mydivirtual cyberspecial psychedelic before&after.

Attempts to get animals & birds to "talk," or at least to understand human speech, range all the way from experiments with the anthropoid apes (a chimp or bonobo is said to be able to pronounce "papa," "mamma," & cup" in a hoarse whisper) to the speaking crow, parrot, & mynah bird, whose vocabulary can be quite extensive. Some claim that higher forms of animal life, such as bird, dog, cat, chimp a.s.o., are capable of really changing man's words into symbols & thus understanding them. But even in the best-attested cases, there is no evidence that any of the animals in question are able to project their "language" into nonimmediate situations, which is a characteristic of all human speech. Dog or bird can give us warning of a peasant, immediate danger or notice of a present, immediate desire; it cannot warn you, as the primitive human being can, that there is a danger lurking in wait a long distance away, or inform you that it desires to do or have something, not now but tomorrow. This non-immediate feature seems reserved to the systems of communication of human beings, be they oral, gestural, symbolic, pictorial, or written ...

Meaning may be transferred by devices that have nothing to do either with the spoken language or with its written counterpart, and this basic proposition few of us will be so hardy as to deny. A logical corollary is that language as we know it did not necessarily have to become the great conveyor of thought that it is. Granted a different historical development, it is conceivable that the human race might have reserved its funny oral passages for purposes of eating and breathing only and develop an entirely different machinery for the transfer of meaning. That this might have been so is proved by the truly vast number of auxiliary meaning conveyors that the human race has actually devised and employs side by side with the spoken and written language. Our justification for discussingbthem here lies partly in the fact that they are auxiliaries to language, partly in our partiality for the broader definition of language as that which serves to convey meaning, partly in the fact that a historical discussion of language would be incomplete without them. In the written language, as we have seen already so many times before during the past years, we can discern at least two possibilities: the written language may follow the spoken language, symbolizing its sounds, or at least its words; or it may avoid any connection whatsoever with the spoken language and symbolize thoughts, ideas, and objects in 3D, hologram & all kinds of other "multimedia tricks"
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