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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: 2) by tfried on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:20PM

    by tfried (5534) on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:20PM (#401446)

    Are there any linguists n the room?

    I'm not a linguist, but until one shows up, I'll fill the gap with a mix of speculation and education.

    I'll start by radicalizing your question: Why are there any articles? Most sentences would work really well without. We can easily understand "book is on table". Where meaning would be ambiguous between definite and indefinite article, we have enough helpers already: "this book is on some table", etc. So what do we need those articles for? My guess(!) is they really are pronouns gone wild. As it is really convenient not to have to specify the subject again and again, you start associating some token with your subject, i.e. "that book. that on table" (ok, example ill-chosen, but I hope you still get the point). Special casing is easy for people "guy with strange hat. he is reading book", and once talking about more than two people at once, it was probably straight-forward and useful to split pronouns into some obvious categories, such as man and woman. So we got frequent use of pronouns - originally freely chosen pronouns get stated with subject - frequent combinations become associated - pronouns suddenly stick with subjects - articles are born (and it could be one, two, or more different articles).

    A small digression: Are there languages without articles? Yes. Latin for example. But those also tend to have rather more complex rules to help clarify the role of subject and objects in a sentence. But beyond grammatical cruelties such as five cases, and various declinations, latin also has three grammatical genders (male, female, neuter). So getting back to your question: Why would languages do that?

    Well, I think we have established that a) pronouns are a good thing, and b) it may make sense to have more than one pronoun to help state slightly ideas involving two or more subjects. Further, c) it may be helpful / natural for certain pronouns to become associated with certain subjects. As an example, d) people are talking a lot about other people doing things, and so male / female / neutral would seem to be rather useful "default" pronouns.

    Which leaves the mystery of why would languages assign male / female, instead of neuter to certain things, or even - as in French - do away with neuter altogether? Good question, although at least for some objects that does not seem too far away. There seems to be a natural tendency in humans to understand lifeless objects (and particularly forces) as sentient actors. Children will understand "the wind" as a sort of person, who is blowing, because (he, she, it?) wants to blow. Similar rules apply for the sun, the moon, plants, the ocean, the fire, any object that "acts", really. So why not classify those "actors" the same as any other person, grammatically? And if such natural "actors" happen to play a large role in typical conversations, why not group everything into the same few/two categories, grammatically?

    Gap filled. Now waiting for the linguist to take over.

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  • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday September 13 2016, @09:31PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Tuesday September 13 2016, @09:31PM (#401482) Journal

    Swedish got rid of articles. They just glued them to the end of the noun, like this:

    "Boken är på bordet"

    bok = book, bord = table.

    And I'm still not sure when I have to use the passivum form, so that might be different than in surrounding languages.

    On thing I wondered: classical Greek and Sanskriet had the singular (1), plural (many) and also the dualis [wikipedia.org] (exactly 2). But modern European languages that I know seem to have lost that.

    It seems 2000 years ago people had got more grammar than now, and they ditched some. We also lost the optative [wikipedia.org], the medium voice [wikipedia.org] (between active and passive, i.e. for reflexive verbs)

    Language is odd.

    What really shocked me is when I found out, only a few years ago, that English has no good verb for NL: gunnen, DE: gönnen, SV: unna [wiktionary.org]. Sad :-( . Ik gun het je om er een werkwoord voor te bedenken. "wish" is not really a good match., "bestow"/"grant" only for one of its sub-meanings. I mean, come on, this is actually an *important* word , just like "solidarity"

    OK I'll stop rambling now..

    That really brings home the point, that some concepts are just easier to talk about in some languages than in others.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @10:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @10:21PM (#401491)

    Not linguist either, but since I speak some Asian languages in addition to several European ones, I just chime in to say that Latin is a bad example of your "article-less" language. Chinese and Japanese do fine without articles, and in the case of Chinese, even without "complex" rules to designate subject and objects, etc. And they also do not have genders (sometimes not even for he or she).

    I see language much more as a living thing, constantly evolving, without any apparent design. There is little "why" in this. A lot of things are drift or coincidence, and very influenced by culture and society. There are some cases in Chinese where words are influenced by the way they are written. And cases in Japanese where words are pronounced differently because they sound similar to concepts that are culturally seen as good or bad, or worthy of respect, etc.

    Things that had a clear function at some point, got applied in ways they were never meant for, and then stayed as a testimony to this history. A bit like DNA. Ask a geneticist why there is so much shit in introns and he may give a similar answer...

     

    • (Score: 2) by tfried on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:41AM

      by tfried (5534) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:41AM (#401674)

      I see language much more as a living thing, constantly evolving, without any apparent design. There is little "why" in this.

      Depends on the sort of "why" you are looking for. I was not trying to argue that languages need articles and/or grammatical gender. And thanks for providing the counter-examples that I was lacking. However, I do think it's fun to think about how languages would come up with mostly redundant features such as articles. I.e. not "what do we need articles for", but "how did articles evolve" (and I'm not so sure my theory on that is any good, but I still like it...).

      Same with my attempted answer to the OP's question: "why do so many languages have grammatical gender at all (and why would they extend it to inanimate things)". I'm totally not trying to argue that languages need this, but as it still appears to be rather "popular" among languages, it's very valid to ask how that feature came to be. Much like genetic evolution, it seems reasonable that this has provided a real advantage at least some time in the past (although that advantage need no longer apply at present). That's what my speculation is all about.

      • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @11:56PM

        by t-3 (4907) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @11:56PM (#402074)

        It seems to me that the "evolution" of language, contrary to the common idea/association (not saying this is right, just that that is what is how it is commonly percieved) of evolution with a growing complexity, language has seemed to always trend toward lesser and lesser complexity and simpler grammar. I'm not a linguist, but I would guess that "original" language/s were very complex and highly specific, making expressing complex/abstract ideas harder, and that over time language has simplified in order to make expression of complex ideas easier, and also as a byproduct of intermixing and cultural development.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 13 2016, @10:36PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday September 13 2016, @10:36PM (#401496)

    Are there languages without articles?

    According to the World Atlas of Language Structures [wals.info], approximately 1 out of 3 known languages don't use articles. That includes most of the languages used in India (unsurprising, because Sanskrit didn't have them either), Russian, many Eastern European languages like Polish and Czech, some East Asian languages like Korean, a variety of southern African languages, many of the languages spoken in Indonesia, and many languages used by native peoples of South America.

    There are also many known languages that will leave out articles a lot of the time, like Japanese, where "the" is understood before a noun unless something else is specified.

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