Human Language vs Animal Communication Systems

From what different experts or random people have meant, one can conclude more or less that language is the “emergence of thought in the natural world”. Through the complicated process of muscle activation and breath, sound is produced, the info of which we decode for the purpose of inserting the meaning into our minds. Animals, also living beings, have similarly developed communication systems so as to interact easier. The question is, on what do those two differ? They differ in three points.

The first one is called “Discrete Infinity”. Language as a tool has at its disposal a discrete number of fundamental units, the alphabet.  From these 26 little legos the human mind has offered outflows of tens of thousands of books, essays, dialogues, academic papers. This diversity of output, as time passes, goes to infinity. On the contrary, while animals do have basic mechanisms of communication, it is hard to say that they have the ability to express this great complexity.

The second difference lies on the thinking of time, space and the abstract. A human can speak about its baby age in the past and dream the love of its life in the future. On the other hand, an animal expresses itself at the moment. A human discusses on countries kilometers away, travels with a plan, and in general has sufficient clarity for many things that aren't at the exact place it is being/living. For the animals the dimension “space” is very restricted, they can only reach an understanding on what is “there”, “here”, “a little further”. Moreover, humans think abstractly, we talk about justice, write poems and compose music. Animals cannot comprehend that “sadness is getting more beautiful because we look like her” or “do a leap faster than decaying”.

The third one is on the purpose of communication. In the human/animal society every member has a role to play for a common purpose. That's why we have to transfer images from one to another, to get into the shoes of the other so that we function more efficiently as a whole. Two monkeys look at the same wig, may know that they see the same wig, but cannot interact in that complex way we humans do.

Source: The info was taken from a MOOC(online lesson) in coursera.org called Human Linguistics, the teacher was Dutch.

It seems that the root/basic difference that is preceding the differences above is the intelligence factor and it is explained by Michio Kaku why we were the species that got it at a blog link here: http://ideanautica.blogspot.gr/2017/02/michio-kaku-on-evolution-of-intelligence.html