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Article 6592 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Communication and Intelligence
Message-ID: <BILL.92Aug10155913@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: 10 Aug 92 22:59:13 GMT
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In-Reply-To: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu's message of 10 Aug 92 16: 31:39 GMT

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

    > As I see it, the unique aspect is that language is DIGITAL.

Let's for the moment ignore written language, and just think about
spoken language.  This is, as you say, "digital" (though I prefer the
word "discrete"), because utterances are strings of phonemes, and
every human language has a limited stock of phonemes -- 40 or so.

But other animals communicate in ways that are equally digital, except
that their vocabularies are much smaller.  Vervet monkeys, for
instance, have a distinct "snake" call, "leopard" call, etc.
  
I think the big difference is that human language is *combinatorial*.
Humans can put phonemes together into long strings that obey
systematic grammatical rules; for monkeys a single "phoneme" is a
complete message.

	-- Bill


