Human language is a fusion of the kind of communication birds, whales, and dolphins use with a more utilitarian type of communication used by, for instance, chimpanzees. As Robert Berwick, a professor of linguistics at MIT puts it . . . What got joined together was the ability to construct these complex patterns, like a song, but with words. . . . All human languages have a finite number of stress patterns, a certain number of beat patterns. Well, in birdsong, there is also this limited number of beat patterns. 26
