
Bonobo and chimpanzee gestures overlap extensively in meaning - pvaldes
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2004825
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dreyfiz
The idea that bonobos and chimpanzees can speak the same language is
absolutely thrilling. Even though bonobos are chimps, I always saw the two
species as very distinct; this discovery really resets my worldview on
multiple levels.

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jerrre
I'm not an expert by far, but aren't many animal "gestures" shared by multiple
species: lying down to surrender, standing on hind legs to threaten, showing
teeth, etc...?

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wallace_f
Also not an expert, but I suppose at some point there can be a distinction
made between body language and sign language?

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fallingfrog
Kind of funny how much of their vocabulary consists of various ways of saying
"get over here, you sexy beast.."

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pvaldes
Even more interesting, If staying bipedal means 'lets make sex' for bonobos, I
wonder if human observers could change the behaviour of studied bonobos
increasing the sexual encounters (just because we are standing there shouting
'lets make sex' with our bodies all the time). Wouldn't be crazy if we repeat
the research with robots and remote cameras to find that they are not so
promiscuous as we thought?

We must be a particularly foul-mouthed species for them. And we share also the
'stop what you were doing' grab/slap.

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sunstone
It's quite possible that human language started as body/gesture language and
then migrated to primarily voice.

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ThrustVectoring
IMO it's still primarily a body/gesture language. Oh, sure, it has some
abstract symbolic representation stuff built on top of more primal human
communication channels. However, when the new stuff conflicts with body
language and paralinguistic signals, it typically gets disregarded.

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brazzy
> IMO it's still primarily a body/gesture language.

Nonsense.

The vast majority of what we communicate nowadays cannot be represented
adequately or at all by your "more primal human communication channels".

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ben_w
I believe a single emoji — ponder or similar — is genuinely an appropriate
response here, however they are automatically stripped. A policy I agree with,
but they are surprisingly capable despite their simplicity and (in many cases)
direct mapping onto body states.

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brazzy
Now try expressing the concepts of "automatically stripped", or "policy I
agree with", or "surprisingly capable" in emoji or body language.

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xj9
emoji don't help you express precise rational statements. they add something
that text lacks: the subtext that people normally express with tone and body
language. emoji aren't a _replacement_ for your day to day unicode symbols,
they are something you can _add_ to make your messages more expressive.

 _technically_ you can express all of the same things without emoji, but
there's a limit to how subtle you can be. by adding an emotional cue using an
emoji i can completely change the meaning of a statement by adding contextual
subtext.

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brazzy
That's a very different thing than the claim that human language is "still
primarily a body/gesture language", which is what I was arguing against.

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ben_w
There are many interesting things which cannot be expressed by body language,
one of which is _what is meant_ by “primarily”.

Maslow's hierarchy? Body language is primary, it comes first.

By number of bits required to describe the typical change to synaptic weights?
No idea.

By number of raw bits? If I had to bet, I’d give 10:1 that body language beats
words with reasonable compression for both audio and video streams, much
stronger certainty for uncompressed.

