In the Beginning was Information

3. Alphabetic: Every symbol generally represents a phoneme (e. g.English, Spanish).If it is not necessary to represent a certain number of sounds, then the setof symbols can be reduced even more. In the case of the genetic code, thenumber of different symbols is a minimum because of the certainty oftransmission; the same holds for binary codes and for Morse code.A2.2 Special Languages Used in the Animal WorldA language can be regarded as a system whereby certain sounds or gesturesconvey certain meanings. In this sense many animals like birds,bees, crabs, wolves, and dolphins communicate with one another. But asfar as fundamental characteristics are concerned, human language is vastlydifferent from the communication systems employed by animals:1. Creativity: Only human language can be creative. When speaking, onecan arbitrarily link together many lingual units to form well-constructednew sentences. Man is able to produce sentences which he has neverbefore uttered, and he also can understand sentences which he has neverbeforehand heard. Any arbitrary matter can be verbalised. But the communicationsystems used by animals are fixed and limited. The history ofexperiments with animals, purporting to teach them some complex language,is characterised by failure.2. Voluntary conventions: The vocabularies of all human languages allover the world consist predominantly of arbitrary vocal structures whichcorrespond to the relevant concept or object purely by convention. In contrast,the sounds and gestures used in “animal languages” are inherentlyfixed, and can thus not be arbitrarily assigned some other meaning.3. Comprehensiveness: The number of thoughts that can be expressed in ahuman language is unlimited, but it is fixed and bounded in the animalworld. The dance performed by bees is in principle such an effective communicationsystem that numerous different messages could be conveyed. But inpractice the system, being restricted to a few concepts only, is inflexible.4. Reason for transmission: The messages sent by animals depend oncertain stimuli (e. g. fear, warning, desire to mate, and quest for food), butman is not limited to such strictures.Although there are fundamental differences in quality between human languagesand the communication systems of animals, the messages conveyedby the latter do qualify as “information”. All five aspects of infor-215