January 22, 2004

Monkeys 'Cannot Ape Human Language' "Monkeys can grasp simple rules of grammar but the key principle common to all human languages is beyond them, new research showed today." There's actually more information in the BBC story, but that one didn't have a monkey pun in the title, so I couldn't very well use it as the main link, now could I?
posted by languagehat 20 years ago
  • I like the difference in the two headlines: Monkeys 'Cannot Ape Human Language' = Monkeys are shit Monkeys 'grasp basic grammar' = Monkeys are great
  • /derail From the same site: Haggis Hunt 3-D Half Life gone horribly wrong.
  • Why study monkeys, and not the great apes?
  • I thought that finite-state grammars were a subset of phrase-structure grammars, in the Chomsky-hierarchy sense. /nitpick Either way, this puts the kibosh on my plans to implement the front end of a compiler entirely with monkeys. Oh, well, back to the drawing board....
  • I wouldn't take this as the final word on primate communication. Researchers aren't exactly united on how humans process langugage, let alone monkeys.
  • How humans process what? ;)