Subject: human and non - human languages

bearing on the question of primate language skills is the observation that they appear not to imitate the * manner * of doing something - - controverting the " monkey see , monkey do " saw . a clue as to why people have cultures and languages and primates do not came up in a national geographic series on primate research that i saw a few weeks ago . they had shown some chimps using sticks to poke through holes in a " beehive " and suck off honey , introducing the topic of tool use . in the next segment , the researcher had some candy on a table surrounded by some sort of cage with vertical bars . he had a primitive kind of rake with three wide-spaced tines resting on the table , the handle through the bars . the chimp had the same , on an adjacent section of the table . if the tines were down , they could n't get the candy because the wide-spaced tines could n't retain it . the researcher demonstrated flipping the rake over . with the back of the rake on the table top , it was easy to pull the candy to one 's hand . no matter how often he saw it , the chimp did n't get it . the inference from this and other experiments was that the primate perceives use of the tool to accomplish the end , but does not attend to the manner of using the tool . in the next segment , there is a similar setup with a small child . the child fails with the tines down . then the adult demonstrates flipping his rake over . the child immediately , on the next turn , does the same , even moving the rake through a curving path very much like that executed by the adult 's rake , to capture the object ( a block ) and pull it back to the edge . in support of this hypothesis , i believe there are no observations of cultural differences between one community of primates and another comparable to differences of human " body language " style and linguistic dialect - - differences in the manner of doing the " same " things , functionally inconsequential differences such that " we " do these things this way and " they " do the same things that way . bruce nevin bn @ lightstream . com
