Comment by ____tom____
3 months ago
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.