Earth Species: Roadmaps towards decoding non-human languages
github.com
github.com
Raising my blind baby goat (as part of a dog pack), is showing me this anew: the dogs are having trouble talking to the baby because she can't see the postures and gestures. Scent and sound and feel are fine, but growly dogs' "respect my space and play nice" isn't being communicated at all.
It’s seems that various version of sign language will be their first target of non audio communication.
This is also what makes two-way communication so hard – we are so focused on our language that we often fail to develop or account for our other ways of expression, (and if we do rediscover our non-verbal expressiveness, it often come in a way of a hacky and very verbal ted-talk or book). So for two-way communication our animal counterparts first have to learn our repressed, underdeveloped body language, gesture, posture and facial expressions.
It's very interesting and it blew me a way a little.
"They're saying.. 'Thanks for the fish'.
Still, given all the research so far, there is no such thing as animal language, not in the sense we understand human language. In particular, it's very clear that animal calls are not in any way equivalent to human words, they are at best equivalent to human facial expressions - quasi-automatic responses to certain stimuli, normally without any syntax or other signifiers.
There may be some exceptions, given that, for example, some dolphins have successfully been taught simple syntax (the difference between "Go there, do this" and "do this, go there", which no other mammal has successfully comprehended).
I thought they'd worked out that dolphins have language and complex social structures? I was definitely told that when I saw the dolphins at Monkey Mia.
And dogs definitely communicate with humans, and understand human speech ("W.A.L.K" or you get zoomies for 10 minutes).
What's the research that says all of this is "not language"?
Communication is not language. Language is a type of communication. Language involves the use of symbols in a grammar that is sufficiently complex enough to facilitate recursive structures of arbitrary length.
I think it is likely that many animals like birds, cetaceans and elephants can use language and that it is possible that some dogs and cats can too but your example of a dog understanding that the word walk correlates to going for a walk is not an example of a dog being able to grasp human language.
My mom has Shelties which are a disconcertingly smart herding dog. I've witnessed one of her dogs overhearing relatively complex sentences, pausing to parse them, and then acting on the in away that indicates that they understand not just the correlation between subjects and objects but also the conditional logic in the sentence.
To show an example: if you give me some bananas and I say "I like bananas but not these ones", it means I don't like the bananas you gave me. But a bonobo or dog "saying" some equivalent of "like" and "banana" would always mean that they like them (according to the paper, they could also "say" something like "not-like", "banana" showing some simple compositionality).
Another important observation (that is not found in the paper) is that animals have never been observed to "discuss" about abstract things or counter-factuals, which is what I mean when I say that their communication is quasi-automatic. For example, a monkey will only "say" "leopard" if it notices a leopard, or if it hears another monkey "say" "leopard" (or, most sophisticatedly, if it wants to elicit the leopard response from the other monkeys, e.g. to steal some food). But there is never a "discussion" about leopards that are not present and that does not cause the monkeys to have a leopard response.
Essentially animal communication is much more similar to our non-verbal queues, such as moaning or gasping or screaming, rather than to verbal communication. It can be more sophisticated than that, especially in primates, whales, and dolphins, encoding some information about social relationships, but 1 year old children already display much more complex language abilities than the most sophisticated animal.
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2019.006...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110512104252.h...
We know they're talking at least enough to have a sense of self, but AFAIK we haven't deciphered the culture/language enough to say anything meaningful to them.
So, listening to sweet birdsong first thing in the morning is like going to a rowdy bar on a Saturday night and listening to the singles yell at each other over the music.
It genuinely never fails to make me chuckle when I'm on the porch listening to birds in the morning.
You missed "DANGER DANGER" and "FEED ME" and "I'M HERE WHERE ARE YOU" and "HEADS UP GUYS (let's mob that raptor)"
Matthew Feigal
Plant Engineer, Google Tulip
Published Apr 01, 2019Each individual animal has its own personality and language which they'll share with you, just like when humans who share a lot of time together tend to form their own language variants.
One of the most helpful books on the subject I've read is "Wild Animals I Have Known" (1898)
If you have doubts about interpretation vs "facts", then I can only guess/assume that you have not had this experience.
The best advice I can give for establishing a relationship is to think hard about what the animal wants most, and try to offer it in a way that it can understand is connected with you.
Rupert Sheldrake controversial work would also be of interest. Starting with his book "Dogs who know when their owners are coming home". It can not always be attributed to sound, smell or time of day.