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Evidence of Chimp Developing "Spoken" Language
testcase writes "The New Scientist has an article describing a bonobo who appears to have developed a simple vocabulary. Researchers who have analyzed recordings of the chimp have been able to identify four sounds he makes in different contexts indicating 'banana, grapes, juice and yes.'"
Or the way i can tell what my dog wants by the tone of his bark? I dont see how this is sutch a breakthrough.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
At last, a female that just can't say no - only yes.
Recent studies show humans are losing the ability for "Spoken" langauge. An associate professor at the university of craven had this to say, "Our research shows that humans have been attempting to do this through the excessive use of beverages for thousands of years. Only recently has the human population discovered the "internet". This internet seems to be the cause for the slow degeneration of spoken language." Another professor from the college of fine arts and crafts had this to say, "Wait minute, got message icq".
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
THat wasnt a troll, it was a legitimate question.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
pls cd u xpln?
:)
Anyone who reads the classifieds, bridge columns, or business plans knows there are many people unable to write English intelligibly. Our simian friends, meanwhile, have a bright future as our species converge.
I am clearly a pygmy chimp trapped in a human body.
(And no, evolutionary biology doesn't count, because the creationists are operating outside the scientific community, not within it -- however much the "intelligent design" people might like to believe otherwise.)
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
George Bush -
Known Words:
Oil, War, Terrorist and Money.
Great, Just wonderfull whats next?
" You maniacs, you blew it up, ohhh, damn you, god, damn you all to hell........"
Take yor stinking paws of me you dam dirty ape!
but good point.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
now it's even harder to distinguish President Bush from a chimp.
Obviously, people have different definitions for what a language is, but the one I've heard and use is not simply "is there a mapping between a sound and an object". That's true of many, many animals. I just yesterday was reading a National Geographic talking about meerkats having different warning sounds for humans and some other sort of predator (I forget what). The test is, instead, "can a *new concept* be expressed with the language". That requires a level of abstraction from simple noise-object mappings.
May we never see th
Contact with Humans outside of a Prey-Predator context has likely started the whole language thing.
They are not that far off from us. We learn by observing, and SO DO THEY!
We have culturally infected them so like in the Laurie Anderson song - Language is a Virus
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
My dog barks when she wants in, and wimpers as I greater her after a long absence.
The most interesting thing about this is that the bonobo in question learned this stuff on his own. We've all heard about sign language, chimps pointing to symbols on keyboards or screens or whatever... all that stuff. The skeptics have always said, "ok, fine-- but you must intensively train animals to use even very rudimentary symbolic communication; you wouldn't be able to stop a human from learning all that and much, much more. How much can all this signing mean?" This bonobo was not intensively trained. He wasn't trained to speak at all. In fact, he wasn't taught any of this, to begin with.
Human children soak up new languages like sponges. Adults are notoriously bad at learning new languages. Virtually all language research done on non-human primates to date has been intensively training adult animals to use abstract symbols (like ASL or glyphs or whatever) to make a one-to-one correspondence to an object or action.
Kanzi grew up around humans, since his mother was being intensively trained to use a keyboard and he was too young to leave her side. He was not trained. He didn't even seem interested. Then, one day, Kanzi's mother was taken away-- and he began using everything she'd been taught (quite a bit more, in fact, than she ever learned) and very accurately. He learned because he was around that type of communication when he was young, and he just "picked it up."
Now, that was when his mother was being specifically trained to use a keyboard. She wasn't being specifically trained to speak. So he picked up, on his own, that human speech has something to do with communication, and how it works, and is able to use words across contexts, and was never explicitly taught to do so. I'd call that pretty damn revealing about the inherent linguistic abilities of bonobos.
Since they're our closest relatives, I'd say it's pretty revealing about the evolutionary history of our own linguistic abilities.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
The bonobos who have earlier developed a simple vocabulary have rapidly evolved to include more complex vocabulary like warfore, compassionated, pillared, and vulcanize. Who knows that if this trend were to continue unabated, might they in the future be regarded not just as an equal to humans, but also be eligible to run for the highest office?
The point is humans are not the only game in town. As far as better, I'll take a chimp or a dolphin over half of the people on this planet any day. It's not a question of will they be "equal" or "better", but rather than assuming that it's just a dumb animal (organic automation), and is repeatedly being proven that animals can think, learn, problem solve, count, have emotions, have language, play, and intentially kill over territory, group, race and species. To lift a quote from an animal research program (Love discovery/animal planet/history channel) "It's becoming apparent that intelligence whether animal or human is a question of degree rather than type." . Hope I didn't butcher that to badly. The above commenter seems to hold onto the human arrogance that we are the only ones that can do what we do. They also miss the fact that that the "Bar" does get moved, as it always has in the past, when ever something new comes along that might contradict long held beliefs in science, religion, or social norms.
Since chimps are supposedly smart enough to do this, how long will it be before there is an organism other than a human that can speak English (or any complex human language) and actually know what they're talking about? I think that would be pretty interesting, to talk to another species.
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)
Abstract thought != Language
I have a step sister who is deaf and brain damaged from birth. She can certainly speak a language, sign language. And yes, she is certainly human - she has feelings, and a personality.
However, her capacity for abstract thought is limited. Just because she doesn't speak of the future beyond her next birthday party (which is always "next month") doesn't mean she doesn't have a language.
And to make the trivial point - at some point the meerkats expressed a new concept - "human". It doesn't matter which arrived last, the humans or the meerkats or the language, there was time when there was no understanding of the sound for human, and now there is.
"In person, WAP'ed up and making your life a misery!" BOFH, 2003
is this the next generation of managers?
;-)
knows only a few buzz words, but has no idea of what the project is all about
I don't find this to be that interesting really. My dog tries to mimic my syllables. He makes distinctive growls for when he wants to go out, when he's hungry, and when he just wants attention. I don't find this to be that great of a feat. Chimps are able to learn sign language, so why are we surprised that they can learn words? Am I just missing the point here??
Regardless of what you say about this, I think it's quite strange how you never seem to get linguists saying that animals have a language ability equivalent to humans. Syntax is one of the most surprising and powerful things about human language, and something animals just haven't ever been shown to develop to any comparable degree.
Yeah, my dog even makes different barking sounds based on how close someone is to the house, how many people are approaching, etc.
This is nothing new, people have researched wolves in the wild (i.e. No human intervention, like Mr. Ape) and they exhibit similar communication abilities.
Show me a chimp that can "say" four words....
/. editor.
And I'll show you the next
(Come on, I can't have been the only one to come up with this one, right?)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
"Oh oh ah ah oh oh ah oh aaah aaah oooh aaah ooh uu uu aa oo ah ah oh oh"
*Click!* Damned telemarketers!
Table-ized A.I.
In a nutshell, chimps / primates / dolphins / etc. always come up short in some ways from anything you could call language. Just off the top of my head, using a finite set of words (English has ~ 500,000), we can come up with an infinite number of things to say. That's many, many orders of magnitude more complex. Throw in pronouns (and the implied ability to think of others as individual entities), verbs, adjectives, adverbs, tenses, affixes, etc. and the differences magnify.
Also, think of the physical differences. We have the pretty-much-unique ability in the animal kingdom to choke because of combined air/food passage in our throat (needed for speech). And the face control ... and the tongue control. Even the deaf use the same areas of their brain while signing that the hearing world does for speech.
But it goes deeper than that. Humans have a tough time seeing language as something unique and special; and yet, we love giraffes for their giant necks; elephants for their trunks; bumblebees for their whacky ability to fly. We revel in what makes them unique ... why can't we revel in what makes us unique? Comparing a chimp's ability to speak to our own is like comparing a crow's squawking to Mozart. Both involve sound, but one is music and the other isn't.