Discourse and gibbons

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Ron,

At 10:25 14/11/02 -0500, Ronald Kephart wrote:

>On the other hand... I recall (but have no reference for) a story about
>Koko, the gorilla who has acquired *some* use of ASL. One day her trainer,
>Penny Patterson, entered Koko's trailer and discovered a large pile of
>Koko-caca on the floor. She asked Koko (signing) "who did this?"  Koko
>signed back "*You* did it."

Alright, but that's not a lie: a lie is providing (linguistically)
deliberately false information that the interlocutor cannot detect as a lie.

As for chimps' mind, I never denied that they are quite smart. They have a
chimp mind, which is good enough for them to be chimps. We share aspects of
that mind, and arguments about chimps having a "proto-language" sound
pretty convincing to me from what I've read.

> > the "discourse" they may build with their language is so far removed from
> > human discourse that I don't see the point in calling it discourse.  (It's
> > just like calling the entire universe a "text": it's poetic, but
> doesn't say
> > what is its nature).
> >
>
>Here I disagree. Gibbons, chimps, bonobos, orangs, and gorillas are *much*
>more like us than we are like the entire universe. So close that, to me, as
>an anthropologist, it makes perfect sense to include an understanding of
>them in an understanding of what it means to be human.

I didn't make myself clear: I meant to say that the use of "discourse" to
refer to gibbon communication was sort of a metaphor like calling the
universe a "text". Perhaps my comparison was excessive. But my point was
that labels by themselves don't help us understand the object.

>(Disclosure statement: I sometimes spend hours at the local zoo watching our
>Bonobo family: mom, dad, and two preadolescent kids. They're some of my
>favorite people.)

Well, to me it would be sort of sad to go watch jailed persons for fun.
Unless you're also using "people" loosely.

Best,
-celso

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/
Assembleia da Língua:
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