All those words and meanings that you store in your brain, and all the words that you are yet to learn, are not simply in a look-up table to be accessed when you need them. You understand words. If you look at a nose, you recognize that what you are looking at is a nose, because through experience, you know what noses look like. If you read the word “nose,” you are not looking at a nose. Yet you also know what I’m talking about. On top of that, I could add other words, adjectives to enhance the idea; if you think of a humungous red nose you’ve linked together three independent concepts—size, color and an object—and fused them not only as a symbolic description of an imagined object, but an abstract one that is not based in reality, but of which you still can conceive. The plasticity of symbolism is complex and clever.
With the exception of onomatopoeia, linguists generally think that the symbolism in words is arbitrary. “Buzz” does sound like its meaning, but deux, zwei, ni, tše pedi, rua, núnpa and tsvey* all mean an ordinal number above one and less than three, yet there is no inherent reason why each of those words has come to mean the same thing.
Consider the sperm whale, improbably summoned into existence above the planet Magrathea in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Surprised by his genesis, he cheerfully pondered the origin of words as he fell:
And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming toward me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like . . . ow . . . ound . . . round . . . ground! That’s it! That’s a good name—ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?
Poor old whale. Paradoxically, he had a fulsome vocabulary to compare words when sourcing a de novo one for the lethal land beneath him. The implication is that there is an inherent property of the word “ground” that relates to its physicality. A study in 2016 suggested that there is the faintest wisp of inherence to certain words, and that this is universal. Linguists looked at a hundred words that qualify as basic vocabulary, from 62 percent of the world’s languages. These words included pronouns, basic verbs of motion, and nouns for body parts and natural phenomena, such as “you” and “we,” “swim” and “walk,” “nose” and “blood,” “mountain” and “cloud.” The analysis was probabilistic, meaning that they used statistics to calculate the possibility that sounds in words in unrelated languages are similar at a higher frequency than by chance alone. The English word that we use to describe the visual perception of electromagnetic spectrum energy at a wavelength between 620 and 750 nanometers is “red.” In other European languages that are closely related in time and space, red words also contain a prominent “r” sound: rouge, rosso, røt. But that “r” sound is also more likely than by chance a key part of the words for “red” in languages unrelated to Indo-European ones. The word to describe the protruding part of the centre of our faces with two holes in it, primarily used for detecting odor, is one that across the world is likely to have a nasal or “n” sound in it.
That doesn’t necessarily suggest that words with similar sounds have a common root, but it may indicate that the neurological framework that enables speech identifies a very basic underlying grammar that makes some words gravitate toward certain sounds. Our brains may gently steer us toward certain sounds somehow resembling the thing they describe.
Even with that in mind, this effect is subtle for unrelated languages, and took some deep data analysis to spot. Symbolism in words is not generally inherent. Words across the world for a nose might have a tendency to sound nasal, but nez, Nase, hana, nko, ihu, phˇasú and noz are not a nose, and they only describe a nose via consensus.
And so, any language must be predicated on the ability to attribute one thing with another. With those tens of thousands of words you know, you can order them and construct a learned syntax to convey meaning, and you do so every time you speak without making a total gallimaufry of it. Isn’t that clever? I looked up “gallimaufry” just to find an unusual or archaic word that was unknown to me, but even without knowing it, you can figure out exactly what it means from the context in that sentence.
A word is a symbolic unit of meaning to represent a thing, or an action, or an emotion. But when a parrot parrots, we don’t think that it is applying symbolism to the sounds it makes. It is merely copying. We also communicate non-verbally, via symbolic gestures, in the sense that the gesture itself doesn’t necessarily imitate the action that follows. Some of our gestures are demonstrative of the required action, such as a typical repeated beckoning action of a finger or hand that says “there to here.” Others are clearly not, and meaning is agreed in culture. A raised hand, flat palm facing away, means either “stop” or “hello” in many cultures. This wave is demonstrated by the naked man on the gold-aluminum plaques aboard the spaceships Pioneer 10 and 11, in case they ever find alien life as they speed across the Milky Way; I always thought that was a bit weird, as that hand action might mean “I wish to open-palm punch you in the face” or even “please violently impregnate me and then decimate my species” to any handed alien that is unaware of convention so arbitrary it can mean opposite things to many humans.
This concern is borne out in understanding the non-verbal symbolic gesture of chimpanzees and bonobos. A hold to the top of the arm from a bonobo may mean “climb on me,” and in chimps “stop what you’re doing,” especially to a young one. A big scratch on the upper forearms might mean “initiate grooming” to a bonobo, or “travel with me” to a chimpanzee. A raised arm might mean “I’m going to climb on you” to a bonobo, but “get that thing” to a chimp. Typically, a great many of the bonobo gestures mean “initiate copulation” or “initiate GG rubbing” (see section Whole Lotta Love), the most obvious one being a legs-akimbo presentation of their genitals, which seems to straightforwardly mean “interested?” Let’s hope that the aliens who find the Pioneer spaceships are not as horny as the bonobos. Chimpanzees are not quite so groinally obsessed, but even with that comparative chastity, waving a branch, or a touch on the shoulder seems to mean “let’s get it on” in both species of Pan. We can reasonably say that the gestures are symbolic and learned, not just because they don’t necessarily resemble the requested action (though presenting one’s genitals has a fairly obvious meaning), but because the meanings are different in two different species.
We also know now that other mammals are capable of learned vocal symbolism. Prairie dogs and vervet monkeys have alarm calls that are specific to the predator, and they act accordingly. For the monkeys, a low grunt warns of an eagle above, and in response, the monkeys look up and hide under trees; a hoo-haah pant follows a leopard being spied, and the monkeys head up for the thinnest branches of trees that will support their weight, but not a leopard’s; a high-pitched shriek warns of a snake, and the correct response is to stand up on two feet and survey the ground.
Audible symbolism is not just limited to primates either. Stridulation is the vigorous rubbing of two body parts that produces the sound of crickets at night, and a thousand other insects, as they advertise their sexual availability. It isn’t merely saying, “I am here and up for it,” as many vary the tone to mark territories or as alarms, as well as for sex. And while we’re on insects, the famous waggle dance of honey bees is nothing but a symbolic gesture, not audible, but indicating information about distance and direction to water or juicy nectar.
That animals communicate is not at all surprising. So far, our exploration of animal communication has revealed that the ability of non-human animals to pass on information via explicit messaging or via symbolic gestures is widespread and common. All the available evidence so far also suggests that it is nothing like ours, at least in terms of the number of units of meaning that they have in their vocabulary. As I’ve said elsewhere in this book, it is worth noting that almost all nature goes unobserved by us, and we ought to display some humility for the things we haven’t yet discovered. We’ve known about infrasonic vocalization in elephants since the mid-1980s, whereby they communicate with other elephants using frequencies well below our audible range, which has the advantage of travelling many miles with little distortion. We’re beginning to get a good idea of how dolphins and some whales convert air vibrations into aquatic noise; in these two cetaceans, it may have some similarities with our own larynxes, but in other types of whale, such as the baleen family, we don’t really know.
In captivity, many great apes have been taught a vocabulary of arbitrary symbolic gestures by instruction from their scientist keepers. Some primate celebrities such as the bonobo Kanzi, who was born at Georgia State University in 1980, or the gorilla Koko, born at San Francisco Zoo in 1971 (and who died in June 2018), have managed hundreds of signs as a basic language. Whether these are simply learned by rote, or they have some understanding of the signs themselves is debatable. A dog will go nuts at the sound of the word “walk” or “park,” not because it knows what a nice green space is, but simply because of the repeated association between that word and a jolly jaunt. My wife and I used to use the French word glace, so as not to alert our young children to a potential ice cream treat. But like dogs with no knowledge of French, they soon worked out that when we said glace in the context of a sentence and in the park, an ice cream often followed.
These captive apes have a significantly high number of signs in their vocabulary, hundreds, which is about the same as a three-year-old. But the non-human apes lack any sense of grammar, or ability to generate a sentence—a typical three-year-old can manage to generate a five-word sentence with ease—I really want ice cream. None of the other apes demonstrates structure in their communications, or tense. What children do easily is fundamentally different. Genes, brains, anatomy and environment provide the canvas on which children learn complex, abstract, arbitrary and symbolic words, grammar, syntax and language, and they do it without even trying.
Verbal, or at least audible, symbolism is not limited to humans, nor is gestural symbolism. As with other examples in this book, we must be wary of implying that similar behaviors in animals and us have a shared evolutionary origin. The genetics of FOXP2 in us and other vocalizing animals shows that there is a clear evolutionary precedent for the genetics, neuroscience and anatomical mechanics of making noise with our mouths, from birds to monkeys to dolphins to us (and this isn’t shared by insects, who make noise with their limbs and other body parts). The application of meaning to those symbols—noise and gesture—looks to be particular to certain species, but we are leagues ahead in range and sophistication.
We need to speak, and we need to describe, and we need to abstract, and we need to predict and exchange information about our thoughts and the thoughts of other people. Maybe in the wild, away from our prying minds, gorilla communications are much more sophisticated, by a mechanism that we can’t yet see. Their communication has evolved to suit what gorillas do, and not as evolutionary and neurological templates for understanding how we do what we do. For now, language is unique to us.
Unique to us, though probably Neanderthals were like this as well. And we will probably discover that the Denisovan people were also potential speakers, if we ever find any more of their mortal remains.