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Animal Communication and Human Language

The Language of the Bees

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

E. Benveniste
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Extract

To apply the notion of language to the animal world is admissible only at the price of misusing terms. We know that it has been impossible until now to prove that animals enjoy, even in a rudimentary form, a means of expression endowed with the characteristics and functions of human speech. All serious observations made of animal communities, all attempts to establish or verify, by means of various technical devices, any form of speech comparable to that of man have failed. It does not seem that animals which emit certain kinds of calls are thereby displaying any behaviour from which we may infer that they are conveying ‘spoken’ messages to one another. The fundamental conditions for a strictly linguistic communication seem to be lacking even in the higher animal world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , January 1953 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © 1953 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Cf., among others, Maurice Mathis, Le peuple des abeilles, p. 70: ‘Dr. K. von Frisch had discovered … the behaviour of the baited bee on its return to the hive. According to the nature of the food to be exploited, honey or pollen, this bee performs a regular exhibition dance on the wax combs, turning in a circle for a sweet substance or in figures of eight for the pollen.'

2 Karl von Frisch, Bees, Their Vision, Chemical Senses, and Language. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950.

3 Cf. Frisch, op. cit., p. vii (Foreword by Donald R. Griffin).

4 Since these pages were written, a review of Frisch's book by F. Lotz, published in Word (1951), VII, 66, has already called the attention of the linguists to this problem and offered some of the remarks presented here.