| Animals tend to respond to stimuli in their communications. Song birds use songs to establish territory and attract a mate. The birds were responding to the other birds being in the vicinity.
Humans have conscious thought with which they can produce new concepts and ideas to communicate.
Much like how a parrot can talk, but it doesn't really know what it is saying. Also Parrots can only mimic what a human says.
If I want a parrot to say "polly want a cracker" I have to repeatedly say to the parrot "polly want a cracker" until it can replicate the phrase exactly.
One could not introduce the words separately to the parrot. I cannot teach the word "polly" one week and then introduce "cracker" a week later and so on and so forth, and then expect the bird to put the sentence together using grammar and syntax. Parrots are great mimics of other animal sounds, This was probably a good evolutionary advantage .
Humans on the other hand, can take separate words and the basic grammar of how a language works and produce new sentences that they did not have to memorize. Humans have the ability to take the grammatic/syntactic rules of a language (which are finite in number) and use these rules to theoretically create sentences of infinite length and compromising of any topic you can think of. |