¶ … properties of human language (displacement, arbitrariness, productivity, cultural, transmission, discreteness, duality) discuss how human language differs from animal communication.
Unlike animal language, human language can possess the property of displacement. Displacement "allows the users of language to talk about things and events not present in the immediate environment." (21) A human need not cry out in pain in the moment, but one can describe the silent pain one felt later on, displacing the experience into the future rather than when it was actually experienced. 'Let me tell you what a day I had,' is a very human, displaced expression. There is also a less arbitrary nature to human language, because human language is contextual. For instance, for although same beast would be a dog in England or a perro in Spain, yet the same dog would still give the same barking sound in both lands, if it were the same breed, and both the English and the Spanish words are part of a specific linguistic structure. But in animal language, figurative or "onomatopoeic...
"For the majority of animal signals, there does appear to be a clear connection between" the production of one sound and another sound.
This means that, for "any animal, the set of signals used in communication is finite." That is, each variety of animal communication consists of a fixed and limited set of vocal or gestured referents and non-symbolic motions or physical structures that have no intrinsic relationship to one another, and thus are not generative of new meanings (22) In contrast, humans can transmit different words across diifferent geographic and cultural locations even though such locations have different languages and means of expressing themselves. Even the structure of language shifts upon exposure to other peoples as the ancient Greeks once had more words for their pluralistic notions of love, which Modern Greek lacks. Also, some Eskimo people famously have different words for snow of a different packing type and appearance,…
