The boy chimp

This story has always been very disturbing to me. I personally feel we grossly underestimate animal intelligence. I'd often argue about cases like Nim's with the linguist I studied under at university. She was fond of saying that it was language that separated animals from humans. I felt that some forms of communication used by animals meet all her criteria for language.

I think that not only is the cruelty involved in not making an "exit plan" for this type of research a serious problem, but the way we view other animals as a whole, and our species tendency to feel that we have something other animals don't have (I mean besides bombs and digital watches)

Yow! I thought for sure this was an April Fool's post at first. What a sad case.

Although apes are capable of a gestural system of communication based on ASL, their hands are not able to correctly produce the morphology of ASL, and they are incapable of the facial expressions that comprise virtually all the function words of that language. Claiming that an ability to say a few mispronounced nouns and verbs without any grammatical morphemes constitutes using a fully developed human language is not only inaccurate to the point of parody, but is a slap in the face to the actual users.
Human users of visual languages have struggled for thousands of years to be recognized as having any language, as being intelligent, even as being fully human, in spite of having produced a vast body of literature, poetry, and other language arts. If apes could use ASL they would duplicate all these achievements. Since they obviously cannot, the implication is that Deaf persons who signed languages are no better than apes, and it is past time for such bigotry to stop.

Primates that are taught ASL are taught a simplified dialect? Why would you react so strongly to that? This isn't meant as a slight to the deaf (what an absurd thought), this is about attempting to measure the linguistic capabilities of the great apes.

You can question what's really going on, but to call this a slap in the face to the deaf is just about the silliest complaint I've ever heard.

Don't know about chimps, but gorillas make up signs (Koko created a "browse" sign for food that was also a pun on eyebrows), and they make semantic mistakes (mixing up the signs for "comb" and "brush", though they look nothing alike). This is serious evidence of language. So is teaching signs to other chimps, as noted in the article.

They have lexicon. Do they have syntax? I've seen Koko sign and I would say yes. Maybe not HUMAN language, but this isn't just mimicry.

You can use the term language to include the ape's linguistic skills if you want, but the point is whether that language is ASL or not. That their words originally came from ASL is no more relevant than our own Latin origins. As used, the ape and ASL lexicons are different. The ape's anatomy prevents them from properly forming the signs of ASL. If I pronounced every single word differently from an English speaker, would I still be speaking English? ASL uses a restricted inventory of phonologic units, like any language, and if the apes have one at all it is demonstrably different from ASL's.

If we accept that apes have syntax, we need to ask if it contains the specific combination of features that distinguish ASL from Libras, Shuwa, Nicaraguan Sign Language or any of the other hundreds of known signed languages. ASL is one of the most highly inflected languages on earth, with mutual hierarchical embedding of two different types of aspect markers: ape language has no inflections. ASL expresses anaphoric reference through a three-dimensional system of spatial loci: ape language doesn't have anaphora. ASL makes heavy use of rhetorical, quotative, conditional, and both internal and external headed relative clauses controlled by simultaneous non-manual signals: ape language doesn't have clauses.

This could go on all day, listing syntactic features that ape languages do not share with ASL. The usual example of ape syntax is something like Washoe's combination �water bird�. Assuming she intended this as a name, she was not using the ASL word for 'swan', she was making up her own language, like the kids in Nicaragua did. If those two words combined in ASL, complex rules of morphology would kick in to modify both 'water' and 'bird' in predictable ways create a single sign. Again, if apes have morphological rules at all, they are not those of ASL.

To say that any non-human has learned, used or been taught ASL is factually inaccurate on phonological, morphological and syntactic grounds. Many, if not most Deaf people find it insulting, for the reasons I gave above. If you think they are wrong, you are entitled to your opinion, but I hope you can at least see the difference between the ape's language and ours.

If you think they are wrong, you are entitled to your opinion, but I hope you can at least see the difference between the ape's language and ours.

Is it an insult to Russians to say that I have been taught Russian, if I only know a few words and phrases and almost no syntax? Or is it an insult to adult speakers to say that babies use language? Nobody is saying that any ape's signing ability comes even close to a competent human's. You are attacking a strawman.

That's an incredibly sad story.

It's similar to how we adopt pets and then abandon them when they interfere with our lifestyle. Birds especially bond very closely with their owners. And yet people think nothing of leaving pets in a field or by a roadside or letting them go wild.

windy:
The level of ability is the straw man here. I'm attacking the claim that what these apes use to communicate is American Sign Language. I've given the reasons why this is factually incorrect. If you continue to insist otherwise, show me the syntactic features the two languages have in common.

Lyssad, nobody cares (except you) about whether or not this is true ASL. The story is about the tragedy of disposable research subjects, and the immediate question is about non-human primates' use of language at all (with all the reasoning ability that implies). If it makes you feel better to call it Yerkish, we'll call it Yerkish.