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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 Gaaark on Tuesday September 13 2016, @06:25PM
Are there any linguists n the room?
Question is, why are there feminine and masculine pronouns: eg.
La main, versus le main
Why is there "la" and not just "le" in French? Even "le femme" would be understandable as the girl even though "le" is masculine.
Long time listener, first time asking...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(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. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:01PM
Armchair linguist here, so I'll just quote Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun-class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. This system is used in approximately one quarter of the world's languages....
Grammatical gender is found in many Indo-European languages..., Afro-Asiatic languages..., and in other language families such as Dravidian and Northeast Caucasian.... Also, most Niger–Congo languages have extensive systems of noun classes, which can be grouped into several grammatical genders. On the other hand, grammatical gender is usually absent from the Altaic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic and most Native American language families. [Splitting long paragraph for clarity.]
Modern English is not considered to have grammatical gender, although Old English had it, and some remnants of a gender system exist, such as the distinct personal pronouns he, she, and it. However, aside from a handful of nouns like "god" and "goddess", "duke" and "duchess", "tiger" and "tigress", and "waiter" and "waitress", gender is almost exclusively found in pronouns and titles. Because gendered nouns and pronouns accurately reflect the biological sex of whatever they represent..., English is said to have natural gender.
English has a very limited system of grammatical agreement, mostly limited to plural. In Spanish, for example, the conjugation of the verb can help determine exactly what the subject is when the subject has been elided.
On "Apparent Absence of Criteria:"
In some languages, any gender markers have been so eroded over time (possibly through deflexion) that they are no longer recognizable. Many German nouns, for example, do not indicate their gender through either meaning or form. In such cases a noun's gender must simply be memorized....
Second-language learners are often encouraged to memorize a modifier, usually a definite article, in conjunction with each noun – for example, a learner of French may learn the word for "chair" as la chaise (meaning "the chair"); this carries the information that the noun is chaise, and that it is feminine (because la is the feminine singular form of the definite article).
Also of interest under "Influence on Culture:"
For instance, German speakers more often described Brücke (f.) "bridge" with words like 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'fragile', 'peaceful', 'pretty', and 'slender', whereas Spanish speakers, which use puente (m.) used terms like 'big', 'dangerous', 'long', 'strong', 'sturdy', and 'towering'.
Also according to Boroditsky, the gender in which concepts are anthropomorphized in art is dependent, in 85% of all cases, on the grammatical gender of the concept in the artist's language. Therefore, in German art Tod (m.) "death" is generally portrayed as a man, but in Russian art смерть (f.) "death" is generally portrayed as a woman.
A problem with such arguments is that, as argued by Adèle Mercier, in French and many other languages the same class of objects can be referred to by words of different grammatical gender.
IOW, don't read too much into it and just memorize. Hope that helps!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:36AM
Okay, I got
"death" is generally portrayed as a woman.
My wife will be the death of me, lol.
But the rest is whoosh... good info, but still makes me think a new language (not Esperanto) is needed.
Actually, sign language s probably the most 'logical', from what I learned (but all I really remember of signing is "beer and more beer".
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by tfried on Tuesday September 13 2016, @07:20PM
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.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday September 13 2016, @09:31PM
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
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
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
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
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.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @09:11PM
English did have genderized language, just ask the Beowulf Poet [smartling.com]!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:31AM
If you're confused about male and female genders, you should see German.
(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.)
[sig redacted]