Wittgenstein "If a lion could speak, we couldn't understand him"

Two quotations clarify this koan-like remark.

First, from Philosophical Investigations #206:

Suppose you came as an explorer to a country with a language quite unknown to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them, and so on?

Shared human behaviour is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

And elsewhere in the manuscripts (MS 165, 97f):

What we call 'instructions', for example, or 'orders', 'questions', 'answer', 'describing' etc. is all bound up with very specific human actions and an order is only distinguishable as an order by means of the circumstances accompanying it.

Humans share both a perceptual and a conceptual apparatus. We also behave in broadly similar ways, i.e. we share what anthropologists call 'universals' and Wittgenstein calls 'forms of life'. Because we share all these things, we have language in common.

A lion doesn't share any of this with us. We have no idea what the world looks like, both literally and in a broader sense, to a lion. None.

Since, language depends, for intelligibility, on a common frame of reference, and humans and lions do not share a common frame of reference, we get: "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him."