Arbitrariness

There is often a strong recognizable link between the actual signal and the message an animal wishes to convey. An animal who wishes to warn off an opponent may simulate an attacking attitude. A cat, for example, will arch its back, spit and appear ready to pounce.

In human language, the reverse is true. In the great majority of cases, there is no link whatsoever between the signal and the message. The symbols used are arbitrary. There is no intrinsic connection, for example, between the word elephant and the animal it symbolizes. Nor is the phrase “These bananas are bad” intrinsically connected with food. Onomatopoeic words such as quack-quack and bang are exceptions - but there are relatively few of these compared with the total number of words.

––12 ––

The Need for Learning

Most animals automatically know how to communicate without learning. Their systems of communication are genetically inbuilt. Bee-dancing, for example, is substantially the same in bee colonies in different parts of the world, with only small variations. Even in cases where an element of learning is involved, this is usually minor. In one experiment a chaffinch reared in a soundproof room away from other chaffinches developed an abnormal type of song. Yet when (he bird was exposed to only occasional tape recordings of other chaffinches, its song developed normally.

This is quite different from the long learning process needed to acquire human language, which is culturally transmitted. A human being brought up in isolation simply does not acquire language, as is shown by the rare studies of children brought up by animals without human contact. Human language is by no means totally conditioned by the environment, and there is almost certainly some type of innate predisposition towards language in a new-born child. But this latent potentiality can be activated only by long exposure to language, which requires careful learning.

Duality

Animals who use vocal signals have a stock of basic sounds which vary according to species. A cow has under ten, a chicken has around twenty, and a fox over thirty. Dolphins have between twenty and thirty, and so do gorillas and chimpanzees. Most animals can use each basic sound only once. That is, the number of messages an animal can send is restricted to the number of basic sounds, or occasionally the basic sounds plus a few simple combinations.

Human language works rather differently. Each language has a stock of sound units or phonemes which are similar in number to the basic sounds possessed by animals; the average number is between thirty and forty. But each phoneme is normally meaningless in isola­tion. It becomes meaningful only when it is combined with other phonemes. That is, sounds such as f,g, d, o, mean nothing separately. They normally take on meaning only when they are combined together in various ways, as in fog, dog, god.

This organization of language into two layers - a layer of sounds which combine into a second layer of larger units - is known as dual-

— 13 —

ity or double articulation. A communication system with duality is considerably more flexible than one without it, because a far greater number of messages can be sent.

At one time, it was thought that duality was a characteristic unique to human language. But now some people claim that it exists also in bird-song, where each individual note is meaningless. It is the combination of notes into longer sequences which constitutes a meaningful melody.