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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: 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 --