Human Animal
Distinctive sounds, called phonemes, are Other animals do not
arbitrary and have no meaning. But
Duality of Patterning humans can string these sounds in an
infinite number of ways to create meaning
via words and sentences.
Creativity New words can be invented easily.
Humans can talk about remote, abstract, or
Displacement imaginary things that aren't happening in
their immediate environments.
Any gender of human can use the same in the animal world can only be
Interchangeability
languages.
Humans acquire language culturally—
Cultural Transmission
words must be learned.
Human language is symbolic, using a set
number of sounds (phonemes) and
Arbitrariness
characters (alphabet), which allows ideas
to be recorded and preserved.
On a purely biological level, the human
voice box and tongue are very unique, and biological structures, which
Biology
are required to make the sounds we
recognize as language.
A word, or sign, can have several
Ambiguity
meanings.
Human language can arrange words into
Variety an infinite number of ideas, sometimes
referred to as discrete infinity.
communicate by arranging
arbitrary sounds, which limits
the number of messages they
can create.
Animals have to evolve in order
for their signs to change.
Animal communication is
context driven—they react to
stimuli, or indexes.
Certain animal communications
used by one gender of that
animal.
The way that animals
communicate are biological, or
inborn.
Animal communication is not
symbolic, so it cannot preserve
ideas of the past.
Other animals have different
impact they way they make
sounds.
Every sign has only one
meaning.
Animals only have a limited
number of combinations they
can use to communicate.