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Can Communications Be Learned From Chimps?
Pine UK writes "The Zoological Society of London are looking for volunteers who are willing to 'talk chimp' in everyday life. The ZSL will be studying the volunteers to see how talking chimp affects situations like workplace conflicts. According to BBC News, the volunteers are expected to show their emotions in a chimp like fashion. This can be done by baring their teeth and by using submissive body language such as lowering their heads and crouching. The ZSL will publish their findings later this year."
Humans already have a range of expected emotional responses that are ingrained into us by culture.
Honestly, if a co-worker of mine bared his teeth and cringed or tried to wave his arms about, draw himself up tall, and shriek, I'd be convinced that he was stark, raving insane. While the researchers are trying to make a point about showing off your emotions better, I think they miss the need in human society to NOT show your emotions at times.
Heck, even confrontational chimps will hide their nervousness until after a stand-off.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
As proposed in the article, this seems extremely lame. However, I've long thought there would be a better way to do it. Humans age 0 to about 4 show a remarkable ability to pick up any languauge. I suggest we should take some yound children (it's not like there isn't a large surplus of them) and raise them with chimps and even dolphins, as well as give them enough human contact that they also pick up our language. Then in a short time we would have people (small people, but still people) who do understand communication of these other species, rather than have people who just act like apes (we have enough of those already).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Its possible that chimp langauges might include phonetic variations that will be impossible for adult humans to hear. For example, some human languages (Navaho is one IIRC) involve phonemes that must be learned in infancy - if one doesn't hear these sounds while the brain is plastic, one never can learn these sounds. Once a baby is older than 18 months, they lose the ability to hear the differences in phonemes. The same could be true with chimps.
We adults may not even be hearing the differences in all the sounds that chimps can make (and mean). And I doubt anyone is going to let a human infant be raised by chimps to properly learn their language.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Actually, "American English" is closer to the pre-1776 english than what they speak in the UK, because of America's geological isolation from the rest of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English
This is why "the universal language is American English" - Britian spread English throughout the world during it's rampant empire building in the 15th and 16th centuries, and because of the distances involved British "english" evolved and the rest of the world was largely uneffected by the changes.
<joke>So you limey Brits can take your extra vowels and shove it!</joke>
=Smidge=