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posted by janrinok on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the click-brzzzp-click dept.

Vyacheslav Ryabov claims to have recorded a conversation between two dolphins demonstrating the use of "words" and "sentences":

A conversation between dolphins may have been recorded by scientists for the first time, a Russian researcher claims. Two adult Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, named Yasha and Yana, didn't interrupt each other during an interaction taped by scientists and may have formed words and sentences with a series of pulses, Vyacheslav Ryabov says in a new paper. "Essentially, this exchange resembles a conversation between two people," Ryabov said.

[...] Using new recording techniques, Ryabov separated the individual "non coherent pulses" the two dolphins made and theorized each pulse was a word in the dolphins' language, while a collection of pulses is a sentence. "As this language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins," he said in the paper, which was published in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics last month. "Their language can be ostensibly considered a high developed spoken language."

click

In his paper, Ryabov calls for humans to create a device by which human beings can communicate with dolphins. "Humans must take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of the planet Earth by creating devices capable of overcoming the barriers that stand in the way of ... communications between dolphins and people," he said.

The study of acoustic signals and the supposed spoken language of the dolphins (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.spjpm.2016.08.004) (DX)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @05:18PM (#401406)

    Until they actually decipher the language, it's probably premature to say it's (full) language just because it "looks like" language. We may be missing a big piece of the puzzle, comparable to not knowing that the chemistry of Mars soil can mimic life in the 1970's.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:36PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:36PM (#401452) Journal

    The computational linguist in me wants to contest that.

    You can recognize the difficulty/complexity classes of languages(repeating tokens, organized structure, context free grammar) without necessarily knowing any of the subjective meaning to any given element.

    You could tell the difference between someone speaking a foreign language, and purposefully babbling nonsense.

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:14AM

      by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:14AM (#401583)

      You could tell the difference between someone speaking a foreign language, and purposefully babbling nonsense.

      If you could, somebody would have figured out if the Voynich Manuscript was actually writing or intentionally obfuscated insanity.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.