pedantry: many non-human animals communicate, in that they create signals with understood meanings; what appears to be special about language is that using it, one can string the same symbols together in different orders, and the understood meaning changes.
That seems to be satisfied by the existence of "like/dislike" modifiers (and possibly directional/proximity modifiers, if the example given is accurate to the research).
Animal language comes from their genes, it is equivalent to laughter and crying and body language of humans. You can do a lot with just those, you can cry and point and you properly communicate that you are sad because of a thing etc.
Human then have another level of language above that that we invented, there is no evidence of animals having anything like that. We can teach an animal to understand some words, but then that animal wont teach their kids to do it, it is a one time thing so they aren't anything like human language learning and culture.
Phrases like that are meaningless without criteria.
Even opposite extremes like “nothing is special”, vs. “everything is special” can be viewed as both true, given sympathetic readings of each phrase’s presumed criteria.
Well, yes they are. No animal comes close to how we communicate and internalize our communication skills, and naturally externalize them with visual symbols, invented hand signs, etc. even before we extended all that to formal writing systems for our languages, like we are using right now.
I am optimistic about whales & dolphins having some level a real of language. But best possible scenarios don’t come near us.
I think you mean “communication”. Yes, even bacteria communicate, so we are not special in communicating. Which for us would include our instinctive facial and body responses, our scent, etc.
Special doesn't mean "we do and they don't", we both utilise language, but Humans' do it to a much higher degree.
I don't see Chimpanzees typing to other Chimps across the world on a Hackernews forum. That is special and is unlike anything else in the animal kingdom.
