By the everyday meaning of the term "language," as opposed to that used by linguists, having a vocabulary of several hundred words IS having a language facility. More broadly you are right though.
Anyway, my point was that you cannot find a trait shared by _all_ humans that is not possessed by _any_ animals. There are certainly humans that have no language facility whatsoever and who the Koko the gorilla would have no problem taking on in a battle of wits (Bill Bartlett?). The practice of killing such people, however, is still normally called murder. Therefore, the language facility cannot be the relevant criterion -- unless killing such people is actually morally OK and the Nazis had it right after all.
--- On Thu, 4/16/09, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>
>
> On this I am with Michael P... knowing a few hundred words
> is not the same as the language facility (even if you don't
> believe in the "faculty"). Nim Chimpsky is about as good as
> they get, after decades of work. There are a lot of
> qualities where many animals have us beat, but language, in
> all its creative usage, IMHO, seems fairly unique to us.
>