Making compound words is not an important difference between human language and the languages of other animals. Even in human languages the ability to make compound words seems to have appeared later.
The main difference seems to be in having sentences structured into verbs and their associated nouns (which may encode various roles, e.g. patients, agents, instruments, beneficiaries, subjects of intransitive or copulative verbs, nominal predicates, results etc.).
As far as we could determine until now, the language of most animals consists only of a set of nouns, which typically have an associated implicit action.
For example:
"Lion!" (meaning "Climb up the tree!");
"Eagle!" (meaning "Take cover under branches!");
"Children!" (meaning "Come here, to mother!");
"Bananas!" (meaning "Come here to eat good food!");
and so on.
Some apes have been trained to compose very simple sentences, as complex as agent-verb-patient, but it is not known whether a similar form of communication exists between wild apes.
The main difference seems to be in having sentences structured into verbs and their associated nouns (which may encode various roles, e.g. patients, agents, instruments, beneficiaries, subjects of intransitive or copulative verbs, nominal predicates, results etc.).
As far as we could determine until now, the language of most animals consists only of a set of nouns, which typically have an associated implicit action.
For example:
"Lion!" (meaning "Climb up the tree!");
"Eagle!" (meaning "Take cover under branches!");
"Children!" (meaning "Come here, to mother!");
"Bananas!" (meaning "Come here to eat good food!");
and so on.
Some apes have been trained to compose very simple sentences, as complex as agent-verb-patient, but it is not known whether a similar form of communication exists between wild apes.