Hi @swamidass,
As someone whose Ph.D. is on the subject of animal minds, I have to say I was underwhelmed by the Smithsonian magazine article, What can bonobos teach us about the nature of language?
First, the claim that scientists cannot agree on what the difference between language and communication actually is, is a misleading one. May I refer you to the following article:
Alex, B. (2018). “Could Neanderthals speak? The Ongoing Debate over Neanderthal language”. Discover , November 6, 2018. A brief excerpt will suffice:
“Without straying too far into academic debates over the nature of language, let’s just say there are broad and narrow theories when it comes to what actually constitutes language.
“A broad view defines language as a communication system in which arbitrary symbols (usually sounds) hold specific meanings, but are not fixed or finite. Words can be invented, learned, altered and combined to convey anything you can think.
“ Narrow definitions focus on syntax and recursion, structural properties shared by all human languages today. These both refer broadly to the set of rules that guides how statements can be formulated in any given language, and they are thought to be hardwired into our brains. By this view language is ‘a computational cognitive mechanism that has hierarchical syntactic structure at its core,’ in the words of biologist Johan Bolhuis and colleagues.”
The point I want to make is that Kanzi’s attempts at communication don’t even satisfy the broad criterion of language, let alone the narrow one. Chimpanzee vocalizations cannot be combined to make an infinite number of sentences, for instance. Nor can chimpanzee vocalizations (or lexigrams, for that matter) be “invented, learned, altered and combined to convey anything you can think.”
Allow me to quote from If a lion could talk: animal intelligence and the evolution of consciousness (The Free Press, 1998) by Stephen Budiansky, a former Washington editor of Nature, whose book was highly praised by Sir John Maddox (Editor Emeritus of Nature) as well as by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs.
Kanzi’s learning by observation as [his mother] Matata pushed lexigrams and received various rewards is one of the few thoroughly documented instances of observational learning in animals. It remains far from clear, however, that any of this use of symbols equates to an understanding of symbols… There is indeed a semantic trick in even calling one of those lexigrams “please.” Why “please”? All that key does is initialize the computer. Does the ape understand the concept of “please”? (p. 154)
Savage-Rumbaugh reports that 96 percent of Kanzi’s utterances take the form of demands for food, tickles, or other activities. As we shall see, this fact alone implies something fundamentally different about what Kanzi is understanding and what a human child is. (p. 156)
Children will say “red” or “plane” or “cat” in circumstances where they show no interest at all in obtaining the object referred to. Uttering the name is a goal in itself. This behavior appears spontaneously at around nine to thirteen months. (p. 157)
It is the fundamental difference between using symbols and understanding symbols that constitutes the discontinuity between animals and humans, and which leads to the manifest and huge gap between the rote demands of language-trained apes and the conceptual flights of humans. Savage-Rumbaugh has argued that in terms of quantitative acquisition of “words” and combination of those words into sentences, Kanzi equals the abilities of a two-and-a-half-year-old human. But the qualitative difference in the way Kanzi employs words from the way even a one-year-old child does is vast, and is what allows a child to keep on expanding its grasp and use of language. “If a child did exactly what the best chimpanzee did,” says [critic Herbert] Terrace, “the child would be thought of as disturbed.” (pp. 159-160)
Finally, I note that neither of the authors of the Smithsonian article has a science background. One is a photographer, and the other is currently studying for a Ph.D. in comparative literature. Although she has authored a novel, this is her first article for Smithsonian magazine. May I courteously suggest that caution is called for, when assessing the credibility of such an article.