did native Americans have grammar?? Were they not speaking?
 
Like I said, not much above Koko, and you can mix and match pretty much any way you want and it still makes sense. Chinese people over there will even tell you there’s not much to Chinese grammar, if anything at all.

I learned Chinese in China, and the grammar was taught in little more than 1/2 hour. The rest of your Chinese studies is pin yin and characters......thousands and thousands of characters. Very little thought given to grammar. Very simplistic.
I understand that they must modify many of their words through context or other words, but it's not arbitrary. A Chinese person could tell you that he had a bad day yesterday, is having a good day today, and hopes to have a good day tomorrow. He could use words to substitute for verb tense. And there would be sensible and non-sensible ways to do that.

Our bonobos and other chips and gorillas don't do anything of the sort. The closest they come is making strings of associations. They could say "You" "Walk" "Here," perhaps (though I'm not completely sure they could do that- it's theoretically possible without language). They could potentially come up with many combinations like that, and even grammatically correct sentences could be learned by repetition and repeated back. They aren't going to use rules about word order, though they may use word orders that get the best results. They won't form new sentences that combine parts of speech in ways that they have not been taught, and be consistent in coming up with new sentences that follow the same rules. That's one of the ways they could demonstrate language.

I'm not close to an expert so I'm not confident taking that much further, but I would accept it's language if the ape could do something like telling you about her poop every day, where she pooped, and describing how it was different from other poops- and correcting errors by the trainer when the trainer says the poop is a different kind of poop. If the ape could do that every day, consistently ordering the words, without gibberish or making a lot of errors, and then start applying whatever sentence structure she chose to other activities, then I think I would have to accept that as language. Maybe another simpler example could be made by somebody who knows better than me, but that's the sort of thing I have in mind.
 
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Do you know how big Africa is, and how many different tribes there were?

Did native Americans have grammar?? Were they not speaking?
I think you could look up those languages on your own and discover that we know some things about native american grammar. Your response on Africa is nonsensical.
 
I understand that they must modify many of their words through context or other words, but it's not arbitrary. A Chinese person could tell you that he had a bad day yesterday, is having a good day today, and hopes to have a good day tomorrow. He could use words to substitute for verb tense. And there would be sensible and non-sensible ways to do that.

Our bonobos and other chips and gorillas don't do anything of the sort. The closest they come is making strings of associations. They could say "You" "Walk" "Here," perhaps (though I'm not completely sure they could do that- it's theoretically possible without language). They could potentially come up with many combinations like that, and even grammatically correct sentences could be learned by repetition and repeated back. They aren't going to use rules about word order, though they may use word orders that get the best results. They won't form new sentences that combine parts of speech in ways that they have not been taught, and be consistent in coming up with new sentences that follow the same rules. That's one of the ways they could demonstrate language.

I'm not close to an expert so I'm not confident taking that much further, but I would accept it's language if the ape could do something like telling you about her poop every day, where she pooped, and describing how it was different from other poops- and correcting errors by the trainer when the trainer says the poop is a different kind of poop. If the ape could do that every day, consistently ordering the words, without gibberish or making a lot of errors, and then start applying whatever sentence structure she chose to other activities, then I think I would have to accept that as language. Maybe another simpler example could be made by somebody who know better than me, but that's the sort of thing I have in mind.

I’ll read the essay later, but no, there is no past, present, future tense, except to clarify by actually stating yesterday, today, tomorrow, time, or to already know when the event occurs. That’s not grammar. Even the order of verbs, nouns, etc is very loose. Really not much to it. It’s just endless study of characters and idioms pretty much. Grammar takes 1/2 hour tops to learn as I already said.
 
I’ll read the essay later, but no, there is no past, present, future tense, except to clarify by actually stating yesterday, today, tomorrow, time, or to already know when the event occurs. That’s not grammar. Even the order of verbs, nouns, etc is very loose. Really not much to it. It’s just endless study of characters and idioms pretty much. Grammar takes 1/2 hour tops to learn as I already said.
I submit that it is grammar when I give a verb tense by adding words. "I played tennis June 23rd" and "June 23rd I to play tennis" and "Tennis I June 23rd play" are all equivalent and could be correct grammar. All three could even be grammatically correct in the same language if the language was particularly loose. I'm willing to be corrected on that.

My last post where I want the gorilla to say things in the same order is probably not a reasonable one in that case.
 
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