Kanzi's Primal Language: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work on the language capabilities of the bonobo Kanzi has intrigued the world because of its far-reaching implications for the evolution of the human language.Kanzi's Primal Language takes the reader behind the scenes of the famous language tests that were performed on Kanzi and featured in popular television documentaries. Showing how Kanzi originally acquired language when he was a young ape - spontaneously in a culture that he shared with humans - this compellingly written book offers important new insights into how culture and language interlace in early childhood. The reader is helped by a novel catalogue of design features of language codifying salient features of Kanzi's language and their concordance with human language. In their penetrating study of how culture shapes first-language acquisition, the authors present a well-founded hypothesis of a gene-culture co evolution of human language, and a thought-provoking discussion of the place of science in human culture.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Kanzi Acquires Language in a Forest in Georgia Design Features of Language Ambiguous Human Culture What Does It Mean to Study Language? Summary: The Catalogue of Design Features Appendix 1: The Apes Appendix 2: The Keyboard Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
PA R SEGERDAHL is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Bioethics at the Karolinska Institute and Uppsala University in Sweden. He has published several philosophical inquiries into language in British and American journals, and in his book Language Use (1996). He currently leads a research project studying the concept of natural behaviour in domestic animals. WILLIAM FIELDS is Research Scientist at the new Great Ape Trust of Iowa in Des Moines (GATI), USA. Before the move to GATI he was Associate Program Director at the Language Research Centre in Atlanta, where he developed a novel anthropological understanding of ape language research. SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH is Professor of Biology and Psychology at Georgia State University, USA. She has published results from her groundbreaking research on ape language in numerous scientific journals and in the influential books Apes, Language and the Human Mind (with Stuart G. Shaker and Talbot J.Taylor) and Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (with Roger Lewin). She is currently Director of the Bonobo Research Program at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, USA.

Review :
'This book caused me to think in exciting new ways about language and its evolution. It represents a groundbreaking addition to the literature on language, situated right at the intersection of a number of disciplines, ranging from anthropology to psychology to linguistics to neuroscience - and of course, philosophy.' Barbara J. King, College of William & Mary, USA 'It has been said that language theorists tend to head for the door on those rare occasions in which Wittgenstein is brough into a lecture. I think Kanzi's Primal Language is just the thing to open their minds to how the kind of conceptual investigation pioneered by Wittgenstein might bear importantly on their interests. The book should also be of interest to philosophers of science, in its provocative challenge to our normal scientific culture...As for those of us who are called upon to interpret and teach Wittgenstein, I believe we will be able to find in it, at the very least, many fresh and illuminating examples to illustrate his ideas and methods.' - William H. Brenner, Philosophical Investigations