Animal language

Human speech is only a small part of communicative means such as tweeting, hissing, growling, snorting, whistling, buzzing, and the like, which are found in the animal kingdom. In animals, the language is not very complex alarm systems. Through signals of different modalities - sounds, movements, poses, smells, colors, etc. - animals transmit information about biologically significant events and conditions to each other: alarms, dangers, threats, humility, "courtship" and many others. Animals can report food, signal their condition or intent.

The most important difference between the animal language and the human language is the absence of semantic function. Its elements do not denote external objects in themselves, their abstract properties and relations are always associated with a specific situation and serve specific purposes. In addition, in the language of animals there is no denial function, which plays an important role in human speech.

Animals can not point to a specific time of the incident, can not build subjunctive constructions (if) and much more. In animals and insects, a certain value is assigned to each signal. Combinations of signals that could form more complex structures are practically not found in animals. The elementary two-three-word expressions generated by two-year-old children have no analogues in animal communication. Many animal signals, even expressing emotional states, act according to the mechanism of emotional infection, but by no means logically organized information.

Another important difference between the language of animals and the language of humans is genetic fixation, as a result of which the language of animals becomes a closed system with a limited set of signals. Of course, the number of such signals can be large (for example, the bees use to transmit information not only movement, but also touch). But in general, every individual from birth "knows" the language of its own kind and the meaning of its signals. Elements of the language of animals are also genetically fixed — they include or inhibit the corresponding instinctive actions. On the contrary, the human language is an open system: it is not fixed genetically and continuously develops and changes.