Chimpanzee hand gestures
It seems more and more that the paradox is not inherent in language but in how we look at it. But the equipment that seems to be designed for language never fully explains its enormous complexity and utility. For example, humans are the only primates to have voluntary control of their larynx: it puts us at risk of choking, but it allows us to articulate speech. To be sure, we have found biological features that are both unique to humans and important for language. The problem is that after looking for a considerable amount of time and with a wide range of methodological approaches, we cannot seem to find anything unique in ourselves-either in the human genome or in the human brain-that explains language. If other animals had a system that was the same, we would likely recognize it.
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It consists of wildly complicated interconnecting sets of rules for combining sounds and words and sentences to create meaning. The early days of serious research in language evolution unearthed a perplexing paradox: Language is plainly, obviously, uniquely human. Luckily, just a few years later, scholars from different disciplines began to grapple with the question in earnest. I was told that linguists did not ask the question, because it was not really possible to answer it. Attending an undergraduate linguistics class in Melbourne, Australia, in the early 1990s, I asked my lecturer how language evolved. Noam Chomsky, the extraordinarily influential linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was, for decades, rather famously disinterested in language evolution, and his attitude had a chilling effect on the field. They may have wanted to clamp down on unscientific speculation, or perhaps it was a political move-either way, more than a century's worth of nervousness about the subject followed. In the 1860s the Société de Linguistique de Paris banned discussion about the evolution of language, and the Philological Society of London banned it in the 1870s. But trying to work out exactly how and why that is the case has been weirdly taboo. That language is uniquely human has been assumed for a long time. But a diverse group of brain scientists, linguists, animal researchers and geneticists are tackling the question-so we are much closer to a real understanding than ever before.
![chimpanzee hand gestures chimpanzee hand gestures](http://images.fanpop.com/images/soapbox/chimpanzees-and-bonobos_1818_2_full.jpg)
We have the ability to ask questions such as, Why is language unique to humans? Despite the accumulated genius we inherit when we learn to speak or sign, we have yet to work out a good answer. Because we have language, we have modern technology, culture, art and scientific inquiry. Only humans can perform this spectacular time-traveling feat, just as only humans can penetrate the stratosphere or bake strawberry shortcake. That dolphin would be touched, through language, by the wisdom of another dolphin, who was in every other way long gone. Dolphins would have history-and with history, they would learn about the journeys and ideas of other dolphin groups, and any one individual could inherit a fragment of language, say, a story or poem, from another individual who had lived hundreds of years before. Over the span of generations clever practices, complex knowledge and technology based on two, three or several components would develop. If they had language in the same sense that we do, however, they would not only pass down little bits of information but also aggregate them into a broad body of knowledge about the world.
#CHIMPANZEE HAND GESTURES HOW TO#
They also pass on useful bits of know-how from mother to child, such as how to catch fish or how to flee. Dolphins name one another, and they click and whistle about their lives or the dangers posed by sharks and humans.