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We cannot deny for one moment that animals think, understand, plan, and navigate the world just as humans do.
They just can’t use language as much as we can*, & mostly aren’t as big as us. But they’re way smarter than we’ve been taught , as every farmer in history would tell you.
And a lot of modern scientists. One cognitive science PhD met once said: the closer we look, the more we see non-human animals doing things we used to think only humans did. Tiny animals, she meant. Snails. Mites. Bacteria.
*can’t use language as much as we can: AS FAR AS WE CAN CURRENTLY TELL. Which isn’t all that much tbh
Me, I think birds are already there, full nouns & verbs. And I highly suspect insects have language systems too. I don’t mean some loose definition like like ants and chemical markers, or emotional expressions.
I mean what linguists mean: units of expression- sound (hand shapes, in signed langs) which recombine to signify different things, in a productive way, allowing for level upon level of transmission of thoughts. It’s a high bar to qualify as human language. And I think probably some nonhuman animals have it, and we’re just not listening closely enough.
But the closer we look.
(And yes there’s a Ted Chiang story about this)
Large parrots are in fact as smart as a toddler. African Greys, apparently, can memorize human language words (just the sound, no grammar or anything complex like that) and apply them to identify objects, colors and materials - even to objects they see for the first time!
And even smaller birds like budgies usually know the sound of their own name and can even assign “names” in form of sound sequences to other birds and humans they live with. You wouldn’t think they have enough brain size for that, but somehow they do
