But there was no way for Native Americans to know that such would be able to happen.
So on what basis at the time should they have believed that the sounds Europeans made would, in the future, be able to be considered language?
The real answer is because both groups were humans using the communication process in ways that looked familiar. They are mostly like us doing something that looks like what we do.
Such is less useful for an intelligence alien to ours, like cetaceans, and perhaps someday even extraterrestrial in origin.
We have a goal to translate an alien language but first we have to recognize it is a language, rather than “simple communication.” How?
I think that it comes down to observing how individuals transfer information to other individuals.
Individual #1 learns some information by experiencing something.
Individual #1 changes its behavior based on this information.
Individual #1 leaves the situation where the information was directly obtainable.
Individual #1 comes into contact with Individual #2.
Individual #1 produces something which might be language that Individual #2 can observe.
Individual #1 and Individual #2 separate.
Individual #2 changes its behavior in a manner consistent with it knowing the above information, which it never experienced directly.
If you can demonstrate all of these steps occurred, then I feel you’ve demonstrated the presence of a language.
So if a Native American observed that one European learned something like “This guy is the chief of our tribe” and then observed that other Europeans later knew who the chief was, even before being told by anyone in the tribe, they could conclude that the first European used language to tell the other Europeans.
The same is true for whales. If some whales figured out that one type of boat has people that throw pointy sticks at whales and another type of boat has people who throw tasty fish, they’ll avoid the former and approach the latter. And if we then see whales who have never encountered these boats before but know which ones to avoid and which ones to approach, we might conclude that these whales were told this information by the other whales.
By that definition bee dance signaling is language isn’t it? In what way not?
And much of the language I hear and speak fails to change behaviors. It does not seem like changing behavior as the result of communication is a necessary aspect of communication being language.
I don’t think we can say a bee learned anything. It was born with a genetic instinct to find flowers and summon other bees. And those other bees were born with the genetic instinct to be summoned. So there was no new information added beyond what they were born with. In order the demonstrate language, you have to show that new information has entered the hive’s awareness.
The individual bee (s) 1 found a food source.
They returned and through dance communicated that information. A change in their behavior from not having possession of that new knowledge
Bee(s) 2 observed that communication and acted on that information traveling to where they otherwise did not know to go, a behavior change, consistent with knowing information they did not observe directly.
The information of where to go was gained and transmitted. In stereotyped ways driven by instinct but non-stereotyped is not part of your criteria.
And again the disputation from the other direction: language occurs that does not result in any behavior changes or as a direct result of newly gained information.
I still think it’s incorrect to say the bee learned anything. The bee just has a set of inherent instincts that cause it to fly around looking for flowers and then behave in a certain predetermined way when it observes a flower. Other bees have a set of inherent instincts that cause them to behave in a predetermined way when they observe another bee moving in a certain way. But it’s all genetic behavior, which is the difference between learning and sphexishness.
Human language and intelligence go far beyond biological needs, allowing us to discuss abstract ideas, construct imaginary worlds, and do science and mathematics. How did such an ability arise? I propose that a major contributing factor was an arms race between truth and deception in storytelling. In honeybees, an elaborate language could evolve because reproductive conflicts of interest between individuals were reduced. For humans, however, reproductive conflicts of interest became a spur for increasing intelligence. Through the drive to negotiate social interactions, primate intelligence reached the point where knowledge could be shared through basic problem–resolution proto-stories, building on the way animals learn. As soon as honest proto-stories became possible, so did dishonest ones, ushering in an arms race between truth and deception…
Language could also be a way of signaling reproductive fitness to the opposite sex. I would expect some whale language to map to their behavior, but not necessarily all: some of their language may be conceptual.
Wiki lists a table of characteristics of sperm whale clicks. Inferred functions include searching for prey, homing in on prey, social communication, and communication by males. Apparently higher latitudes are only populated by sperm whale dudes, while both sexes frequent temperate and tropical waters. Sperm whales feed on squid, octopus, rays, sharks and bioluminescent pyrosomes.
Wiki discusses their social life:
Like elephants, females and their young live in matriarchal groups called pods, while bulls live apart. Bulls sometimes form loose bachelor groups with other males of similar age and size. As they grow older, they typically live solitary lives, only returning to the pod to socialize or to breed.[39] Bulls have beached themselves together, suggesting a degree of cooperation which is not yet fully understood.[39] The whales rarely, if ever, leave their group.[189]
A social unit is a group of sperm whales who live and travel together over a period of years. Individuals rarely, if ever, join or leave a social unit. There is a huge variance in the size of social units. They are most commonly between six and nine individuals in size but can have more than twenty.[190] Unlike orcas, sperm whales within a social unit show no significant tendency to associate with their genetic relatives.[191] Females and calves spend about three-quarters of their time foraging and a quarter of their time socializing. Socializing usually takes place in the afternoon…[192]
When sperm whales socialize, they emit complex patterns of clicks called codas. They will spend much of the time rubbing against each other. Tracking of diving whales suggests that groups engage in herding of prey, similar to bait balls created by other species, though the research needs to be confirmed by tracking the prey.[193][194]
Sperm whales are also prey, suggesting another topic of conversation.
From a practical observable perspective information was obtained. Behavior was changed. Changed behavior transmitted information which changed behavior in the receiver.
How do you propose to define if what we observe of alien communication passing along information that results in new behavior (cetacean, extraterrestrial, artificial, whatever) is based on instinct, genetics, programmed response, or true learning - other than being self same as what we do?
MHO is to not require learning new behaviors as a criteria of language. So much of language use, storytelling as suggested above for example, is not about changing behaviors. But to require that the communication is not exclusively stereotyped.
That we can observe just from observing the communication alone with no knowledge of the physiology producing it.
I will grant that not all language communication involves the transfer of new information. But I feel that in order to be defined as a language a means of communication must be capable of communicating new information. A process that can only communicate things that both parties already knew is not a language.
Bee communication fails in this. A bee can communicate that there’s a flower over at this location to other bees - but only because the bees were born with a set of instincts that are programmed for that purpose. If a bee encounters something outside of its programming - like a new source of food that isn’t a flower - it has no way to communicate this new information to other bees.
That was the idea I was describing with boats. Boats with whale hunters or ecotourists have not been around long enough for whales to have evolved a set of instincts regarding them. So how whales respond to these boats is learned behavior. And if a whale can communicate new information that it learned to another whale, that’s language.
So if you want to know if something is practicing instinctive communication or language, present it with some new information that you know it cannot have an evolved response for. If you observe that it can communicate this new information to its fellow beings then you know it’s using language.
Of course not, and both sides knew it. They lacked the tools, the dictionary, but they knew it was a feasible task. OK, I should have said “in principle” somewhere along the line. This is the Dope, no hair is too fine not to be split.
I’m sorry but I seem to failing at communicating the point: how, faced with a novel alien form communication, does one know that it is, in principle, translatable?
Does defining language as something translatable into our language help us decide if cetacean communication, or any putative alien communication, is language?
Could there be languages that cover conceptual domains that do not overlap and have such different structures that they are not even in principal translatable one to the other?
It’s not you, we are both talking past each other. We come from opposite ends: I ask not how one can know a priori that a language is, in principle, translatable, I state that if we manage a translation, we will know it is a language.
Does knowing that there are undecidable statements help us devise better algorithms for our computers? I think yes. That is the sense I would like to be understood regarding translatability. We knew hieroglyphs were translatable before Champollion, we knew cuneiform signs were translatable too. And eventually someone managed. Now many people are trying Cetacean. I wish them luck, we will know when they succeed that it is a language. But absence of translation is not yet proof of untranslatability.
It probably depends on your definition of language, but for most definitions I guess the answer is yes. If music is a language* and formal logic is a language** I for one fail to see how they could be translated into one another.
*I don’t think music is a language, it lacks semantics, but you can code messages in music notation, as J.S. Bach used the notes B-A-C-H in a fuge. Translating a code written in music is not translating music, it is translating the language that was encoded using music. But music is only a lazy example, there should be better ones.
**Formal logic probably is a proper language in its own right.
One doesn’t. And thus, when we first meet aliens, we’ll have the same debates about them that we’re currently having about whales: Is what they have a true language? And the best answer we’ll have will be “We don’t know”.
Bees dance and respond to the dance in a manner that isn’t learnt. That reasonably counts as a innate behaviour. Humans have the ability to learn a language. That bit is clearly also innate. The actual language learnt is an interesting question. Chompsky held sway for decades that the underpinning nature of language was invariant across all humans, a universal grammar, and that that grammar is innate. I don’t really think modern understanding of physiology and neural plasticity supports Chomsky, and when he starts to argue from a standpoint of free will and his political leanings it gets even thinner.
But do we suppose that cetaceans are required to have the same constraints? There might be a good argument from common heritage - we didn’t diverge from their side of the gene pool all that long ago, and a huge amount of the wetware wiring and plasticity is going to be common. As will be the ability of the infant brain to learn ab-initio. But whether they have the universal grammar constraints on language that we might recognise is not so clear. And not everyone believes Chomsky anyway, so the question is wider.
Dolphins are my bet for the most advanced language. I don’t think I’m exactly alone in that. Their aural capabilities are interesting. They can echo locate objects that modern sonar systems struggle with. The statistics on all parts of the sensory, nerve bundles size and brain size directed at sound are about double human capability. And they clearly make communicating sorts of noises that are distinct from echo location noises. They produce very high amplitude clicks with energy out to 150kHz, with an ability to control the click rate to compensate for range. But their other sounds, which are more complex, and not used for echolocation only run up to 30kHz. There is something there. But we humans can’t even hear the full extent of what they emit, let alone have the level of raw brain processing power available to them to dissect the sounds. We are intrinsically left needing to throw computational systems at the problem, which leaves us with a very thin pipe through which to suck out anything that we can tag with semantic value.
Right now, we don’t even know what the equivalent of phonemes might be, let alone trying to shoe horn a grammar over the top of assemblies of phonemes. I am reminded of the various sign languages in use. The idea that position of the symbol changes its meaning, and that it is possible to compose rhyming poetry by exploiting location. Or make puns. Would be interesting to see if an AI could extract anything out of that.
It always struck me as interesting that the sonar abilities of dolphins allows them, to some extent, to see inside one another. And us if we join them in the water. They have very good eyesight as well, on par with humans at any rate. Makes them interesting critters.
Point granted. Stories are used to transmit culture and values.
And they are used to simply entertain, or to put a child to sleep.
Which is what this part of this conversation is dancing around, a definition of language that avoids defining it as a description of what human languages share. One that could be applied even if the languages untranslatable into each other.
Accepted that not all communication is language. Is it reasonable to demand semantics else an alien communication is rejected as language?
ETA to @Chronos - we certainly cannot know if we don’t have reasonable criteria for what a language is. But exactly right, if we can’t with whales, a fellow intelligent mammalian species, what chance do have at recognizing a truly alien one?
A language may need many things, like syntax, grammar and semantics. The two first are related more to the form of a language, happy to discard them as anthopomorphic. But how can you convey a meaning without semantics? I guess semantics are not sufficient, as the meercat example saying “panther”, “snake” or “eagle” shows, as that is not language for us humans (though it is for meercats, I suppose, so I am being specieist?). But without having something to say, what is a language? So yes: I guess semantics are necessary.