FYI: the link in your article to the published paper is broken. I also noticed the same in the Guardian article, so something must be up with the DOI link.
I think André Martinet's insights are sadly missing here. To him, language was `doubly articulated` in the sense that you combine sounds to form units, and then you combine units to form sentences, and THIS was the uniqueness of human language. It's not just about syntax, as interesting as this is.
what they mean is language from the human perspective. Sperm whales definitely have a phonetic alphabet AND now that we have the mechanical capacity to record sounds outside the human hearing range trees may also have a phonetic alphabet.
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