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Comment by jemmyw | Hacker News Reader

We can already communicate with animals. They don't have a secret language. We're probably better able to understand them than they each other because we research and look for signals that are irrelevant to the daily lives of wild creatures.

There's a lot of media depiction of scenarios where someone can talk to animals, either via magic or by technology (a different magic). So it does not surprise me that a lot of people just believe animals can talk to each other if only we could understand.

This isn't to say there aren't some unknown communications going on - we regularly find new ones. But we're never going to find what we would consider a language.

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We have known for decades now that bottlenose dolphins understand language, and I mean the regularities that distinguish it from ordinary communication because we tested them with an artificially constructed one. And I mean tested comprehension rather than production. Lot easier to write off results of the latter. The idea then that these highly social animals have the ability to understand an artificially constructed language but don't use one naturally is highly suspect. Especially when everything we can observe indicates it. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...

"Comprehension, at levels far above chance, was shown for all of the sentence forms and sentence meanings that could be generated by the lexicon and the set of syntactic rules, and included the understanding of: (a) lexically novel sentences; (b) structurally novel sentences; (c) semantically reversible sentences that expressed relationships between objects; (d) sentences in which changes in modifier position changed sentence meaning; and (e) conjoined sentences (Phoenix). Additional abilities demonstrated included a broad and immediate generalization of the lexical items to different exemplars of objects; an ability to modulate the form of response to given action words, in order to apply the action appropriately to new objects, to different object attributes, or to different object locations; an ability to carry out instructions correctly despite changes in the context or location in which a sentence was given, or in the trainer providing the instructions; an ability to distinguish between different relational concepts; an ability to respond correctly to sentences given with no objects present in the tank until 30 seconds after the instruction was given (displacement tests); and an ability to report correctly that the particular object designated in a sentence was in fact not present in the tank, although all other objects were (Akeakamai).

......

The comprehension approach used was a radical departure from the emphasis on language production in studies of the linguistic abilities of apes; the result obtained offer the first convincing evidence of the ability of animals to process both semantic and syntactic features of sentences. "

That is interesting and I wasn't unaware of such research. I was thinking about mentioning in my original comment that we observe animal intelligence and that we seem to be able to provoke it as well. I remember a study on shrimp where researchers gave them puzzles of increasing complexity, then gave a basic one and the shrimp didn't want it's food without the challenge.

Haha. Neither was I until very recently. I really had no idea such rigorous research had already been done.

I just figured the extent of it was "Well we can't prove they aren't just communicating unlike we can for say dogs"

By the way, if you'd like an overview of the tests performed, you can read them here.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342706263_Language_...

Yes I know it's not proof they use language naturally but this is where that "not being able to prove" thing come into play.

As far we can see, it does look like they use language.

1. We can tell they give each other unique names https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dolphins-whistle-...

2. similar use of "baby talk" in mothers. https://www.science.org/content/article/dolphin-moms-use-bab...

3. Their clicks and whistles three key linguistic laws of efficient communication, namely, Zipf’s rank-frequency law (humpback whales also shown to follow this), the law of brevity and Menzerath-Altmann law...but only till babies reach a certain age!

That humpback whales will communicate with fewer vocalizations in the presence of noise but still seem to understand each other

https://theworld.org/stories/2019-06-13/baby-dolphins-babble...

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.11.523588v1....

All these things paint a pretty clear picture imo. I'm near certain that most? cetaceans use language.

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