Purpose: Yerkish is an artificial language created in 1971 for the specific purpose of exploring the linguistic potential of nonhuman primates. The aim of this paper is to remind the research community of some important issues and concepts related to Yerkish that seem to have been forgotten or appear to be distorted. These are, particularly, its success, its promising aspects for future research and last but not least that it was Ernst von Glasersfeld who invented Yerkish: he coined the term “lexigrams,” created the first 120 of them and designed the grammar that regulated their combination. Design: The first part of this paper begins with a short outline of the context in which the Yerkish language originated: the original LANA project. It continues by presenting the language itself in more detail: first, its design, focusing on its “lexigrams” and its “correlational” grammar (the connective functions or “correlators” and the combinations of lexigrams, or “correlations”), and then its use by the chimpanzee Lana in formulating sentences. The second part gives a brief introduction to the foundation of Yerkish in Silvio Ceccato’s Operational Methodology, particularly his idea of the correlational structure of thought and concludes with the main insights that can be derived from the Yerkish experiment seen in the light of Operational Methodology. Findings: Lana’s success in language learning and the success of Yerkish during the past decades are probably due to the characteristics of Yerkish, particularly its foundation in operational methodology. The operation of correlation could be what constitutes thinking in a chimpanzee and an attentional system could be what delivers the mental content that correlation assembles into triads and networks. Research implications: Since no other assessment or explanation of Lana’s performances has considered these foundational issues (findings), a new research project or program should validate the above-mentioned hypotheses, particularly the correlational structure of chimpanzee thinking.

Key words: Yerkish, artificial language, correlational grammar, operational methodology, Silvio Ceccato, machine translation, animal communication

Open peer commentary on the article “A Critique of Barbieri’s Code Biology” by Alexander V. Kravchenko. Abstract: My commentary criticizes Kravchenko’s objections to Barbieri’s biosemiotic theory. Because Kravchenko holds that concepts of signs, codes, and languages should be applied only to humans, his position, which is neither clearly explained nor defended, completely rules out any semiotics that would apply to biological construction in organisms (genetic codes and their expression), intra-organismic communication processes (molecular signals and their interpretations), informational processes in nervous systems (neural codes and how they are read out), and animal communication. I argue that most of the critique is about unproductive disagreements over word usages rather than an attempt to develop an alternative biosemiotics. Kravchenko’s critique also misconstrues how biosemioticians think about signs, codes, interpretation, meaning, and epistemology.

First paragraph: Ernst von Glasersfeld’s contributions to the LANA Project (the Language Analogue Project) were very important to its seven years of success, 1971–1977, during which the effort was led by the senior author of this paper… Indeed, his contributions have helped perpetuate research into the language skills of apes and sea mammals to this day. Ernst was a member of the original team of 1970 that formulated the proposal to the National Institutes of Health for four years’ funding to develop a computer-monitored keyboard-situation appropriate to research on the language skills of which the great apes might be capable.

Key words: animal communication, LANA project, language learning

Departing from the theoretical framework of the semiotic hierarchy (Zlatev, 2009), realizing a form of cognitive semiotics based on ‘integrating methods and theories developed in the disciplines of cognitive science with methods and theories developed in semiotics and the humanities’i (cf. www.cognitivesemiotics.com) the paper analyzes the concepts of embodiment and communication along an evolutionary progression of four levels: biological, phenomenological, significational (sign-based) and extended/normative. Examples of human and animal communication are provided in order to clarify these distinct levels. Further, the concept of bodily mimesis and the model of the mimesis hierarchy (Zlatev, 2008, Zlatev & Andrén, 2009) that is predicated upon it are offered as conceptual and empirical tools in order to help explain the transitions leading to the two highest meaning levels: to sign use proper (from pre-sign meanings), and from this to normative, and eventually body-independent, objectified sign systems such as those of writing and mathematics. The leitmotif of the paper is the risk of either exaggerating or down playing the bodily bases of meaning and communication.