original video is here 人类语言高级在哪里-1

hello, friends from bilibili, my name is Edvard Moser, today , I'm here to talk about human language, the question that I received is the following,

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language is a necessary tool for social communication, what makes us understand and speak language? is language unique to humans? or do animals have their own language?

so it's true that communication is common to all animals, even a small worm, like c.elegans(秀丽线虫), which is just 1 millimeter long, has … leaves odor(气味) traces, that are used by other worms to find their way,

birds, as we all know, attract mates and define territories by singing,

bees use a dance to communicate to other bees, where they will find nectar(花蜜),

monkeys have alarm calls that with different meanings,

and finally, humans, as we all know, speak and write, and have language as their main basis of communication,

however, those languages are very different, human language is very different from communication that is common to all animals,

and I think one of the major differences is arbitrary relation between sound in spoken language, and the underlying meaning, you can use any sound to denote or define a certain meaning, so human language consists of a finite set of sounds, just a small number of sounds, or phonemes(音素) as we call them,

and these sounds are then combined to create small units, often called morphemes(型态素), and those units are then put together to make words, and the words again in turn are put together to make sentences,

and this structure of using small units, like sounds, and making words, and then putting words together in sentences, um, and doing that in arbitrary ways, that is what distinguishes language from just any other form of communication,

there are very strict rules about how you can define, how you can combine sounds, not all sounds can be combined, and how you can combine words to make sentences , you can’t have just any order of words, for example, there are strict rules in every language about how you can begin a sentence, how you end it, and that by itself conveys meaning, this doesn't exist in animals, not even in the most sophisticated monkeys,

and what we have in human language is, with this ability to combine words in so many different ways, this is almost no end to how much meaning we can express in the language,

while animals, even monkeys, for example, have different alarm calls for different situations, the number is very very small, you can count them on your fingers, they have different meanings,

whereas in human language, the number of combinations you can make from words and sentences is endless, it's totally infinite,

and moreover, not only can you express a very large number of the meanings, but you can make new sentences, that never have been made before, and people will understand them, and this generative ability of languages is very unique, and only known in the human species,

and this is then again what then underlies our human culture, because we have this ability, we can express any meaning, that we want to say, all right?

and we can write it, that means that we can tranfer it to other people whether they live now or later, and in that way accumulate knowledge, and then use it for the common of the entire world, and not only the ones we directly speak to, so this is totally transformative, probably much of the reason how humans have distinguished themselves from other species, even other primates,

there have been attempts to try train monkeys, chimpanzees, which are thought to be closest to ourselves, to speak and to write, and use language, I mean, not speak with words, of course, but to use symbols as language, and by and large, these attempts have shown that they can grasp a limited number of words, maybe 10, 20, 30 words, and they can combine them in a very limited number of ways, but they never can really reach the ability to combine them into new sentences, and use language to communicate their own intent,

it requires a lot of training, and I think these studies have biology just reinforced the view that language is a unique human ability,

so thank you for that interesting question,

there will be another question about language in a different session, and I will then speak more about the brain substrate of language, what is it in the brain that makes us speak and listen, and understand,

thank you,