What about birds, dolphins and wales then? They arguably also communicate in complex ways as we do through another type of “language”.
Typo on the Cymru, but point taken. Human language is more expressive, possibly more conceptually far-reaching although we’ll never know. And if that doesn’t do it: opposable thumbs. Check and mate, cetaceans!
Koalas have even two oposable thumbs but are not able to use them intellectually. They are smooth brained, because their digestive system is highly specialized for breaking down eucalyptus and this needs a lot of energy, so development of higher intellect is impaired in these animals. Else the potential would be extremely high for these to evolve similarly to us intellectually. Having two opposable thumbs is even more advantageous than just one. You can see that in a few cases of polydactyly, where these cases have a second pointing finger. They use it like a second thumb and are far more capable in manipulating objects with one hand than non-polydactylic humans are. Koalas could do that too, if they would have evolutionary more energy left for their brain.
Understanding other languages that never developed from each other are extremely hard to analyze from one of the two perspectives and it even seems more primitive on first glance. I wouldn’t assume that dolphines are that intelligent to develop such a sophisticated language as we did with verbs, adjectives and what not but wales language has been tried to analize by correlating it with fitting propositions by creating a knowledgebase and it was found to be pretty sophisticated already.
Also as a cognitive scientist I have to say that our language might only seem from our perspective very sophisticated. If wales were more intelligent they would lough similarly about our weird noises we do with our mouths, because they are not built to understand our language, the same way as we are not built to understand their language.
Typo on the Cymru, but point taken. Human language is more expressive, possibly more conceptually far-reaching although we’ll never know. And if that doesn’t do it: opposable thumbs. Check and mate, cetaceans!
Koalas have even two oposable thumbs but are not able to use them intellectually. They are smooth brained, because their digestive system is highly specialized for breaking down eucalyptus and this needs a lot of energy, so development of higher intellect is impaired in these animals. Else the potential would be extremely high for these to evolve similarly to us intellectually. Having two opposable thumbs is even more advantageous than just one. You can see that in a few cases of polydactyly, where these cases have a second pointing finger. They use it like a second thumb and are far more capable in manipulating objects with one hand than non-polydactylic humans are. Koalas could do that too, if they would have evolutionary more energy left for their brain.
Understanding other languages that never developed from each other are extremely hard to analyze from one of the two perspectives and it even seems more primitive on first glance. I wouldn’t assume that dolphines are that intelligent to develop such a sophisticated language as we did with verbs, adjectives and what not but wales language has been tried to analize by correlating it with fitting propositions by creating a knowledgebase and it was found to be pretty sophisticated already.
Also as a cognitive scientist I have to say that our language might only seem from our perspective very sophisticated. If wales were more intelligent they would lough similarly about our weird noises we do with our mouths, because they are not built to understand our language, the same way as we are not built to understand their language.