Debalic wrote:
zepoodle wrote:
Edit: To clarify. You first misunderstood me, then called me dumb, then ignored a dictionary reference shoved under your face, and then said "enough with the stupid semantics" when you realised you were wrong about the semantics, which, coincidentally, were the subject of discussion.
You were trying to convince me that cats weren't social because they don't "speak". In "verse". That's pretty stupid.
I think his original premise was that cat's don't
banter, their social medium is more in body-language than in sound. He agreed with you that cat's have society, but the two of you hung up on the word "converse". Zepoodle wanted to talk about how cats "
communicate", and you seemed to take the words "
communicating" and "
conversing" as meaning identical things, whereas Zepoodle had a more pedantic separation of meaning between the words "
communicate" and "
converse".
Therefor when Zepoodle insisted that "cats don't converse" you took him to mean that "cats don't communicate (and therefore have no society.)"
Whereas what Zepoodle meant was that "cats don't converse", that is, "cats don't communicate in spoken language, cats communicate in body-language and their society doesn't really include
banter because bantering requires a playful use of words, or plays on words, and body-language is better at communicating emotions or whole concepts at once, rather than discrete words."
Interestingly enough, adult cats are largely silent, unless they are interacting with humans. It's only around humans that adult cats vocalise. (Apart from purring, which has a piezoelectric effect on their bones that helps strengthen them because of the frequency of the purring sound, and of course, that famous yowl when cats fight or mate.) This extra vocalisation around humans possibly shows that cats understand that humans communicate with sound, and that cats, either individually or as a socially learned thing, are attempting to tell us things verbally.
