{"id":213712,"date":"2025-05-10T05:12:12","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T10:12:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/origins-of-language-wild-chimps-mirror-linguistic-structures-in-human-language"},"modified":"2025-05-10T05:12:12","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T10:12:12","slug":"origins-of-language-wild-chimps-mirror-linguistic-structures-in-human-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/origins-of-language-wild-chimps-mirror-linguistic-structures-in-human-language","title":{"rendered":"Origins of language: Wild chimps mirror linguistic structures in human language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/origins-of-language-wild-chimps-mirror-linguistic-structures-in-human-language2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Humans are the only species on Earth known to use language. They do this by combining sounds into words and words into sentences, creating infinite meanings.<\/p>\n<p>This process is based on linguistic rules that define how the meaning of calls is understood in different sentence structures. For example, the word \u201cape\u201d can be combined with other words to form compositional sentences that add meaning: \u201cthe ape eats\u201d or append meaning: \u201cbig ape,\u201d and non-compositional idiomatic sentences that create a completely new meaning: \u201cgo ape.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A key component of language is syntax, which determines how the order of words affects meaning. For instance, how \u201cgo ape\u201d and \u201cape goes\u201d convey different meanings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Humans are the only species on Earth known to use language. They do this by combining sounds into words and words into sentences, creating infinite meanings. This process is based on linguistic rules that define how the meaning of calls is understood in different sentence structures. For example, the word \u201cape\u201d can be combined with [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213712"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213712\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}