Chimpanzees speaking human languages

[Caballero]

I heard that someone talk a chimpanzee to say "mama", "papa", "cup" and "up". Does anyone know where there are videos of this?

Do you think that a chimpanzee could be taught to distinguish tones, to make more distinctions so they could say more words?

[Perikles]

It is misleading to suggest that chimpanzees 'speak a language' just because they may be able to articulate a few words. Have a look at this news report, showing they have at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other.

[aleCcowaN]

Koko speaks a lot more.

[Caballero]

Oh, I know about animal sign language. I just think it would be interesting if they continued teaching apes to use speech, since this is also possible. Since they can only a limited number of sounds, there has to be a way to customize language for them.

[aleCcowaN]

I've always been amazed of my fellow humans, how easily they use their abilities as superior animals to force inferior species to fill the gap.

[irmamar]

There are several studies about the ability of apes to express themselves. There are many articles about the ability they have to learn deaf and dumb language. There is just one here (in Spanish), but this is not the only one.

People who spend part of their time with animals are able to understand many messages that those animals send. Animals don't have articulatory organs as we have, but language is just a code to cipher and decipher a message, a tool to communicate each other. Animals send and receive messages as we do, using other tools. I understand my animals when they want to communicate something nine times out of ten (more or less); they understand me ten times out of ten (I am not sure who is the intelligent being ).

[Frida]

dont know about monkeys but i read that a parrot is able to make all forms of sounds, witch is well known, but they can also learn to distinguish diffrent objects from eachother.. for exampel if you tell them "key" the can pick up a key among a number of other stuff. their are also able to recognize simple adjective like green. so if you tell them red they can pick up the right objekt.... this is ofcourse after a lot of training... but i think its pretty amazing anyway...