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(Edward Vajda)
1) The signs of animal systems are inborn. Birds, apes and bees
naturally and instinctively develop their species' signals, even if
raised in captivity and away from adults of their own
species. Humans must acquire language through exposure to a
speech community (cf. example of children picking up obscenities
vs. a child getting a new tooth). A Korean child adopted and
raised in America won't spontaneously develop Korean words or
sentences in an all-English speaking environment--or naturally
develop a degraded form of Korean. The words of human
languages are definitely not inborn. Rather, it seems that it is
the capacity to acquire creative language which is innate to
humans. (Linguist Noam Chomsky calls this still mysterious
capacity the LAD, or language acquisition device.) The actual
form of any particular language is definitely not inborn and must
be acquired through prolonged exposure. No linguist disputes the
fact that a child of any ethnic origin can learn any language
flawlessly if raised in a community where that language is
spoken. In acquiring a human language, exposure to a speech
community is all important; racial or ethnic origin in themselves
are completely unimportant.
Unlike animals, humans can lie, they can use language to distort
or extend the world around them. Animal communication is
based on a limited inventory of signs. If you learn the set of
signals and their meaning then you know the system completely;
there is no creativity for extending it further. This is not the case
with human language. If you were to learn the entire set of
words in any human language, you would still not know the
language.
5) Because they are non-creative, animal systems are closed
inventories of signs used to express a few specific messages
only. Honeybees, for instance, can communicate only about the
location of a source of nectar. As far as we know, bees do not
communicate about the weather or the beauty of nature, or
gossip about other bees in the hive.
Animal languages also change, but they change with the slowness
of genetic drift. The minute differences between the dialects of
the European honeybee language, by contrast took perhaps
100,000 years to develop. Human language changes more than
that even during the lifetime of each individual speaker (cf.:
computer terminology; such terms as "to impact," "to pig out";
also the changing pronunciation of wh). Human language is
constantly in flux; animal systems are extremely stable.