Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this type of thinking is that it undervalues the role that non-vital communication has in social species. Look at uncontacted peoples around the world. They've had music and dance even though their tribes consisted of a couple hundred people. These forms of communication serve a role in their communities but it isn't "there are fish in the pond over there" it's more special and abstract.

If we are to treat whalesong the same way then we can't immediately assume that they're just trying to communicate base concepts.

View on HN

In any given human language, at least, most vocabulary tends to be concrete objects or physical processes. The parent is suggesting that we begin by looking for that subset of the language by correlating the speech sounds of whales with their behavior to objects in their environment.

Not sure exactly what you're saying, but: Bible translators regularly translate the Bible into other languages, including the kind of "tribal" languages you refer to. The people they translate for are fine with saying "there are fish in the pond over there", and they can also talk about abstract concepts. They may not have vocabulary for all the same concepts we have, whether abstract ("justification") or concrete (the Inuit didn't have words for sheep), but they have plenty of words for things for which we don't have individual words, and those other concepts can be described in phrases. And of course they have grammars.

I think that if you were trying to decode one of those languages you would take the same approach and observe coordination behavior, “there is a deer to our left” -> tribe goes left.

You need to start somewhere. Maybe you would never be able to decode the non-functional communication without a Rosetta Stone or common language root.

The point is that at least some of language needs to cash out into a description of the physical world. I’d argue almost all of it, even in modern societies.

It's easy to start learning another language without an interpreter or dictionary, you just start with concrete objects and actions. The hard part is representing the sounds (phonemes), which are often quite different from the language the learner knows. It helps that there is a way of writing all the known sounds of all the studied languages (the IPA, which Wikipedia uses), and it's pretty rare these days that a "new" sound is found.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com