Progressing to higher orders, Dr. Konrad V. Lorenz is perfectly able to communicate, on such matters as would interest them, with jackdaws, with mallards and with greylag geese, among others. His command of the Jackdaw language, for example, includes such subtleties as the two forms of the verb "to fly"—Kia, to fly away; Kiaw, to fly back home. Other persons, working with other birds, have achieved successes of their own. Ernest Thompson Seton recorded a long list of "words" in Crow; a scientist prepared a seven word "dictionary" of Rooster; etc.
When we come to the mammals, we might expect to find considerable increases both in the number of "words" and in the sophistication with which they are used. We will not be disappointed. It is hard to imagine a man who has lived for any length of time in intimate contact with a dog, for instance, who will deny that his dog has sought communication with him and sometimes attained it. It is true that domesticated animals (particularly when they are so thoroughly domesticated as the dog) are a special case—it is as though an American child were brought up in Babylon; he would undoubtedly learn to communicate, but it would be in Babylonian terms and not in the language he had been born to. It is worth observing that at least one dog—his name was Fellow, and he was an honored guest at Columbia University in New York—had a vocabulary in English of four hundred words, which he recognized regardless of who spoke them. But we must strike Dog from our list as, at best, a sort of beche-la-mer or pidgin, thoroughly contaminated with Human.
Cat might be purer—and some fifteen words of Cat have been identified, along with some six words of Horse and a few each of Elephant and Pig. But the linguists of the animal kingdom, at least in their own and native tongues, are the primates. The gibbon, the gorilla and the orangutan have notable vocabularies; and the chimpanzee, best studied of primates short of man, not only has a vocabulary of some thirty-two distinct words, according to Blanche Learned, but may have a unique claim to linguistic fame. A philologist named George Schwidetzky believes he has found traces of Chimpanzee loan-words in ancient Chinese ("ngak"), in a South African Bushman dialect (a tongue click), and even in modern German! (The German word, "geck," derived from Chimpanzee "gack.")
One definition of Man calls him "the tool-using animal"—yet elephants crop tree branches to swat flies, spider monkeys construct vine ladders for their young, and there is some plausible evidence that the polar bear hunts sleeping walruses with the aid of that primitive tool, the missile, in the form of a hurled chunk of ice. Another definition identifies. Man as "the linguistic animal"—but even the few remarks above will indicate that that claim is far less than unique.
Perhaps there is room for a third definition of Man, not much better than the other two, but very likely not much worse: Man, the snobbish animal . . . who clings to evolution's ladder one rung higher than the brutes beneath and saws away, saws away at the ladder beneath in an attempt to sever the connection between himself and the soulless, speechless, brainless Beast . . . that does not, in fact, exist.
Frederik Pohl, Slave Ship
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