“Animals are good, they do not ask questions, they do not criticize”(George Eliot,1864). Human beings have spent more of their life living with different sort of animals throughout history. Hence, ,according to some research domestication could have started in the Stone Age when humans needed animal strength to work. With this idea in mind, it is ordinary to believe that since this period, people have developed a great deal of feelings for animals which help them whole day working and taking care of humans. Nowadays, these feelings have become strong. In fact, much people guess that when they say to their pet an order as “get in”, “get out”, “sit down”, etc. Animals immediately understand  because they see their pet is doing what they say. Therefore, due to repetition and stimuli-reponse, animals end up catching on human's language. However, we will show that this “comprehension" is not possible even for humans, animals will never understand the real idea of an order.

First of all, producing words in our native tongue(humans) is very difficult,so the meaning of a simple order for an animal is imposible. We need to understand the process in our brains in order to discover the differences with animal’s brain. Generally, people do not stop to think that there are some areas in our brain which have to interact to catch and produce a simple world, for example house (at this point, I have to clarify that I will talk of “real” objects and I will avoid metaphysical topics). Human beings have to use two main areas in its brain, the first is called Broca zone which is located front of the left hemisphere; this area has to control whole muscles around our mouth, tongue, throat at the moment to speak. On the other hand, Wernicke zone is responsible for the structure and the meaning of our language. Both areas have been studied for many anthropologists and the main conclusion they found was that the evolution of our brains throughout history allow us to develop speech. Let me digress a few in order to explain the relation between evolution and language because Human beings are the only animals that can modify tools in order to get food, kill, and survive. Consequently, when human exploit something new, they modify their ambient to feel themselves comfortable. language is not something far from this idea.  

Furthermore, evolution has a huge role in our speech skills. Now we know that the evolution play a great deal in our language. However, language does not appear one day, “only when we need a word for an object we invent a name for it”. It means that only when people discovered fire, a new animal, new tool, etc.They had the necessity to give it a name to share the object in their community. Therefore, whole names that we have for objects are arbitrary. Thus, house is called house because all the community decides that House will be the name for the place where people live and not chair (saussure,1897).

On the other hand, animals do not have its brain as evolved as us. The above statement says that animals cannot use the brain language zones as us (Broca and Wernicke zone). Then, if animals had produced sounds in order to call objects, it would have been arbitrary as human speech. Let me give a famous example to illustrate the enigma. In 1965, a couple of scientists tried teaching human speech a chimpanzee called Washoe, after many years she could learn some sign language words. However, Washoe could never put all words in a right way to ask for water. Therefore, learn a language is not only to know vocabulary, animals must know what that world means. If I ask for water and another person does not know what water mean there will be no communication. Consequently, if I tell my pet “sit down” and it does not know what he has to do, it will not have purpose.

Moreover, If language is difficult to animals, language can be difficult even for humans. Language needs minimum two people to get its goal, but sometime one of two people cannot understand what others folks are saying. Hence, we can say that the problem exist because two possible facts: firstly, one person does not know the object that his mate is talking about (the problem that we show in the previous paragraph); secondly, it could be a code enigma. What does code enigma mean? People always say that communication can be explained like some who says something, a code, and someone who receives the message (issuer, code, and receptor). However, this idea is totally wrong. In order to explain the last statement, let me give another example, the reader of this essay knows apples and I know apples, however, I am sure that my reader cannot discover what the color of the apple I am thinking is. Therefore, here we have the reason why sometimes conversations are difficult, the reference that our friends give us could not be clear. Consequently, animals will get confuse if humans order and they do not know what our pet have to do. Because of this linguistic issue, expressions with double meanings, human can develop sense of humor.

Finally, language has been the most important issue in human life and animals, and nobody has a result for this linguistic enigma.  Human beings can speak among themselves and they can order animals. Thus, human can talk about thing that they have around because they developed a vocal apparatus and human have a general idea of the world they are living in that allow them share ideas and get aims. One of these objectives is to share with animals; however, the interaction is unidirectional: human can say something to their pets but they will not receive any speech answer. Animals are in this world in order to accompany humans  and despite the fact that they can understand some words human tell them, human must love them and take care of them because animals are always sharing their feelings.  




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