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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: 2) by gidds on Friday September 16 2016, @12:26PM
I'm no linguist, but I'd guess that French inherited gender from its ancestor Vulgar Latin. — Of course, that just raises the question of where Latin got it from. (After all, linguistic gender must have started somewhere!)
There's no easy answer to where languages get complex features such as this from in the first place. But I'd really recommend Guy Deutscher's book 'The Unfolding Of Language', which addresses this in great detail. It's written for a general audience but doesn't shy away from complex ideas, and I found it absolutely fascinating. It's one of those books that you feel smarter after reading.
Perhaps the more interesting question is why so many languages keep gender, instead of letting it die; this suggests that gender fulfils some useful function and 'earns its keep'.
I'd guess that allowing words to agree with each other (whether by gender, number, case, &c) helps keep things clear in complex sentences, making it easier to follow which words relate to each other. (In a genderless language like English, it's easy to get mixed up where 'it' could refer to more than one previous thing, and you have to repeat previous words or restructure the sentence to keep it clear. Gender can sometimes avoid all that.)
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