Walker Percy Quotes

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking - all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

There's one thing that shows up on all of the lists of what makes us human: language. Our ability to share our thoughts and complex information with others far surpasses all the barks, squeaks and growls of our animal friends.

Chimps don't have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

No one seriously doubts that if Piraha children are brought up in Boston they'll be speaking Boston English, that is, that the capacities are present, unlike other animals, as far as is known. There's no challenge to the theory - not mine, but everyone's - that the human language faculty provides the means for generation of an infinite array of structured expressions.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

I do love animals so much, and have a great respect for them emotionally and intellectually, because they are so different from human beings.

It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

While language can surely be used for communication (as can much else), communication probably has no special role in its design or evolution.

You got to get away from words if you want to understand any animal. It thinks in pictures, it thinks in smells, it thinks in touch sensations - little sound bites like, it's a very detailed memory.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties...The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

I do ask myself sometimes, what am I doing writing about animals that talk like we do? But I guess it's okay if it brings across a point.

The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.

Why do people shush animals? Theyve never spoken

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

Human language is nothing like the signalling systems of other animals.

Anytime you work with animals, you begin to see more humanity in them.

But all this language gotten, and augmented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the tower of Babel , when by the hand of God, every man was stricken for his rebellion, with an oblivion of his former language.

We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would "get a good deal of it." This is all the students get anyway.