As far as we know, cetacean communication is **proto-**linguistic. Not quite Language yet, but not too far from it. The article shows abstraction of smaller units, but it doesn’t show the recursion Language shows, of blocks building block-building blocks.
And that recursion is damn important. It’s what allows us to pick a finite number of elements, and create an effectively infinite number of utterances out of them.
I went at length on this topic in !ethology@mander.xyz (the comm about animal behaviour). Here’s a link. But, to keep it short:
As far as we know, cetacean communication is **proto-**linguistic. Not quite Language yet, but not too far from it. The article shows abstraction of smaller units, but it doesn’t show the recursion Language shows, of blocks building block-building blocks.
And that recursion is damn important. It’s what allows us to pick a finite number of elements, and create an effectively infinite number of utterances out of them.