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If you put a bunch of humans (children) together, each with no previous knowledge of language, on an isolated island, they will in all likelihood come up with one. (Something close to this, as a live example, is a documented case I remember having read years ago of an all-new sign-language that emerged spontaneously among a large group neglected deaf-mute children at an institution a few decades ago. I think this was in Nicaragua or some other country in that region) What I mean is, our linguistic ability isn't dependent on culture (though tremendously enriched by it), it's biological. Why wouldn't the same hold for dolphins. I think they're very smart, but I don't believe they ever had something we could decently call a language.

Language is a strange and large territory. And, almost by definition, any social animal must be able to communicate with each other; And, in order to communicate, there must be shared formal rules. In essence: syntax.

Well, yeah, but those rules will only be unique and useful for probably 5 or 10 dolphins. The rest of dolphin kind won't have any innate concept of the vocabulary they've developed.

Grammar, syntax, vocabulary, implicit context, mood and tone. You'll be starting at square one, with every separate pod, with minimal potential of cross-pollination across pods, based on dolphins that leave one group, and join another, and whatever they bring with them, and manage to learn from new dolphins they meet.

Even the presumable token words, which surely must exist: air, water, fish, dirt. One pod in isolation from the rest might not build these conceptual ideas, or use their noises the same way, and then what of another pod halfway around the world, which they've never met?

Sure, the capacity for language remains, but there's no persistent implementation. Each variant of a dolphin language dies with the dolphin that knows it.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

>Without hand writing, or something like it, to act as a physical artifact and provide shortcuts to skip over expensive processes of trial and error, I doubt that a codified language, borne of strictly oral traditions among small pods of disorganized dolphin social groups, would survive across generations, to jump the inheritance gaps introduced by being hunted nearly to endangered status by predators like us.

There are many examples of Native American tribes that didn't lose their languages despite being nearly wiped out by disease and lacking written language.

What would they record it on? This seems to me the biggest drawbacks of seaborne intelligence: any dolphin could be twice as smart as the smartest human but it's really hard to develop technology when you don't have opposable thumbs and the environment is, almost by definition, more fluid and corrosive than the one we share.

Hah, that sounds almost like something out of a book.

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." - Douglas Adams, H2G2

Although I do think that without a way to store knowledge outside the brain it becomes much harder to form and maintain societies. Ian Stewart uses a wonderful term for that part of intelligence which we cannot hold inside our heads: extelligence. An external store of knowledge and (mis)information allows for sources of reference even when no other people with the knowledge happen to be available.

It's not that bad. The undersea environment doesn't suffer from erosion and weathering which basically prevents any long term construction from surviving very long on in the air. If dolphins carved words into the sea floor using a tool, they could easily be very long lived.

Why no erosion? There are still currents.

What would the tool be made out of? Would any rock do or would it have to be a specific type that requires modification? What would they hold it with?