What is language? On the face of it, the question seems simple. After all, language is so much a part of our everyday experience, so effortlessly employed to meet our impulses to communicate with one another, that it cannot be too intricate a task to figure out how it works. Hidden below the surface of the “what is language” question, however, is a web of mysteries that have taxed great minds from the beginning of recorded history. Plato, Lucretius, Descartes, Rousseau, Darwin, Wittgenstein, and Skinner, to name just a few, have all probed into some aspect of the human capacity for speech, yet none of them were able to explain the origin of language, why languages differ, how they are learned, how they relay meaning, or why they are the way they are and not some other way. These issues remain an enigma that awaits further exploration.

This is not to say we have learned nothing or know nothing about our ability to utter meaningful sequences of sound. Centuries of careful observation and experimentation on language have revealed some extraordinary insights into its fundamental properties, some of them quite surprising. Perhaps most significant, language has no analogs in the animal kingdom. Nothing remotely similar to language has been discovered in the vast array of communication system utilized by the fauna of our planet. Language, it seems, is uniquely human, a fact summarized well by Bertrand Russell (1948) when he exclaimed: “a dog cannot relate his autobiography; however eloquently he may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though poor.”

J. W. Lindsay. Introduction to typology: the unity and diversity of language. Sage, Newbury Park, CA (adapted).

According to the text, judge the items that follow.

Human beings are the only representative of our planet fauna to communicate through a system.