Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite generation of meaning by combining phonemes into words and words into sentences. This contrasts with the very few meaningful combinations reported in animals, leaving the mystery of human language evolution unresolved.
I think the chimp behavior is more analogous to combining syllables into words than combining words into sentences—inasmuch as the former process still yields a finite number of words, while the latter can generate an infinite number of sentences.
That would require higher cognitive complexity though, wouldn’t it? Seems more rudimentary to attach simple meaning to simple sounds and combine those for “simple” extended meaning as opposed to having meaningless syllables create distinct words with distinct meanings.
Yeah, maybe I should have said morphemes instead of syllables.