this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Linguistics Humor

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[–] weirdwallace75@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A sentence grammar's what I'm thinking of

You wouldn't get this from another species' cry

Never gonna mix the words

Never gonna drop the nouns

Never gonna drop a verb and confuse you

Never gonna OSO

Never gonna lose my flow

Never gonna noun a verb just to lose you

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You know, I've been thinking, has anyone ever tried teaching a synthetic language to a non-human animal?

A gorilla might not be able to distinguish between "Sam sees Becky" and "Becky sees Sam", but it's not unreasonable they could track "ты" vs. "тебя" given they can track a variety of other intangible distinctions.

The usual standard with apes seems to be sign language, and none of them have been able to use it to the standard of human children once you peel back the wishful thinking of certain researchers. They can learn words, they can use words to get things, but they can't make the jump to grammar.