The difference between human language and animal language
For a long time, language has always been seen as the preserve of people and used as a criteria to differentiate human and animal. But look at that what is language for. It fulfills two functions: it tells us about things and it allows us to interact in various ways. That is to say, both the communication systems of human and animal can be called as language.
What’s more, there are a lot of similarities lying between human language and animal language. Firstly, both human and animal would use medias in order to communicate information, for example: hearing, vision, touching, smelling and tasting, these five kind of expression forms. Secondly, both human and animal would only choose one or at most two of the five forms as main instrument. In a word, on the whole, human language and animal language are similar in many aspects.
Having talked about the resemblance between human language and animal language, we will move on to the differences between them and it will help us have a deeper understanding of the meaning of language. The following will make an analysis about the distinction between the human language and animal language from two perspectives: the expression form and content.
Expression form
Let’s begin with the body language. It is the most common system used by the animals and here is an example. Honeybees live in large colonies consisting of a queen bee, drones and worker bees, which are the offspring of the queen and drones. Once a worker has located a source of nectar, it returns to the hive in order to signal the location to the other forager bees. This is achieved via a sophisticated dance performed on a wall inside the hive. The dance indicates the distance of the food source from hive, as well as its direction. Of all expression systems, body language isn’t simpler than the others due to its difficulty of acquirement then why animals prefer to it. The reason behind is that...