Comment by netdevphoenix
3 months ago
I think linguistics, don't deem animals to have languages as you require human level intelligence to use and understand some of the features in human languages like communicating about things that are away from your current timespace location. Animals have communication systems
I'm not asserting that bonobos, for example, have as complex a language as humans, just that it would be interesting to understand what language that they do have.
"You haven't experienced Shakespeare until you've read him in the original Bonobo". :-)
It would be indeed. But it would not be a language. What animals have is called "communication system". A language can be seen as a type of communication system. Languages are complex by definition and require certain cognitive capabilities: ability to create new sentences based on a set of rules, spatial-temporal displacement, etc.