Coffee break: Language embedded in language

Here's a brilliant example of language embedded in language. A friend writes to tell me that this video was submitted in a contest by a 20 year old. The contest was titled "u @ 50."

To get the point you must watch it through to the end.

How NOT to build a multicultural society ...

According to this story in Britian's Daily Trelegraph (December 8, 2008),
Words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary

Words associated with Christianity, the monarchy and British history have been dropped from a leading dictionary for children.

Oxford University Press has removed words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire" and "monarch" from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled.

The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society.

But academics and head teachers said that the changes to the 10,000 word Junior Dictionary could mean that children lose touch with Britain's heritage.

Of course it could. And some people will find that very convenient, because kids can be told any nonsense about government in Britain or Christianity, and they'll believe it. That latter situation is already a problem, thanks to some energetic nineteenth century propagandists. (And go here for more.)

By the way, people don't usually need definitions of the words that are in common use.

For example, here in Toronto, who needs a definition right now of "mitt," "boot," "snow shovel,"or "sidewalk salt"? A picture, sure, but a definition, no. It's not like people have any trouble figuring out what all that stuff is for.

But "bishop" or "monarch", now those terms - like "mullah" or "caliph" - do require some explanation.

Pictured above is a typical scene in downtown Toronto today. It features a bag of sidewalk salt, a pair of boots, a pair of mitts, and a boot cat. The boot cat keeps the boots from falling over. But if you saw it up close, you would not need me to explain that, would you?

Hat tip: Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury.

The neuroscientist and Shakespeare - no, actually, this is fun!

In "The Shakespeared Brain", Philip Davis offers some interesting, non-reductive neuroscience research on why we react to some of Shakespeare's more unusual phrases the way we do.

By "non-reductive", I mean that he is not trying to persuade us that "we" don't really react to the phrases or understand their significance ("it's just your neurons firing, you know"). Indeed, Davis starts with the assumption that we do react to them because we try to understand them.

He focuses on a peculiarity of Shakespeare's writing - "functional shift." Shakespeare turns nouns into verbs or pronouns into nouns in arresting ways - for example, in Coriolanus, a man writes of his benefactor: "This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, godded me indeed." and in Twelfth Night, Olivia is called "the cruellest she alive."

The literary device of functional shift turns on a feature of English as a language. Its grammatical structure depends heavily on simple conventions of word order. That in turn means that words can change their function abruptly simply by being put in a different position in a sentence.

For example, consider

"Jane knew the ins and outs of the grocery business."

"In" and "out" are prepositions. They do not normally appear as nouns.

I made "in" and "out" into nouns by the simple act of parking them in a noun's position in the sentence. I reinforced their new position by making them plural. (That way, you know for sure that they are not prepositions any more.) If the sentence makes sense, that's all a reader (or hearer) requires.

I am told that not every language is suited to this device of functional shift - possibly because factors other than word order are used in those languages to organize thoughts.

Anyway, Shakespeare was obviously well aware of how such a functional shift can attract a hearer's attention. Davis, who is editor of The Reader magazine, decided to have a look at the neuroscience underlying that.

Functional shift was small and tight enough for experimentation. Up until now the main cognitive research done on the confusion of verbs and nouns has been to do with mistakes made by those who are brain-damaged. But hardly anybody appears to have investigated the neural processing of a 'positive error', such as functional shift in normal healthy people. We decided to try to see what happens when the brain comes upon these sudden new formulations in Shakespeare. We would use three pieces of kit. First, EEG (electroencephalogram) tests, with electrodes placed on different parts of the scalp to measure brain-events taking place in time; later, MEG (magnetoencephalography), an imaging technique using a helmet-like brain-scanner which measures effects in terms of location in the brain as well as their timing; and finally fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), which uses those tunnel-like brain-scanners that focus even more specifically on brain-activation by location. Together with my English Language colleague, Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz, I set up forty of the following four-sentence stimuli based upon Shakespeare, where 'A' is the control sentence or basic norm, making both grammatical and semantic sense; 'B' the Shakespearian functional shift (in this case adapted from Coriolanus 5.3); 'C' a functional shift in syntax but one that doesn't make sense in context; and 'D' a formulation that has no grammatical shift but still doesn't make sense semantically. People undergoing the experiment simply had to press a button if the sentence roughly made sense to them.

(A) This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, deified me indeed.

(B) This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, godded me indeed.

(C) This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, charcoaled me indeed.

(D) This old man loved me above the measure of a father, nay, poured me indeed.

What happened?

Davis distinguishes between two types of sentence violations whose effects, once perceived, are registered in the brain: semantic violation (= the sentence doesn't make sense, called N400) and syntactic violation (= the sentence makes sense but doesn't read right, called P600). You can read the details here, but you won't likely be surprised to learn that the EEG picked up

(A) no reaction to A (just a normal sentence)

(B) a high P600 reaction to B "(because it feels like a grammatical anomaly) but no N400 (the brain will tolerate it, almost straightaway, as making sense despite the grammatical difficulty)."

(C) Both N400 and P600 were high because the sentence is both ungrammatical and meaningless.

(D) No P600 reaction because the sentence is grammatical but high N400 because it makes no sense.

Davis concludes that

... functional shift is what the scientists call a robust phenomenon: that is to say, it has a distinct and unique effect on the brain. Instinctively Shakespeare was right to use it as one of his dramatic mental tools.

(Mind you, if Davis had concluded from his research that Shakespeare was wrong to use functional shift, I would conclude that Davis himself should stay in neuroscience and not try to make a living as a playwright.)

What's fascinating is that Shakespeare may have been tapping into a little known feature of brain organization to achieve his effect. Davis suggests:

... some neuroscientists believe that there is one area of the brain that processes nouns and a different area of the brain that processes verbs. Too often people suppose that brain experimentation is reductive, mechanically localising 'love', for example, to a specific part of the brain. But look at this case: supposing that nouns and verb are indeed separately localised, what happens when the brain is momentarily stunned by a functional shift that it cannot immediately identify as noun or verb? Then the brain is pressured into working at a higher adaptive level of conscious evolution, paradoxically undetermined by the localised laws and structures it nonetheless still works from.

Conscious evolution ... I like that. Alfred Russel Wallace would have liked it too.

Non-reductive research may shed light on how some stylistic devices draw a crowd - and others empty the theatre faster than a fire alarm, as people are suddenly seized with a conviction that watching shirts dry on the clothesline is way more interesting.

(Note: The image is from The Dallas Public Library Fine Books Division.)

Can languages be treated as if words were genes?

"Some researchers think that the evolution of languages can be understood by treating them like genomes — but many linguists don't want to hear about it" Emma Marris reports in Nature News. (Paywall)

In that case, treating language families like a genome evolving over generations raises some interesting questions. We must assume that the speakers of languages do not have much conscious input into the fate of languages, just as we do not have much conscious input into our physical genetic codes.

Can we all say out loud together "reductionism!"?

As a general rule, reductionism does not work when a given thing is reduced below the level of meaningful information. We will not usually understand words better by cutting them up into letters, for example, or by treating them as if they were genes.

Examining the letters in a word can tell us some interesting things, as we will shortly see, but not usually the social and cultural meanings of the word.

We are constantly providing input into the language we use. One thinks immediately of the significance certain phrases acquire during an election campaign. Barack Obama, for example, may well have rescued the word "audacity" from near oblivion by his phrase, The Audacity of Hope. However, I think the word will go back to near extinction in a few years.

Some might argue that a sort of Darwinian process governs which word innovations or recoveries succeed. Maybe, but the process begins with intelligent design. The skilled orator knows what effect he intends to have and how he proposes to create it. Given the importance rhetoric has played in the oldest cultures, we can assume that skilled orators have had their hand in the system all along.

A friend enumerates reasons for doubt more academically than I can:

Languages clearly are hierarchically-structured systems while actual science is far from understanding the hierarchical structure of genomes (if any);

Languages are tools daily used by intelligent agents who constantly use them (and change them) to express meanings. As such languages evolution is driven by intelligence. Genomes are not used daily by intelligent agents this way and even Darwinism [Darwinian evolution] denies a front-loader designer at their beginning;

Language always expresses concepts and manifests thought and ideas, it is fully teleological. According to Darwinism, genomes are not teleological systems.

Of course, sometimes looking at the individual letters can tell us something about words. The word "skirt" in Scandinavian languages became "shirt" in English (which tends to soften the consonants). Then later, English speakers also grabbed "skirt" and made it mean the bottom garment rather than the top one. To maintain the distinction between the two garments, we had to stick with Scandinavian phonetics this time. Our first grab was probably automatic, but the second required a conscious distinction in spelling and pronunciation.

And then, when I was young, the skort made a brief appearance - essentially a skirt with built-in shorts, pictured above. I am glad to see it has not entirely gone out of fashion. The word "skort", at any rate, was a deliberate coinage by an intelligent agent, probably the earliest skort designers, explaining their concept.

I would hate to think of an earnest researcher attempting to compile "laws of descent" for the English language and spending many hours trying to show how "skort" arose without any intelligent agency. On another planet, perhaps.

(Note: The image is from Bartleby's American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000, a good place to bookmark. This isn't quite the type of skort I remember from 1960, which was loose cotton, and sometimes pleated, but it's close enough.)

Language: No current theory of its origin is worth much

Further to the question of the origin of language, in "Selective scenarios for the emergence of natural language"* Szabolcs Számadó and Eörs Szathmáry opine,

Explaining the evolution of human language is likely to remain a challenge for the coming decade. As we have discussed, there is no single theory that could sufficiently answer all the questions about honesty and groundedness, power of generalisation, and uniqueness. Table 1 summarises these criteria. As one can see, most of the theories fail to answer most of the questions. Perhaps the easiest criterion to fulfil is shared interest, as there are several social situations that assume shared interest between communicating parties (such as hunting or contact calls). There are only two theories, 'tool making' and 'hunting' 22 and 26, that do significantly better than the others as they can answer three out of the four questions asked of them (Table 1). Thus, it might be tempting to say that some combination of the two could provide a series of selective scenarios that would fit all of our criteria. The most notable conclusion, however, is that all the theories fail to explain the uniqueness of human language. Thus, even though indirect evidence strongly suggests that the evolution of human language was selection limited, it remains difficult to envisage a scenario that would show why.

Theirs is, on the whole, a glum look:

The recent blossoming of evolutionary linguistics has resulted in a variety of theories that attempt to provide a selective scenario for the evolution of early language. However, their overabundance makes many researchers sceptical of such theorising. Here, we suggest that a more rigorous approach is needed towards their construction although, despite justified scepticism, there is no agreement as to the criteria that should be used to determine the validity of the various competing theories. We attempt to fill this gap by providing criteria upon which the various historical narratives can be judged. Although individually none of these criteria are highly constraining, taken together they could provide a useful evolutionary framework for thinking about the evolution of human language.

They go on to hope that Darwin's natural selection will answer the question, but it is hard to see how. Natural selection eliminates life forms that express genes that do not help them survive. It is not known to produce ideas that must be expressed in language.

*(Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Volume 21, Issue 10 , October 2006, Pages 555-561)

Language: NOT a sopisticated version of primal screams

Explaining language, Elizabeth Svoboda writes,

Lots of animals make noise; much of it even conveys information. But for sheer complexity, for developed syntax and grammar, and for the ability to articulate abstract concepts, you can’t beat human speech.

No you can't beat human speech, but if you are a human, you won't even be trying to beat it. Maybe Vulcan speech is actually better for some abstract concepts, but only Vulcans would care, right?

And that is the fundamental problem with materialist efforts to explain human language. The tomcat, for example, doesn't speak a human-like language because he has nothing to say that requires it. He can get by with yowls, snarls, and purrs.

Humans need a language that expresses ideas because we need to communicate ideas. The ideas come first. The complexities of our languages are structures chosen to express ideas and feelings the tomcat does not have.

The materialist needs to explain language as a sophisticated version of primal screams, but that project is bankrupt and pointless because that isn't really what human language is.

If your math teachers wants to explain to you why dividing by zero is not an acceptable operation in mathematics or your civics teacher wants to explain the advantages and disadvantages of proportional representation, they want to explain to you things that are irrelevant to primal screams.

On the same topic, Sver Eldoy, among others, commented recently,

[ ... ] Any human from any part of the planet are capable of learning any language; this fact lends credit to the assumption that languages are indeed something living in systems within the brain. The sheer complexity of human language is way too high to be a bi-product of the other mental faculties; if it were not we would have made talking computer programs already and "artificial intelligence" would be a "walk in the park".

But are languages really "living in the systems of the brain"? How about this: The idea to be communicated, along with the desire to communicate, is living in the systems of the brain.

Spoken language is the most obvious method that we adopt, because we have the equipment and we are encouraged to use it. But people deprived of hearing and/or speech have developed sign languages that function in the same way as vocal languages. And non-verbal people often express themselves in a sophisticated way in art or music.

So the desire to communicate exists independently of the usual equipment, and the ideas to be communicated are a necessary condition and justification of human language.

Neuroscience: Language feature unique to human brain?

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Center used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to probe language areas of the human brain, vs. that of non-human primates. They found that the pathway (arcuate fasiculus) connecting brain regions involved in human language such as Broca's area and Wernicke's area is much larger and more widely connected than in rhesus macaques or chimpanzees.

Yerkes researcher James Rilling notes,

"We know from previous functional imaging studies that the middle temporal lobe is involved with analyzing the meanings of words. In humans, it seems the brain not only evolved larger language regions but also a network of fibers to connect those regions, which supports humans' superior language capabilities."

Findings like this may modify overly optimistic projections for communicating on an equal footing with apes - though don't count on it. Ideas like that die hard in times like these.

New assessment of ape language skills is dramatically scaled back

You've probably heard about all the apes who have been taught to communicate using sign language in recent years. As Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain, the discovery that American Sign Language could, in principle, be taught to apes spurred a number of interesting research projects - and some pretty unrealistic claims. In Dragons of Eden (1986), for example, Carl Sagan dreamed of a day when

Although a few years ago it would have seemed the most implausible science fiction, it does not appear to me out of the question that, after a few years in such a verbal chimpanzee community, there might emerge the memoirs of the natural history and mental life of a chimpanzee, published in English or Japanese (with perhaps an “as told to” after the byline).

What you probably DIDN'T hear much about is the mood of skepticism with which much of the science community has greeted this work in recent years - even as the apes impress hosts on national television programs.

In "Aping Language", a thoughtful article in E-Skeptic, Clive Wynne explains how that happened. Wynne certainly does not have a hitch in his craw about the concept of ape language. On the contrary, would have been pleased to discover that apes can be taught grammar. The trouble is, after the initial flurry of success stories, later, more critical research came to the conclusion that they generally can't.

Why did initial reports sound so favourable? One problem was overinterpretation. The ability to learn a large number of signs is not the same thing as the ability to learn a language whose meaning depends largely on grammar. The former achievement is sometimes found among birds as well as mammals, but the latter seems unique to humans.

The ability to string a sequence of words together does not necessarily mean awareness of grammar. The sentence "Tom shot John" does not mean the same thing as "John shot Tom," and the difference is pretty important. Overly generous assumptions were made about the extent to which apes such as Washoe and Kanzi were using grammar. When they were examined by scientists other than their trainers, they did not perform well.

Also, attuned as they were to individual signs of success, researchers were often not looking at the big picture. Reporting on how one researcher revised his thinking after closer study, Wynne notes,

Terrace now argued that Nim's use of ASL signs was quite unlike how children learn language. Nim failed to initiate conversations, he seldom introduced new vocabulary and just imitated what the humans around him said. Nim's sentences failed to grow in length. In human children there is a close relationship between the number of words known and the number of words used in a sentence. Not so in Nim. Throughout his time in the language project he stuck to using one or two words at a time. And his longer utterances were without any regard for grammatical structure. Nim’s longest recorded “sentence” was give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. Not hard to understand — but not very grammatical either.

The key difference between an ape and a child is that the child is growing in intellectual capability. The ape is not. Thus, the ape isn't under any internal pressure to expand his language competence. Once he knows how to satisfy his fairly simple needs, any pressure he experiences will come from drill by humans - at the expense, one suspects, of things he would rather be doing.

Wynne describes his own disillusion,

For a start Kanzi — like Nim before him — did not show the increase in sentence length that is typical of children learning language. In fact, at 1.15 symbols per sentence, Kanzi's average utterance is even shorter than Nim's. And it turns out that to complete many of the requests that were put to him Kanzi did not need to understand grammar. For example when Kanzi was asked to "Take the hat to the colony room" - which Kanzi did successfully - all he needed was some sense of "hat" and of "colony room."

Wynne's point is that, unlike "John shot Tom"/"Tom shot John" the command given to Kanzi is not reversible - a room cannot be taken to a hat. He concludes that, while Kanji's and his trainers' achievements are significant, as far as grammar is concerned, "on any assessment not tinted with rose-colored glasses, Kanzi just doesn’t get it."

Commenting on John Berman's recent Nightline show with 26-year-old Kanzi, he quotes Berman's assessment, "Moments like this are proof that these conversations help scientists learn about apes, from the apes themselves," but says,

I don’t disagree, though I fear the conclusion I draw is not the one Berman intended. Moments like this tell us that Descartes was right, there really are no beasts, no matter how fortunately circumstanced, that can make known their thoughts through language.

As I see it, the take home point is that Kanji doesn't really want anything more out of life than his limited language skills give him. That is what makes all the difference between him and a three-year-old child.

Anyway, it's good to see a magazine that bills itself as "skeptical" living up to its billing by exercising its skepticism in an area that has long been in need of it.

Update: An interesting combox discussion developed on this story over at Uncommon Descent, with some participants claiming that many scientists had never been fooled by the claims. (And, implicitly, shame on me for pointing out how long Sagan-like claims went on being fronted).

I responded to one as follows:

getawitness, it would be scary indeed to think that everyone was fooled. But one Chomsky doesn't alter a pattern that Mario Beauregard and I note in The Spiritual Brain - a very familiar pattern, replicated widely over many issues. The notion that apes can learn grammar was treated as the default "scientific" position in accounts of the subject - even though one did not need a great deal of familiarity with the area to see why it probably wasn't true.

Now, of course, the fact that that was the case - as is demonstrated by the way popular culture sources replicate it to this day - is somehow supposed to fall down a memory hole.

That way, we can avoid disconfirming a materialist prediction.

I for one will work to see that it doesn't fall down a memory hole, but is entered among the disconfirmed materialist predictions.

That will force materialists to redefine their theory so as to exclude what they once enthusiastically included as evidence. Eventually, a paper trail develops ...

Language: Theodore Dalrymple takes on materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker

Materialist cognitive scientist Steve Pinker of Harvard, who was recently mixing it up with eminent bioethicist Leon Kass, also attracted the attention of highly literate retired prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple. In "No, Dr. Pinker, it's not just from nature," Dalrymple recalls that many of his patients from the prison culture simply did not fit the stereotype of the "human animal" as "hardwired for language", a stereotype that owes much to Pinker's work. On the contrary, he finds, not only is there no such hard wiring but the lack of it is both apparent and devastating:

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.

In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. ...

He adds, a propos Pinker's insistence that there are no "better" or "worse" ways of expressing oneself:

I need hardly point out that Pinker doesn’t really believe anything of what he writes, at least if example is stronger evidence of belief than precept. Though artfully sown here and there with a demotic expression to prove that he is himself of the people, his own book is written, not surprisingly, in the kind of English that would please schoolmarms. I doubt very much whether it would have reached its 25th printing had he chosen to write it in the dialect of rural Louisiana, for example, or of the slums of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Even had he chosen to do so, he might have found the writing rather difficult. I should like to see him try to translate a sentence from his book that I have taken at random, “The point that the argument misses is that although natural selection involves incremental steps that enhance functioning, the enhancements do not have to be an existing module,” into the language of the Glasgow or Detroit slums.

I'm definitely in Dalrymple's camp here because, like him (though only in a volunteer capacity), I have often found myself writing letters to authorities on behalf of persons in difficulties. What has so often struck me is that some people only clearly grasped the nature of their problems after I had explained them clearly in a letter I was composing, to be sent to someone else.

No doubt Pinker is right in thinking that humans have a natural tendency to construct language of some type. But all language is not equally useful for everything. Put another way, words are tools. If the only tools I know how to use are big and heavy, I can't do fine work. And just as some jobs require fine tools, some missions require carefully chosen words. There is nothing "natural" about any of that. Our language is an artistic inheritance built up over centuries of use and refinement. For various reasons, as Dalrymple notes, some people never got most of the toolkit of their culture (not nature), and it shows.

Often, I helped my friends in difficulty most by teaching them words so that they could think their way through difficulties that they had been trying to feel their way through. Post-modernists would, of course, say that I was "imposing my uptight Anglo-Canadian culture", and to some extent that is true. To help people navigate a system dominated by Anglo-Canadians, I taught them the Anglo-Canadian words of power.

It is the case with all words of power that once you know them, you find that you can think clearly about things that were fuzzy before. You can reject the new thoughts if you want, but you cannot go back to a time before you knew them.

Anyway, enjoy Dalrymple's graceful and interesting essay.

Ape watch: Another claim for ape language that doesn't pan out

Well, John Berman's ABC report "Hello, How Are You Doing?: Groundbreaking Research Has Scientists Talking with Apes" certainly sounded groundbreaking. The bonobos and orangutans at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, are said to "talk"*, using a 350 symbol keyboard on which they have been trained since infancy. One ofthem, a 26-year-old orangutan, Kanzi, is the star: He can map a series of English words to symbols on the keyboard. But then, it all fell apart during Berman's "interview" with the ape:

Sound beyond belief? During a visit to the Great Ape Trust, I sat down with Kanzi the Bonobo -- the first Ape I have ever interviewed.
I read Kanzi a series of words, and then without fail, he hit the corresponding lexigram symbol on a touch screen.

I said "Egg."

He pressed "Egg."

I said, "M and M."

He pressed "M and M."

Then Kanzi took control of the conversation and pressed the symbol for "Surprise!"

Needless to say, I was quite surprised, having never actually spoken to an ape before.

But Kanzi was pointing to a box of candy that I was sitting near. That is the surprise that he wanted.

I'll just bet that was the surprise Kanji wanted. And far from all this sounding "beyond belief", I would be really surprised if, having been pestered this way since infancy, Kanji could not have managed at least this much communication. Dogs do it regularly.

I myself taught a cat to recognize and respond to a number of words in 1964. And the cat, like the ape, could be relied on to choose the point at which she felt she should be rewarded for her cooperation and to identify the location of any reward she was being offered. For their prudence in such matters, I commend both the cat and the ape.

But the whole experiment points up the fundamental problem identified by Jonathan Marks in What does it mean to be 98% Chimpanzee?: The ape hasn't anything to say, in particular, that requires a high level of language skill. If he is under your control and you force him to learn some routine for a box of candy, he must comply - whether you are operating a circus act or a lab. But beyond a certain point, it all sounds like cruelty to me.

The people involved mean well - they want to protect apes. Then why couldn't they just let them be apes?

And what a naive thought! - that apes can really help us understand the fundamental riddles of human existence. As if I could make that long-departed cat understand the motivations that caused me to teach her some sit and rollover tricks.

(I was refuting the claim made by some acquaintances that cats cannot be taught to respond to simple words. They can indeed be taught to respond to simple words, if motivated, but they are hard to motivate. The cat's native senses are far better than the human's, and the cat - who, unlike the dog, has no great delight in obedience - is readily distracted by other interests.)

Here are some linguists' thoughts on these perennial talking animals stories and why they don't pan out.

*Apes' vocal cords do not seem to permit speech, so experiment in communicating with primates rely on signals of various types.