Is it now considered established that gorillas and chimps simply don’t have the abstract reasoning capacity for language?
Browse drink polite nipple there hurry (That’s ape for “Yes”)
It’s not that they lack the capacity, it’s that they have no need for it in the wild. We teach them language for our benefit, not theirs.
Here’s a highly technical paper discussing it:
Considering that pet owners have their cats and dogs stepping on buttons to communicate, I doubt apes aren’t still being spoken with in gestural language somewhere.
I hope they keep doing it for the incarcerated Apes. I feel so sorry for them in zoos. The ability to say “stop” or “no” pleases me. Somehow.
WAY back in the day one researcher was teaching chimps to use a symbol-covered “lexigram” rather than signing; presumably because it removed any ambiguity over the ape’s response. Of course all of this gets into nitpicking about what “real” language is. But since I haven’t heard anything new about it in decades I presume it’s considered a dead end.
The examples of apes using sign language in any convincing sense disappear when you remove the handler from the environment.
When an ape (or a whale) demonstrates to use or understand a dependent clause, then I will agree that they can use something like a human language.
Whalesong is complex enough that, even if they don’t have dependent clauses, they might have other semantic constructs that we lack, and that they won’t take us seriously until we demonstrate them.
But our level of understanding is still crude enough that we don’t know on either score.
Oops, made a dumb joke.
Is it true that no ape has ever asked a question?
One just did, in the post I’m replying to.
If the topic of dog communication is interesting to you, Nova is currently showing an episode about dog communication using these buttons:
They briefly mention the experiments about teaching apes to communicate.