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Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

on.natgeo.com

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Re: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

#11

Imagine that you're a football (aka soccer) player. And of course all your teammates are football players too. To communicate explicitly on the football pitch, you use a combination of names, pronouns, short phrases, hand gestures, head movements, etc. But actually most of the communication on the pitch is implicit--players observing each other, inferring the mental state of each other, and making changes based on th…

The other side of the coin is that there really might not be any actual pattern to pull out of any single dolphin's vocalizations.

Just because dolphins possess a possible capacity for language doesn't mean that any language exists.

I'd figure the mutlitude of dolphins in the wild all establish personal colloquial parlances, organized according to the whims an experiences of each individual pod.

Kind of like in that movie Nell, where the children grew up learning to make noises like their stroke-afflicted mother. If there are no regimented social constraints to enforce teaching and learning, wild animals have no externalized motive for establishing the codified norms of a symbolic language.

Re: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

#12

Imagine that you're a football (aka soccer) player. And of course all your teammates are football players too. To communicate explicitly on the football pitch, you use a combination of names, pronouns, short phrases, hand gestures, head movements, etc. But actually most of the communication on the pitch is implicit--players observing each other, inferring the mental state of each other, and making changes based on th…

The other side of the coin is that there really might not be any actual pattern to pull out of any single dolphin's vocalizations. Just because dolphins possess a possible capacity for language doesn't mean that any language exists. I'd figure the mutlitude of dolphins in the wild all establish personal colloquial parlances, organized according to the whims an experiences of each individual pod. Kind of like in that…

I don't understand the distinction that you're making here...a lack of intergenerational transmission? Isn't all language at heart a personalized colloquial parlance? The contemporary world of highly codified standard international languages is novel and weird.

If the dolphins, in their signature whistles, invent arbitrary symbols that are assigned meanings in a social context, that's ultimately linguistic behavior that outmatches even the most precocious sign-language-using ape.

Re: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

#13

Imagine that you're a football (aka soccer) player. And of course all your teammates are football players too. To communicate explicitly on the football pitch, you use a combination of names, pronouns, short phrases, hand gestures, head movements, etc. But actually most of the communication on the pitch is implicit--players observing each other, inferring the mental state of each other, and making changes based on th…

The other side of the coin is that there really might not be any actual pattern to pull out of any single dolphin's vocalizations. Just because dolphins possess a possible capacity for language doesn't mean that any language exists. I'd figure the mutlitude of dolphins in the wild all establish personal colloquial parlances, organized according to the whims an experiences of each individual pod. Kind of like in that…

I agree with this idea. Wordless shouts can get a lot of communication done on a football pitch when accompanied with some gesturing and a rich understanding of the immediate context.

Even among humans, with our highly codified and atomic language, there is a lot of research that hints at how important nonverbal cues are to communication.

Dolphins can seemingly identify themselves verbally, but does that mean it's part of language? It doesn't seem to be conceptually different the fact that big cats and dogs identify themselves to each other, although they do it with complex chemical markers instead of sound waves. But I don't think anyone expects to find a highly codified chemical language of "words" among cats.

Re: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans

#14
post #4
post #2

"Come on Eric, you've had your lunch" https://www.youtu.be/qf_BR1StMxQ Sorry

Chrome wouldn't open your link. I've corrected it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf_BR1StMxQ

Nor does firefox. Looks like the TLS certificate for the domain is the wrong one.
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