to video chat

[Joel S. Berson]

At 2/29/2012 09:02 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/apps-apes-orangutans-using-ipads-paint-video-chat-174457692.html
>  :
>
>"Orangutans using iPads to paint and video chat with other apes"
>
>I don't care if it's in OED or not. We should take notice of evolutionary
>leaps regardless.

When I saw that article, my skeptical hair rose slightly.  Not sure
why, except that it is not a peer-reviewed journal's description of a
well-designed experiment.  I'm awaiting Noam Chimpsky's refutation
(via iPad, of course), asserting that only humans are wired for
language ... oh, I forgot -- iPads are not wired.

Joel


>But more seriously, this kind of construction may require the formulation
>of a new syntactic, rather than lexical, rule to describe it.
>(Maybe someone has alread done so. In that case, we should simply celebrate
>the apes' achievement and future buying power.)

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