Archive for Language and animals
Animal calls are not comparable to human speech
But can they still tell us something useful about language? Here are two new papers that address that question:
I.
"What the Hidden Rhythms of Orangutan Calls Can Tell Us about Language – New Research." De Gregorio, Chiara. The Conversation, May 27, 2025.
In the dense forests of Indonesia, you can hear strange and haunting sounds. At first, these calls may seem like a random collection of noises – but my rhythmic analyses reveal a different story.
Those noises are the calls of Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), used to warn others about the presence of predators. Orangutans belong to our animal family – we’re both great apes. That means we share a common ancestor – a species that lived millions of years ago, from which we both evolved.
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Linguistics bibliography roundup
Something for everyone
- "Cultural Nuances in Subtitling the Religious Discourse Marker Wallah in Jordanian Drama into English." Al Salem, Mohd Nour et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (March 6, 2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04515-6.
- "Humpback Whale Song Shown to Be Structurally Similar to Human Language." PhysOrg, February 6, 2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-02-humpback-whale-song-shown-similar.html. Discussing "Whale Song Shows Language-like Statistical Structure." Arnon, Inbal et al. Science (February 7, 2025). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055, "Convergent Evolution in Whale and Human Vocal Cultures." Whiten, Andrew et al. Science 387, no. 6734 (February 6, 2025): 581-582. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv2318, and "Language-like Efficiency in Whale Communication." Youngblood, Mason. Science Advances 11, no. 6 (February 5, 2025): eads6014. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads6014.
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ChatGPT cat wound healing conversation
VHM: This is a dialog held between ChatGPT and TK, who printed it out and sent it to me.
The unretouched dialog, which lasted about 20 minutes, is very long. If you don't have time to read all of it, please look at the last paragraph of this post, where I give my takeaway assessment of the implications it holds for AI.
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TK: It's truly amazing what ChatGPT does. I believe this is worth your time reading this conversation I had with it. Because not only is the topic and material interesting on its own, but also it will really give you a flavor and insight into how the AI known as ChatGPT functions.
Some people are claiming newer AIs are better but I can't see how this could be improved…. Only if the interface included sight and displayed images.
Note, I used voice dictation extensively in this conversation.
+++++++++++++++
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Punxsutawney and Maxatawny
It's unlikely that I ever would have written a post on the strange-sounding name "Punxsutawney" because it is so well-known worldwide for groundhog Phil who lives there and can predict whether winter weather will persist after he wakes up from his hibernation, although it is nestled in the wooded hills about 85 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.
On the other hand, few have ever heard of Maxatawny, despite the fact that it is only 65 miles northwest of Philadelphia and situated on mostly flat land.
I never would have been aware of Maxatawny either, but for the miracle of the internet, because I happened upon it while surfing the www, which I have spent a goodly part of my life doing since its invention. When I saw mention of Maxatawny pop up on my computer screen, I was instantaneously nearly catapulted out of my seat because of its obvious likeness to Punxsutawney.
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Calculus bovis: bezoar, part 3
Poor cattle, they suffer for / from their gallstones in more ways than one. If you want to know why, read the previous Language Log posts on bezoars, for which see "Selected readings" below.
For linguists, one of the most interesting things about the Chinese term for "bezoar", niúhuáng 牛黃 ("cow yellow"), is that it is among the earliest attestable borrowings into Sinitic from Sanskrit, viz., gorocanā गोरोचना ("bright yellow orpiment prepared from the bile of cattle; yellow patch for the head of a cow; bezoar") — already in pre-Buddhist times.
Because they are so expensive and sought after by believers in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), bezoars are back in the news again:
Cattle Gallstones, Worth Twice as Much as Gold, Drive a Global Smuggling Frenzy
A prized ingredient in China’s $60 billion traditional medicine industry, gallstones have become the must-have item among underground traders and armed robbers in Brazil
By Samantha Pearson, Wall Street Journal (Jan. 19, 2025)
A Brazilian pasture holds a potential fortune on the hoof.
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Turtle this and snake that
[Guest post by Frank Chance in response to my latest post. Gives me hebi-jebies.]
Reading your recent Language Log post on turtles (mostly about Kucha) on New Year’s Day made me wonder whether there should be a Language Log post on snakes. There are two very different characters used for snake in Japanese – 巳 mi, used almost exclusively for the zodiac sign and in counting (it is a homonym for three ), and 蛇 hebi., also read as ja, particularly in such compounds as 大蛇 daja, also read as Orochi. That name is known to giant monster fans from 八岐大蛇 Yamata no Orochi, the eight-forked (and hence eight-headed) great snake mentioned in Nihonshoki, the oldest Japanese history text. Tea aficionados and dance fans know it from a type of umbrella with a red dot where the spines meet, called a 蛇の目傘 janome-gasa or snake-eyed parasol. Janome was in turn a corporate name for a maker of sewing machines.
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Turco-Sogdian horses and languages
Reading through Étienne de La Vaissière's massive magnum opus, Asie Centrale 300-850: Des routes et des royaumes (2024), I came to a screeching halt when my gaze alighted on this photograph (III.6, p. 71):
Limestone relief of Saluzi ("Autumn Dew"), one of the Six Steeds of Zhao Mausoleum, along with an unknown human general. The general switched horses with the emperor and cared for Saluzi; he is seen here pulling an arrow out of Saluzi's chest. On display at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (source)
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A Sino-Iranian tale of the donkey's Eurasian trail, part 2
The first part of this virtuoso study of the Afro-Eurasian archeolinguistics of the donkey and its concomitant terms in diverse languages across vast expanses of land from East and North Africa to the heartland of East Asia was described in "A Sino-Iranian tale of the donkey's Eurasian trail" (5/10/24). This post summarizes the second part of the study, which appears here:
Samira Müller, Milad Abedi, Wolfgang Behr, and Patrick Wertmann, "Following the Donkey’s Trail (Part II): a Linguistic and Archaeological Study on the Introduction of Domestic Donkeys to China", International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, 6 (2) (October 16, 2024), 294-358.
The first two paragraphs of the Abstract were reproduced in the Language Log post cited in the first paragraph above, so there is no need to repeat them here. Here is the third paragraph of the Abstract, which appears at the head of the just published Part II of the article:
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A Sino-Iranian tale of the donkey's Eurasian trail
By now, we have conclusively traced the path of the domesticated horse from the area around the southern Urals and Pontic Steppe through Central Asia to East Asia. It's time to pay more attention to another equid, this one not so glamorous, but still redoubtable in its own formidable way: Equus asinus asinus.
Samira Müller, Milad Abedi, Wolfgang Behr, and Patrick Wertmann, "Following the Donkey’s Trail (Part I): a Linguistic and Archaeological Study on the Introduction of Domestic Donkeys to China", International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, 6 (2024), 104–144.
Abstract
How and when did domestic donkeys arrive in China? This article sets out to uncover the donkeys’ forgotten trail from West Asia across the Iranian plateau to China, using archaeological, art historical, philological, and linguistic evidence. Following Parpola and Janhunen’s (2011) contribution to our understanding of the Indian wild ass and Mitchell’s (2018) overview of the history of the domestic donkey in West Asia and the Mediterranean, we will attempt to shed light on the transmission of the beast of burden to Eastern Eurasia.
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A new look at sperm whale communication
For as long as I can remember, I've been aware that whales, dolphins, porpoises, and other large mammals of the seas (the cetaceans) make whistles, clicks, calls, groans, songs, and other sounds / noises. These vocalizations are manifestly complex and nuanced, leading people to believe that they are communicating content, emotions, and so forth. What exactly they are conveying and how they do it have remained a mystery, but researchers never stop trying to figure out cetacean "language". A new study at MIT claims to have made progress in analyzing sperm whale sound systems.
Scientists document remarkable sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet'
By Will Dunham, Reuters (May 7, 2024)
[with 2:58 video]
I was hesitant to read this article at all because of the mention of a "phonetic alphabet". Even with the quotation marks around it, attributing this ability to sperm whales was a bit much for me.
Yet, since it was "scientists" doing the documenting, I forced myself to read the first two paragraphs:
The various species of whales inhabiting Earth's oceans employ different types of vocalizations to communicate. Sperm whales, the largest of the toothed whales, communicate using bursts of clicking noises – called codas – sounding a bit like Morse code.
A new analysis of years of vocalizations by sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean has found that their system of communication is more sophisticated than previously known, exhibiting a complex internal structure replete with a "phonetic alphabet." The researchers identified similarities to aspects of other animal communication systems – and even human language.
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Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth
Given that we've been discussing astronomy / astrology and their relationship to the alphabet so intensely in recent weeks, I'm pleased to announce this important conference that is about to be convened: “The Power of the Planets: The Social History of Astral Sciences Between East and West”, May 20–21, 2024, Dipartimento di Beni Culturali – Università di Bologna (Ravenna, Italy).
I warmly recommend that you take a close look at the header images of two objects in The Cleveland Museum of Art: Mirror with a Coiling Dragon, China, Tang Dynasty 618-907 (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1995.367), Drachma – Sasanian, Iran, reign of Hormizd II, 4th century (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1966.738).
The quality of the photographs is extraordinarily fine and detailed. Using the zoom and expand functions, you can see things not clearly visible to the naked eye. Especially noteworthy is the jagged dorsal fin / frill / spine that runs along the back of the dragon on the Tang mirror and is a conspicuous counterpart of many species of dinosaurs.
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