> IANALinguist, but as you can imagine, this example comes up a lot in the
> discussion of complex communication that isn't language, as well as colony
> insect life in general. And the linguists seem unanimous in
> distinguishing "going back and signalling the hive where to find
> something" from language with a grammar.
I *am* a linguist, actually, or used to be. And yes, I well remember this insistence that human language was something utterly different and discontinuous from every other species' way of conveying information. I always sorta thought it was a matter of professional vanity.
In a trivial sense, of course human language is utterly different from say whalesong (not that we really know anything about whalesong, but let's grant it, arguendo). But then probably birdsong is utterly different from bee-dance, too. Is there really something that puts human language on one side of some great divide and everything else on the other?
Our difficulty in even framing the question in any precise way suggests to me that we're looking for we-know-not-what apart from a sense of specialness.
> But amusingly, if you spin
> the hive after the first bee enters, they all go off in the wrong
> direction.
Try spinning the Senior Common Room at Balliol in the same way, and you'll be vastly amused by the behavior of the dons -- especially the linguists, who if my experience is any guide, will have been into the port a good deal more heavily than the economists.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org