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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."
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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)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 13 2016, @06:31PM
Followup question: Why do so many non-English languages feel the need to give everything a gender? Inanimate objects, concepts, and geographical features do not need genders.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:22PM
My personal theory is just simply for the reason some languages have a plural and need agreement depending on singular/plural. Japanese, for example, lacks grammatical plural. Black English Vernacular has the interesting property that positive/negative tend to agree (in this way "Dindu Nuffin" is not a grammatical error--didn't and nothing are negatives in agreement [wikipedia.org], apparently the official term is negative concord also see here [wikipedia.org]). Diving into the article linked below:
Research indicates that the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders (animate and inanimate). According to the theory, the animate gender, which (unlike the inanimate) had an independent accusative form, later split into masculine and feminine, thus originating the three-way classification into masculine, feminine and neuter.
Many Indo-European languages retained the three genders, including most Slavic languages..., Modern Greek, and German....
However, many languages reduced the number of genders to two. Some lost the neuter, leaving masculine and feminine like most Romance languages... and Hindustani and the Celtic languages. Others merged feminine and the masculine into a common gender but retained the neuter, as in Swedish and Danish.... Finally, some languages, such as English and Afrikaans, have nearly completely lost grammatical gender (retaining only some traces, such as the English pronouns he, she and it), and Bengali, Persian, Armenian, Assamese, Odia, Khowar, and Kalasha have lost it entirely.
And just because:
Klingon divides nouns into beings capable of using language, body parts and others. Regular nouns in these categories form plurals with the endings -pu', -Du' and -mey respectively. The first category also has a separate possessive suffix in the first and second persons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @10:49PM
Even English sucks. Before you can even refer to someone (his/hers/he/she) you must first, for some reason, determine if the person has a penis or a vagina in their pants. How weird is that?
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:42AM
The penis/vagina test is inconclusive is slightly less than 1% of cases.
Asking them is more reliable.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:21AM
Use "they".
Solved.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---