[Sigia-l] Findability

[frank.shepard at att.net]

In response to Karl's post about apes and language, here's an excerpt from a
recent NYT article (July 15, 2003)

"Language, as linguists see it, is more than input and
output, the heard word and the spoken. It's not even
dependent on speech, since its output can be entirely in
gestures, as in American Sign Language. The essence of
language is words and syntax, each generated by a
combinatorial system in the brain. 

If there were a single sound for each word, vocabulary
would be limited to the number of sounds, probably fewer
than 1,000, that could be distinguished from one another.
But by generating combinations of arbitrary sound units, a
copious number of distinguishable sounds becomes available.

Even the average high school student has a vocabulary of
60,000 words. 

The other combinatorial system is syntax, the hierarchical
ordering of words in a sentence to govern their meaning. 

Chimpanzees do not seem to possess either of these systems.
They can learn a certain number of symbols, up to 400 or
so, and will string them together, but rarely in a way that
suggests any notion of syntax. This is not because of any
poverty of thought. Their conceptual world seems to overlap
to some extent with that of people: they can recognize
other individuals in their community and keep track of who
is dominant to whom. But they lack the system for encoding
these thoughts in language."

Here's a link to the full article: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/science/15LANG.html?ex=1059457160&ei=1&en=9043
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