Documentary on animal & human language. A strangely “hard to find” Horizon episode. From advocacy.britannica.com During the last four decades, several groups of primatologists have undertaken research programs aimed at teaching a human language to nonhuman great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans). The apparent success of efforts in the 1970s to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to Washoe, a chimpanzee, and Koko, a gorilla, challenged traditional scientific and philosophical assumptions about the intellectual capacities that supposedly distinguish human beings from other animals. More recently, the striking achievements of Kanzi, a bonobo who apparently has learned more than 3000 spoken English words and can produce (by means of lexigrams) novel English sentences and comprehend English sentences he has never heard before, has strengthened the case of those who argue that the thinking of higher apes is much more complex than had previously been assumed and that the capacity for language use, at least at a rudimentary level, is not exclusively human. The latter conclusion, which implies that some of the cognitive systems that underlie language use in humans were present in an evolutionary ancestor of both humans and apes, is still vigorously disputed by many leading linguists and psychologists, including Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. According to Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi was able to understand unusual and grammatically complex requests such as Go get the …
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Alexander Arguelles presents a series of videos to provide introductory overviews of the languages of the world. Working diachronically through various language families in turn, he demonstrates how to identify each language, translates a text sample to show how it works, and discusses its genetic affiliation and cultural context. For further information about the series, please refer to www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com
Video Rating: 4 / 5
