ANIMAL COMMUNICATION AND TECHNICAL LANGUAGE

Objectives:

● Understand the difference between human language and animal

communication
● Understand technical language used to describe the knowledge in that
area: the arts and mathematics.

Types of Language
Do animals have language?
So far, we have been considering language as a human behaviour, but we can use these
same characteristics to consider whether and to what degree other animals
may have language ability.

Scientists have established that Vervet monkeys have three quite distinct alarm calls
depending on which predator is spotted. They make a different sound for a leopard, a
martial eagle and a python.

Listen to the three different alarm calls and see for yourself how different
they are.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p016dgw1

Three different alarm calls used by vervet monkeys to warn other individuals
in the group exactly what type of predator to beware of. The "snake" alarm
call would cause the group to stand up and study the ground, while the
"eagle" alarm call would see them dive into bushes or the middle of trees
where an aerial predator could not reach them. The "leopard" alarm call
would send individuals scuttling up to the very tops of the trees.
● The first set of calls are made by a male.
● The second by a female vervet monkey.

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(Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney and Peter Marler)

Equally interesting is the fact that the behaviour of the other monkeys when they hear
the calls differs depending on the alarm that is sent.

These facts about the Vervet monkeys would seem to suggest that they have at least
some language – there are apparently semantic units, specific calls, with fixed
meaning, and enough information is conveyed through those calls to tell the other
monkeys what they need to do in response.

The sounds also seem to be arbitrary – they don’t mimic the sounds that leopards or
pythons make, for example. Infant monkeys do not make the calls perfectly; they make
mistakes. Juveniles are better, and Vervets seem to master the making of the three
different calls over time. So, the calls are to some degree, apparently, transmitted
from generation to generation, rather than being instinctive. That, however, seems

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to be the limit of Vervet ‘language’. The sounds are fixed in meaning; the sounds of the
communication system are not dual in nature, and so the ‘language’ is not productive
as human languages are. (Duality: for example, a baby at early stage produce only sound but
after sometime he/she starts to produce words with these sounds and sometimes those words are
produced which even do not exist in language)

Vervet monkeys can alert each other to an immediate danger in the here and now, but
they cannot ‘discuss’ events from other times or places. We can say that, although their
communication system has some features of language, it is not a fully developed
language.

The honey bee is another creature who seems to have language of a kind. Scout honey
bees are famous for being able to convey to the bees back in the hive where they can go
for rich sources of pollen.

There are two types of dance:

the round dance and
the waggle dance.

The former alerts the other bees to the fact that there is a nectar source relatively nearby
– from 25–100 m away (‘Dance Language of the Honey Bee’). This dance does not offer
any information about direction, and the bees simply fly out of the hive in all directions
looking for the nectar source.

The waggle dance, on the other hand, conveys information about distance to a nectar
source which is further away. The bee communicates the direction the other bees need
to go by facing a direction during the straight portion of the waggle dance which indicates
the relationship of the nectar source to the Sun. Distance is conveyed by the amount of
time that it takes the dancing bee to complete one circuit of the dance. ‘For example, a
bee may dance 8–9 circuits in 15 seconds for a food source 200 meters away, 4–5 circuits

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for a food source 1000 meters away, and 3 circuits in 15 seconds for a food source 2000
meters away’ (‘Dance Language of the Honey Bee’).

Watch an example of honey bees doing the waggle dance.

https://youtu.be/bFDGPgXtK-U

This ‘language’ seems to be in some ways quite sophisticated and also somewhat more
flexible than the communication system of the Vervet monkeys. Like the monkeys, the
communicating bee is passing information along which causes particular
behaviours on the part of the receivers. The dance can be seen to be semantic, in that
the shapes the movement takes have particular meanings. The ‘language’ is also to
some degree productive, since there is a wide variety of information that can be conveyed
with the few segments of the dance, but the productivity is limited to how far away and in
what direction nectar sources reside.

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Honey bee language is not dual in nature, and although it does indicate where
something is in a place other than where the bees are, it is not capable of full
displacement, as they cannot ‘discuss’ events removed in time. It is not known for sure
whether the dance behaviour is instinctive or learned (Donnelly), but as honey bees live
only six weeks, there is not a lot of time for this skill to be passed along through traditional
transmission with its consequent need for trial and error and improvement over time.
We would say, then, that although the honey bee’s system of communication is quite
sophisticated, it is also limited to one particular – albeit very important – subject, and so

must be seen as a communication system, rather

than as a language.

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Watch a video about Einstein the talking parrot and then answer the following questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ_wO0r16ww

Answer the following questions.

1. Do you think that Einstein speaks English as a language?

2. Which of the six features of language that we have investigated does his speech
demonstrate?

Other potential languages

Different areas of knowledge and each of the different knowledge-related themes have a
vocabulary specific to them. But there are two particular areas of knowledge which seem
to use language differently from the way that various practitioners of history or the natural
sciences, for example, develop a technical language to describe the knowledge in
that area: the arts and mathematics.

The Arts
Language plays a central role in some art forms, of course: poems and
novels, for example, consist of words. In drama and songs with lyrics,
words are only a part of the artwork, but they play a significant central role. In other
art forms, however, words play a minimal role or are absent altogether. Think of

paintings and sculptures, which may involve no language other than a title –
and which may even be untitled. Classical music may sometimes involve words,
as with the ‘Ode to Joy’ in the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. That
symphony was, in fact, the first time a major composer included vocal music in a
symphony (Bonds 387). More often there are no words at all in classical music, as with

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Beethoven’s other eight symphonies. Dance usually relies on movement alone without

words . So, for most artworks, it would seem that

language does not play a significant role; however, some kinds
of paintings do rely on sets of fixed symbols to convey messages to viewers, and so we
might consider whether in those cases at least, art is, or has, a language.

In the Netherlands, the Vanitas school of still-life painting was

popular from about 1550 to about 1650 (The Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

The word ‘Vanitas’ is the Latin word for ‘vanity’, and the paintings focused
on the vanity of life in the face of inevitable death. These
paintings relied on a number of fixed symbols that would have been easily recognized by
viewers in the seventeenth century. The painting - Vanitas Still Life With Flowers and
Skull (1642) by Adriaen van Utrecht, used many of those set symbols.

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The skull is an obvious symbol of human death, and,

in this painting, it is surrounded by many objects that
symbolize self-indulgence and the greed for material
objects. The pearls, the gold chain, the ring and the coins represent the idea of
wealth. The open chronometer (a portable timepiece similar to a modern-day pocket
watch) ticking away next to the coins and pearls symbolizes the relentless passing of time
(‘Vanitas Still Life With Flowers and Skull’). The flowers, which seem to provide a striking
contrast to the skull, are cut flowers. They are dying, and we can see that in some cases,
the flowers have dropped out (such as the rose which is drooping off the edge of the
table) and are already withering (‘Vanitas Still Life With Flowers and Skull’). Other
symbols in the painting are the hourglass in the wooden case at the back of the painting,

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which, like the gold clock, signifies the passing of time and the pipe (the long white object
on the book) and wine glasses, which symbolize the waste of time in indulging oneself in
idle pleasures (Najarian). The nautilus shell came from what was seen as an exotic sea
creature – another sign of the wealth of its owner. Finally, the book represents human
knowledge; the fact that the skull is placed on the top of the closed book suggests the
limit of human knowledge – another sign of the vanity of man in the face of his inevitable
death (Najarian).

In this painting, therefore, we can see some features

of language: there are objects which have specific
meanings and they combine to create a message;
thus, this system of communication can be seen to
have semanticity. The objects are obviously symbolic, but perhaps we cannot
really consider them to be arbitrary. The human skull certainly came from a dead human,
and the dying flowers are actually dying flowers. Money is the form in which wealth is
traded in the world. The timepieces do actually keep time in real time and a book is a
repository of human knowledge. The ‘vocabulary’ of this ‘language’ can be used to create
a wide range of works of art, but the message in all of the paintings was essentially the

same: he who spends his life in pursuit of wealth and

luxury is vain; wealth and luxury cannot keep you from
your inevitable death. So, we cannot really consider that the ‘language’ of
this school of art is productive.
(Productivity: Language is an open system. We can produce potentially an infinite number of
different messages by combining the elements differently.)

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This example serves to introduce the idea of meaning in art and the way that symbols
can be used to convey ideas.

Mathematics
Mathematics is another area of knowledge which might be seen as being or having a

language. You are probably familiar with the ‘alphabet’ of mathematics: numbers and a

variety of symbols such as +, –, =, ≥ and ∞. Mathematics can also use letters of the

alphabet to stand in for a number which is unknown. Unlike the letters of the English
alphabet, numerals do have meaning in their own right: 3, 8 and 9 all have recognizable
meaning. Like the letters of the English alphabet, however, they can be combined in a
virtually limitless number of ways to create new statements.

Here are a few examples:

We can already see, then, that the language of mathematics features many of the
characteristics that we examined earlier: semanticity, arbitrariness, duality, productivity
and, certainly, traditional transmission. No one is born knowing the language of
mathematics; it has to be taught and it does allow us to preserve knowledge for future

generations. The fact that new knowledge builds on old

knowledge is possibly even more significant in mathematics
than in other areas of knowledge – indeed, it is central to the whole

pursuit. We can also consider that mathematical language is

capable of displacement, since mathematics

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describes features of reality in general and

throughout time. Mathematics, then, unlike the communication systems of
Vervets and honey bees, and in contrast to the symbolic function of elements of Vanitas
still-life paintings, can be seen as having a fully-fledged language.

ACTIVITY
Working with a partner, think about the following question, which is debated among
mathematicians:

➔ Does mathematics have a language or is mathematics a language?

➔ What evidence do you have?

IA PROMPTS

1 What counts as knowledge?

2 Are some types of knowledge more useful than

others?

9 Are some types of knowledge less open to

interpretation than others?

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