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We’re in total agreement, I’m just measuring my words by habit.

No, dogs and birds can't "speak", not in the same sense you do (with dolphins it's a little more debatable).

Animal calls have no syntax - each call has some meaning, but they do not compose in any way. The order in which an animal performs its calls is arbitrary, and an animal hearing said calls doesn't pay attention to it. Even basic modifiers like "no" don't exist in animal communication - if a call means "food", and another call means "no", then an animal hearing the call for "no" and the call for "food" will behave as if they heard there is food somewhere.

The exception to this seem to be dolphins (orcas, in particular), where it seems they have been quite successfully trained to follow a series a short commands in order, in a sign language (so you can sign "jump, swim, splash" and they will follow this; and then sign "swim, splash, jump" and they will do it in the new order). This can't be done with dogs, and it's even questionable if it has been successfully done with chimps.

To say that almost all animal communication is without order (syntax) is almost certainly incorrect, and would have a high burden of proof. It’s certainly been a historical assumption, but I think science has moved a little past it. Even bees can communicate relatively sophisticated messages between them.

Bee dances are a fascinating topic, but the evidence is still inconclusive - there is some evidence that suggests the movements in the dance correlate with the position of the flower, but there is other evidence that suggests they are irrelevant and the flower is found by a trail of pheromones.

In all other animals where this had been extensively studied (except orcas and maybe chimps), syntax has proven to be absent in natural calls, and also impossible to teach artificially. There are sometimes apparent breakthroughs, but it later turns out that the animal figured out a way to interpret "a", "b", "a then b", and "b then a" as four separate calls, without any deeper understanding. This is evident when you then teach it "c", and find out that it sees no difference between "c then a" and "a then c", and it takes just as long to teach it to distinguish these three calls; and then again just as long to teach it the difference between "b than c" and "c then b".

Have we tested each possible animal this way? No, of course not - but we have tested all the most likely candidates, and orcas and chimps were the only successes (and even here there is some debate). Crows, parrots, dogs, cats, gorillas, elephants, horses - none of these show any understanding of syntax.

3g4o53g4o5 1465 days ago

Is this a counterargument? You are denying facts and say something juat even contract with yourself.

> Dolphin can understand sign language but dog dont. So ALL OF THEM do not speak.

Do you mean this? It is the same as saying that you dont understand Japanese and conclud that human can not speak.

Correct me if I am wrong. Or correct yourself.

I'm saying that perhaps with the exception of dolphins and mayyyyybe chimps, there is a measurable, observable, quantifiable way in which animal communication is fundamentally different from human language.

So, perhaps you can say that dolphins speak, and maybe chimps speak, and then we can even contemplate that bonobos speak (since they are very similar to chimps, but haven't been studied as much).

But dogs definitely don't speak, and neither do any other mammals that we've tried to test in this way.

Not to mention, there is another characteristic of human language that 0 animals can be taught, as far as we've tried - more complex structure, like "not (c and d)"

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/this-speech-therapist-taught-h...

3g4o53g4o5 1465 days ago

Well since there is full of false assumptions, I just give you a name.

@toshitaka_szk in twitter. A Japanese dude can translate languages of birds and successfully did some experiences on it. And he is kind of famous.

And needless to say Hunger the dog[1]. Did this clear your humancentric brain?

> 0 animals can be taught, as far as we've tried - more complex structure

Also this applies to limited intelligence human infant and mathematic immature dudes. So by your logic, those underintelligence human do not have consciousness. QED.

The claims about the dog are ridiculous - especially evident with the "love you" word. In fact, most of the article is describing a much more humane version of the famous Pavlov's dog experiment - the dog learned to associate the sounds of the "bells" with certain needs and persons, and uses them as such.

The Japanese research is much more interesting, and in a related comment I also cited a published article that proved that my claims, while fundamentally ok, are wrong in the details - animal calls are fundamentally simpler than human language, but some do show simple syntax.

> Also this applies to limited intelligence human infant and mathematic immature dudes. So by your logic, those underintelligence human do not have consciousness. QED.

I never claimed dogs aren't conscious, I only claimed they don't have language in the sense humans do. Infants also don't have language, but they learn it natively. All humans learn complex structures, even the mathematically illiterate, no idea where that came from. The only exceptions are people with serious brain disorders, and those people, indeed, don't "speak".

That, again, doesn't mean that they are not conscious beings.

{{citation needed}} for most of this.

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.006...

Here is an article that discusses the topic quite broadly [0]. The most relevant section is part 4.

I will freely admit that it actually refutes some of my claims - that's are actual example of simple syntax identified in several species.

Still, I believe it matches my broader point: there are a fundamental, measurable differences between human language and animal calls, with the latter at best showing only very basic structure, if any.

I will readily agree that levels of sophistication of languages vary, and that human languages are almost certainly the most complex / sophisticated that we know of.