What is language? An animal's perspective.
Who showed the birds words to tweet bird to bird?
A question of interest to a linguistic nerd,
an anthropologist, or metaphysical poet too.
It's a marvelous mystery this pigeon coo coo.
Bird in South America! Bird in Spain!
Same bird but the bird song is not the same,
A cultured coo due to enculturations
An evolving song learned across generations.
Why be Bees dancing in syntactic ellipses?
"for food fly away from sun at 70 degrees"
There is you, here is me, the food is by the tree,
swoops and shapes that show intersubjectivity.
Bees are dumb! And a bird has no brain!
But somehow these beasts are learning and saying,
teaching and reading, encoding, relaying,
if this is not language what are they displaying?
Must bonobos play oboes, mimic music on sheets?
Is a monkey's smile not a smile cuz it shows so much teeth?
Must vervets be mavericks in fighter cockpits?
And frogs croak Shakespeare from their slimy swamp lips?
Before primates with noses and notions held high
abandon their selves and open their eyes.
We are talking to each other all of the time,
what is seen and measured is not the only sign.