Don't assume that. They can more easily camouflage themselves in a xeric savannah among acacia trees than you or I can. When they are motionless, they are hard for even a well-seasoned human monitor to locate. The infrasound may well be their "tool" to help a band of giraffe, disbursed over a square mile or further, locate each other without moving to give away their location to watchful predatory eyes.
@@EyeSeeThruYou they are tall, their backdrop will be the sky a lot of the time, not the savannah grass, so camouflage doesn't make much sense, especially at further distances where the tops of their heads will poke above the horizon as the earth curves. also I'm not a professional zoologist or anything lol, i just said i assumed that, and i was kinda making a joke about giraffes are tall. personally i think the reason they use calls for location is mostly at night, maybe over very long distances, as mentioned in the video, they seem to make more noise at night, which is probably to make up for a lack of vision when its too dark, since their eyes are "tuned" for the bright sun on them all day.
@@Minty1337 You're missing the point, African "savannah" isn't uniformly grass, and giraffe prefer upland forested areas. That could mean acasia "forest," where clumps of trees dot the landscape, to a mixed-wood loosely forested area. That's not "open sky." Giraffe fur is part of its camouflage as well, and so is its behaviors, including movements. Most animals can actually see in the dark, some better than others. Stationary positions aren't because they can't see, but to keep them out of the field of view of nocturnal predators looking and listening for movement. My statement with regard to infrasound stands, lending to day or night use were feasible.
@@EyeSeeThruYou I'm not missing the point? most of the savannah is grassland, the last time forests were common and dense was around 7000 years ago during the African humid period, perhaps at that time vocalizations were more useful during the day, but in the modern day, they don't seem to be, again look at modern giraffes that have been studied, they mostly vocalize at night. obviously many animals can see in the dark, humans can for example, but that's not true of all animals. as i said, im not a zoologist, but it wouldn't surprise me if giraffes simply lack decent low-light vision, and never needed a reason to evolve much in that regard due to relying on hearing in the dark, and that has been good enough for hundreds of thousands of years. as i keep saying, i'm not a zoologist, and with giraffe vocalizations being so understudied, i don't think either of us can claim any potential use is right or wrong, im personally just speculating based on what makes sense and what i know about zoology, as an enthusiast. lol, upon googling it: "They can detect small movements across long distances. Their night vision is quite poor. Giraffes are among of the few mammals to be able to perceive color. They also have a 360-degree field of vision and can see far into the distance." they seem very good at spotting small movements over long distances (other giraffes moving their heads) and lack quality low-light vision, requiring other senses (like hearing) to find each other. i know i didn't do any research initially, but i wasn't correcting anyone either, i was merely speculating and made sure to say i was merely assuming, please do research before correcting other people with such confidence.
The article is about giraffe communication in visual, olfactory, and acoustic modalities. It doesn't claim that sound is the main way giraffes locate each other, just that it might be one way.
@@DrBunnyMedicinalIf you snorkel or scuba, you almost have your thoughts drowned out by the reef sounds. Even a recent paper showed that polyps will react to these sounds, it horrifically understudied.
That sentence of kitten purrs made me remember an academic lesson I one participated. We talked about about de different „s“ sounds in different languages to put it simply and an syrian student told us the different variants in theirs - most of them sound to us, unfamiliar with it , exactly the same. Not one could make out differences between them. What we hear and expect from our prospective an possible mislead us, as different animal species could have possibly developed an completely different form of communication.
Huh, that's neat. Russian has 4 s sounds, deep s, hard s, normal s, and soft s. And also 3 sh sounds. So 7 sounds which are all pretty similar, the only difference is the frequency I guess. If you can tell s and sh apart, then you already have an in-built ability to tell apart these 2 similar frequencies, which many speakers of other languages aren't able to do. Russian just takes that to another level and has 7 of them lol. But some of them are like allophones so it doesn't really matter anyway. It's not like saying one of them wrong would change the meaning of a word, it just gives you a foreign accent :D and almost every foreigner is unable to say them correctly lol
@@louiserocks1Can you show them phonetically and by naming them within exemplary words? I'm learning Russian yet, I couldn't find a reliable source for articulative features of those sounds.
??? There’s only two in the Levantine dialect, س and ص. Maybe it’s just because I speak Palestinian, not Syrian, but I’ve never heard more than those two sounds
My last cat was very vocal. She had something like 14 different meows and vocalizations that I could identify. Ranging from greeting, initiating some kind of activity, requesting help for things, and expressing emotional state. I always understood her easily
"Stick with me a bit longer." You can't go far enough into this for me. My speculation is that consciousness goes a lot deeper than our homocentric thinking does and communication is just an expression of that.
@@Mohenjo_Daro_ oh there's not just that, let's not forget the many sign languages, the signs we use across traditional languages, and technically writing and brail are a separate form of communicating, and unrelated to you, mohenjo, I think the reply above is correct, there are the many many precise vocalizations, oh and facial communication also exists
“Moans” is crazy but ya 😂 and we have whatever the “shhh🤫” is called, and also the “psssp 👁️🫦👁️” not to mention every culture has their own animal mimicry and other shouts, below the border is the “ayayayayaya🛖🌮”
I used to have a beagle who swore like a sailor at me whenever she didn’t get her way. I didn’t teach her those barks; she must have picked up that ‘potty muzzle’ from the dog park.
@@andyjay729 Cephalopods (at least Octopus and Cuttlefish) are a a lot smarter than most people think, sentient and probably even sapient. But, given the way the entire clade is stuck in their 'breed once and then die' reproductive strategy, there's no way for there to be much accumulation in either culture or technology, on top of all the other issues that an aquatic lifestyle imposes. I'm pretty sure that squids mostly aren't that smart (potentially the largest/longest living species are), but I don't know enough about Nautiluses/Nautili to even start on an opinion. Octopodes and Cuttlefish are very clearly at least sentient however.
Interesting! As a biologist, I often wonder if we make too much of human communication. Obviously human speech is intelligent, creative, diverse, ever changing, so it's definitely special in that sense. However, it does break down into categories like food/hungry, reproduction/sex, etc. We look at body language to help interpret other people's statements.
The more I think about it, the less I can differentiate between all these meanings. In the end, all communication seems to be expressing emotion, even our abstract, technical language. If we didn't feel these things were important, we wouldn't care about it. Rationality, reason, and logic are only implemented by people who feel they're important and useful.
I see lizard doing those push-ups all the time! I remember musing on the reasons behind this behavior as a kid. And now my childhood mystery has finally been answered
Although these videos do have lower viewcounts, I think these are some of the best on the channel! I love how deep you dug to uncover all this information, and the methodical way it is presented in these videos!
Doin it fer the joy, and fer the education!! NOT just fer views (which for the record you DO deserve WAY more of!!), THAT'S why you are one of my favorite UA-camrs!!! Keep up the great work!!
I think the low view count just means people haven't discoverd this. Maybe once the whole video (at the end of the series) comes out, the algorithm will push it and more people will discover the amazing work youve put in!
I think another reason is UA-cam notifs sucking. I have notifs on for this channel, and I only saw the video after scrolling down on my home page quite a bit
Your segways remind me of the Eyewitness videos I watched as a kid. A thought to add is that humans will also use words as emotional expressions rather than signals to someone else, so the two categories aren't always clearly separate. .
Now, I find this kind of research a lot more interesting than trying to teach human languages to nonhumans. Not only is the latter presumptuous, and dehumanizing to actual humans who use sign and augmented communication tools, I think we can learn so much more from studying communication between creatures on their own terms. After all, *our* languages must have come from somewhere.
Exactly. "Can animals talk (the way a human would)?" is the wrong question to ask. "To what extent do animals talk (among each other) and how?" is so much more interesting. For one, it's not a polar question with arbitrary criteria on what constitutes language. Just start with any communication they exhibit, and work your way up to the complicated aspects from there.
Well, why not do both? The button cats and dogs who are, right now, getting many of their needs met much better than before they learnt to use buttons with human words to communicate those needs, would beg to differ. Especially with respect to their health needs, including such things as surgery and medication. But also simply with respect to their everyday needs for food, water, play, pets and things like planning their upcoming days, for those who like that. Regardless of whether they just use a single button to get their point across, or strings of three, four and even five words at once. Bottom line is, these animals are healthier and happier than they were without those buttons. Why deprive them of this improved quality of life? Not to mention the parrots who enjoy chatting to their parrot friends through video calls that they themselves initiate. An activity which requires less communication with their humans, but they do need to learn how to let those humans know when they want to use their tablets to call those far-away feathered friends. Again, why deprive them of this improved quality of life? One approach really does not exclude the other. And for the record, I'm talking about peer reviewed research here.
I love this series, am always looking forward to the next part. I've wondered about this topic for so long (my cat definitely communicates with me using mews, but how much is actually about telling me anything and how much is just getting my attention?? Maddening to not know.)
I have two indoor cats. One of them will walk up to me and make the same sequence of about four unique sounds, every time she wants me to sit on the couch so that she can snuggle on my lap. I do wonder if this is a "sentence" to her, or four "words" (Hey! Couch? Sit? Stroke?), or just five attention-getting noises she uses for me.
I wonder how long someone had to study mice to figure out all the sounds they make and did they just stick a bunch of microphones in their cages. I can just imagine some researcher with a mouse sized auditorium and they're taking notes on a clipboard while occasionally petting and feeding them.
Dear Josh your low viewcounts are a result of the algorithm, I click on your vids every time they are recommended to me, but the algorithm prefers people who upload atleast weekly. I personally don't care about the frequency of uploads.
On top of its remarkable feats of communication, the Amazon giant river otter manages the impressive acheivement of being an otter and still being ugly
This is kind of me wanting more from the Jacky dragon example, but I honestly think that an episode just on lizard linguistics could be interesting. I used to have a bearded dragon and while she didn't have any vocalizations (at least for us; I've heard some of them hiss when they feel threatened), she was much more expressive than some cats I've met. She would sometimes head bop if she liked something (although it's also a dominance display), she would wave at us all the time to show she was submissive to us, she had a beard that she could flare out and change color to indicate she was stressed (and gape her mouth if she really didn't like something - I actually saw her do all of that once when her heat lamp flickered out suddenly during a thunderstorm we had), she licked everything she was curious about, and I swear that sometimes she had the smallest hint of a smile or frown (depending on her mood and comfort). That last part could very well be me anthropomorphizing her but everyone I met who has owned some specific lizards and especially bearded dragons have said that they can be surprisingly expressive, maybe even emotional even if it's not the same as human emotions. (I do think lizards have emotions but they don't feel them in the same way humans do) Anyway I'm only just seeing you're making this series and I'll be tuning in for more, I haven't really thought about the ways we potentially learn from animals to see what language is and how we might define language. It could be a bias of mine thinking mostly as an anthropologist more than a linguist but being reasonably open to what others have to say on the subject is what opened my world to learning more about language in the first place.
Chantek the orangutan self-identified as human in part because he knew sign language while the "orange dogs" (as he called other orangutans) were not able communicate as he could. The experiment with him was stopped precisely because it was successful in showing that an animal can learn a human language, at least to some extent.
Have you studied chickens yet? I’m not how well-accepted this is academically, but I read a book called “How to speak chicken” (clearly marketed for backyard chicken keepers) and I’ve been observing and communicating with my chickens. They have different types of vocalisations and they combine different sounds to create what I would call phrases or expressions. I’ve mastered the greeting “buh-dup” well enough to be understood and get a response from chickens I’d never met before! I can also understand their alarm call, they’re “look: Food!” noise, and the “egg song” that they make when they’ve just laid an egg or are celebrating with another hen who’s just laid an egg. Roosters have a slightly different vocabulary. There’s the obvious crowing call, but mine also understands and speaks with the hens effectively. They’re constantly communicating with one another and according to the book, they give each other names! I’d love if you’d investigate and see if there’s been academic research that corroborates this!
From my perspective, my dog makes slightly different barks for different emotions or wants and I can understand them, so I would say at least some animals have a small amount of language in them
I'm pretty confident that a mouse (or possibly a rat, I didn't get a good look) cussed me out once. Was walking along a stretch of sidewalk that was covered by long grasses from the vacant lot next to it and accidentally kicked a rodent. Lemme tell ya, that little guy had opinions on my carelessness. If that was not the mousey equivalent of "Hey! I'm walkin' here!", then I'll eat my hat.
I think the main property that a anything that can be dubbed a language has to have is arbitrarity. As long as meanings are universally assigned to a call, this is no different to a human smile or crying, which are not part of a language. Once the correspondence between the sign and the meaning becomes arbitrary, it immediately implies there's something happening in the brain rather than the genes, and opens up a possibility for things being learned. This is how you get different dialects, languages and languages groupes, after all. Interstingly enough, this phenomenon dies exist at large in birds - their songs are often not genetically inherited but instead learned from their parents, reulting in geographically distributed dialets of bird song. As for the Clever Hans phenomenon, I personally believe that this very same phenomenon lies at the heart of learning a human language as kids: we simploy mimic what people around us do. That is why learning a language with a textbook that much more difficult, I assume: if you want a foreign language as efficiently as you have your mothertonge, it has to be about exposure rather then memorization. The more you try to mimic other people speak, the more effortless it becomes for you to speak the same language as they do. At elst that's my conjecture.
@@williamdittmann9281 Well, for one animal communiaction is a very underresearched area to have any set in stone principles so it often comes down to what one wants to believe, unfortunately for now at least, as these videos showcase. But the importance of arbitrary meaning-sign assignment is either way mentioned in many monographies on linguistics by prominent linguists to invite speculation on it in an intruguing but yet poorly understood area.
Note: Primatologists are collecting a corpus of non-human ape sign-language. Each of the non-human great-ape species is being observed in the wild, and the signs they make written down. In fact, @NativLang, remember your lingusit's-first-contact survival-kit video? Yeah, these primatologists seem to be using those same techniques to record the [possible] meanings of the different signs. It's all really fascinating. You may wanna have a look at it.
Great video! I read a great book on animal communication; the segments on the vocalizations (& what they signalled) of prairie dogs (which have warning vocalizations that are way more complex than people would realize, indicating the type of predator spotted, & even the general direction from which it's coming), bats, & whales were especially super intriguing. Bees were interesting, of course, & frogs were kind of neat. I once read a Nat Geo article that said that dolphins have vocalizations/"names" for each other, that they remember for decades. I'm sure there's a lot to learn about animal communication. I don't think animals have our capacity for grammar, though; even primates that were taught to sign lost the ability after a couple of generations, or so (i.e., some of the signs [but always less] would be passed to the next generation, & even less to the next).
There is a thing I started to wonder after seeing this video: if human language is learned/developed during socialization, isn't it the same for animal language? I mean, we're looking for paterns, but isn't more likely that different groups have different patterns? And if an individual or a small group is kept apart from the others (like lab rats or even cats and dogs that live in apartments), couldn't they develop a language structure completely different from other groups of the same species?
Can animals grammar? Yes. Crows grammar a lot, but I don't really understand it. When we brought our new dog home, the crows started dive-bombing her. After they realized she was not a threat, all crows left her alone. A neighbour dog used to get hassled all the time. They looked very much the same, but the birds were able to explain to each other the differences between the two dogs, ignoring the one and pestering the other. I probably can't hear the nuances of their calls, but they have no problems understanding each other.
I will go back and watch the others in this particular series because I'm curious as to why birds are not duscusseed (maybe you already covered them, or they will appear in the next installment).
I'd like to ask, could you do a video on the background and spread of Celtic languages? I'm pretty close by Brittany in the grand scheme of things, and I've even visited once or twice; but only recently did I learn of the existence of Brezhoneg from looking into the history of _Wat Zullen We Drinken._ Turns out it's a Dutch adaptation of a Brezhoneg workers' song created in the early 20th Century.
Hey! you finally woke up after a month! Could you make a video on Meiteilon after you are done with your animal thingies? No linguistics channel i have reached out to has never made a video on meiteilon. I know it isnt that easy to just ask someone to do smthn and expect them to do it for you but my oldest request like this is 1 month and a half old on another channel! as of now, i have requested 4 channels to do this. Maybe you could be the first or first ever? Thanks!
Sorry, but what about cetaceans? they are known to have quite elaborate languages (is the term appropriate though?), individual names and sing songs just for fun, like we do.
The shortfall in views might be telling you that you've fostered a fanbase interested in anthropology first and language second. I love this series, but that's my thought.
If you haven’t seen those videos of people training their pets to “talk” you need to look them up. They record words on buttons they can push, and it’s astonishing the way dogs and cats are able to legitimately communicate.
These chapters are so temporally spaced out that as an audience member and student I would lose interest because you keep piquing my interest and then offering just 10 minutes of content every three months or so. If you need more time to complete your project, I would really recommend you do that first, and then release the complete content in one go or maybe over the course of just a few days or at most weeks. By the time you release a new chapter, I've already forgotten most of the concepts discussed in the previous chapters. Please take this as constructive criticism. I'm a long time channel fan and I haven't missed a video in years.
Appreciate your thoughts on this. It was a source of anxiety for me when I began the project, and now I've had good and detailed feedback in both directions. Very valid criticism, especially given how long it takes me to research and animate each minute of content. Thank you.
Well monetarily it doesn’t maybe work out. But this video has already been sent to director animal behavior at John’s Hopkins. Probably get passed around from there. Temporal problems are temporary.
4:20 "how do giraffes locate one another"
...they are like 15 feet tall in a mostly flat savannah.... I'd assume they just... ya know.... look around
Don't assume that. They can more easily camouflage themselves in a xeric savannah among acacia trees than you or I can. When they are motionless, they are hard for even a well-seasoned human monitor to locate.
The infrasound may well be their "tool" to help a band of giraffe, disbursed over a square mile or further, locate each other without moving to give away their location to watchful predatory eyes.
@@EyeSeeThruYou they are tall, their backdrop will be the sky a lot of the time, not the savannah grass, so camouflage doesn't make much sense, especially at further distances where the tops of their heads will poke above the horizon as the earth curves.
also I'm not a professional zoologist or anything lol, i just said i assumed that, and i was kinda making a joke about giraffes are tall. personally i think the reason they use calls for location is mostly at night, maybe over very long distances, as mentioned in the video, they seem to make more noise at night, which is probably to make up for a lack of vision when its too dark, since their eyes are "tuned" for the bright sun on them all day.
@@Minty1337 You're missing the point, African "savannah" isn't uniformly grass, and giraffe prefer upland forested areas. That could mean acasia "forest," where clumps of trees dot the landscape, to a mixed-wood loosely forested area. That's not "open sky."
Giraffe fur is part of its camouflage as well, and so is its behaviors, including movements.
Most animals can actually see in the dark, some better than others. Stationary positions aren't because they can't see, but to keep them out of the field of view of nocturnal predators looking and listening for movement.
My statement with regard to infrasound stands, lending to day or night use were feasible.
@@EyeSeeThruYou I'm not missing the point? most of the savannah is grassland, the last time forests were common and dense was around 7000 years ago during the African humid period, perhaps at that time vocalizations were more useful during the day, but in the modern day, they don't seem to be, again look at modern giraffes that have been studied, they mostly vocalize at night. obviously many animals can see in the dark, humans can for example, but that's not true of all animals. as i said, im not a zoologist, but it wouldn't surprise me if giraffes simply lack decent low-light vision, and never needed a reason to evolve much in that regard due to relying on hearing in the dark, and that has been good enough for hundreds of thousands of years.
as i keep saying, i'm not a zoologist, and with giraffe vocalizations being so understudied, i don't think either of us can claim any potential use is right or wrong, im personally just speculating based on what makes sense and what i know about zoology, as an enthusiast.
lol, upon googling it:
"They can detect small movements across long distances. Their night vision is quite poor. Giraffes are among of the few mammals to be able to perceive color. They also have a 360-degree field of vision and can see far into the distance."
they seem very good at spotting small movements over long distances (other giraffes moving their heads) and lack quality low-light vision, requiring other senses (like hearing) to find each other.
i know i didn't do any research initially, but i wasn't correcting anyone either, i was merely speculating and made sure to say i was merely assuming, please do research before correcting other people with such confidence.
The article is about giraffe communication in visual, olfactory, and acoustic modalities. It doesn't claim that sound is the main way giraffes locate each other, just that it might be one way.
Fish also vocalize. I've heard my clown fish make grunts and clicks, usually when they want food.
The oceans are very noisy places indeed, and far more of that is deliberately created by assorted forms of life than most would realise.
Electric fish also use electroreception to send signals to one another, sometimes surprisingly similar ones
@@DrBunnyMedicinalIf you snorkel or scuba, you almost have your thoughts drowned out by the reef sounds. Even a recent paper showed that polyps will react to these sounds, it horrifically understudied.
As a biologist studying (among other things) communication in ants, I really appreciate this series and commend you doing it for joy, not the views.
Ant use pheromone, ant use scent, ant use antenna, ant use eye, ant use ordered movement, ant use pincers.
That sentence of kitten purrs made me remember an academic lesson I one participated. We talked about about de different „s“ sounds in different languages to put it simply and an syrian student told us the different variants in theirs - most of them sound to us, unfamiliar with it , exactly the same. Not one could make out differences between them. What we hear and expect from our prospective an possible mislead us, as different animal species could have possibly developed an completely different form of communication.
Huh, that's neat. Russian has 4 s sounds, deep s, hard s, normal s, and soft s. And also 3 sh sounds. So 7 sounds which are all pretty similar, the only difference is the frequency I guess. If you can tell s and sh apart, then you already have an in-built ability to tell apart these 2 similar frequencies, which many speakers of other languages aren't able to do. Russian just takes that to another level and has 7 of them lol. But some of them are like allophones so it doesn't really matter anyway. It's not like saying one of them wrong would change the meaning of a word, it just gives you a foreign accent :D and almost every foreigner is unable to say them correctly lol
@@louiserocks1Can you show them phonetically and by naming them within exemplary words? I'm learning Russian yet, I couldn't find a reliable source for articulative features of those sounds.
??? There’s only two in the Levantine dialect, س and ص. Maybe it’s just because I speak Palestinian, not Syrian, but I’ve never heard more than those two sounds
@@malegria9641maybe they meant Assyrian
My last cat was very vocal. She had something like 14 different meows and vocalizations that I could identify. Ranging from greeting, initiating some kind of activity, requesting help for things, and expressing emotional state. I always understood her easily
Halfway through the series!
But too many especially communicative species remain. Stick with me a bit longer.
til the end!
Hi there NativLang, welcome back! still waiting for that guaraní video!
Loving it!
"Stick with me a bit longer."
You can't go far enough into this for me. My speculation is that consciousness goes a lot deeper than our homocentric thinking does and communication is just an expression of that.
This is a very interesting series! Whenever you'll release I'll make time to watch.
YES, NEW NATIVLANG VID
Human calls: screams, shouts, laughs, cries, moans and groans, gasps, snorts, sighs, coughs, sniffs, and of course the "huh?".
(hidden: way too many precise mouth movements)
And let's not forget gesturing: Pointing, shrugging, and "thumbs up"
But homo sapiens don't really have grammar. These are all just making elaborate displays. Nothing to see here.
@@Mohenjo_Daro_ oh there's not just that, let's not forget the many sign languages, the signs we use across traditional languages, and technically writing and brail are a separate form of communicating, and unrelated to you, mohenjo, I think the reply above is correct, there are the many many precise vocalizations, oh and facial communication also exists
“Moans” is crazy but ya 😂 and we have whatever the “shhh🤫” is called, and also the “psssp 👁️🫦👁️” not to mention every culture has their own animal mimicry and other shouts, below the border is the “ayayayayaya🛖🌮”
babe wake up new nativlang video dropped
I am thoroughly enjoying this series. Linguistics from the ground up.
I used to have a beagle who swore like a sailor at me whenever she didn’t get her way. I didn’t teach her those barks; she must have picked up that ‘potty muzzle’ from the dog park.
low views? don't underestimate the Long Tail! 😏
❣your pun! May this series have many long tails!
@@NativLang Hear, Hear!
brilliant
When I hear "visual communicating" in context of animals, my brain is screaming "bees!!!"
Well, I hope after this video, it also screams JACKY DRAGONS at you.
"Is it doing that in a Nicolas Cage voice?" though, *that's* the big question. 🤣
I'm pretty sure that's "tactile" or "physical" communication. The vibrations are sensed through their antennae, not their eyes.
And cephalopods changing color.
@@andyjay729 Cephalopods (at least Octopus and Cuttlefish) are a a lot smarter than most people think, sentient and probably even sapient. But, given the way the entire clade is stuck in their 'breed once and then die' reproductive strategy, there's no way for there to be much accumulation in either culture or technology, on top of all the other issues that an aquatic lifestyle imposes.
I'm pretty sure that squids mostly aren't that smart (potentially the largest/longest living species are), but I don't know enough about Nautiluses/Nautili to even start on an opinion.
Octopodes and Cuttlefish are very clearly at least sentient however.
A dog "huff" sounds more like a sneeze. In my experience, the feeling it expresses is "I am satisfied".
Do Lycaones picti actually sneeze, or do they huff?
@@pierreabbat6157I meant Canis familiaris.
@@Matthew.Morycinski I know, but painted dogs are said to vote by sneezing.
maybe the views are lower but i am so deeply interested in this subject and always look forward to the next episode
Thank for making these long ago enough to have given me a love for Linguistics, and long enough in duration to follow me to my Masters. :)
Interesting! As a biologist, I often wonder if we make too much of human communication. Obviously human speech is intelligent, creative, diverse, ever changing, so it's definitely special in that sense. However, it does break down into categories like food/hungry, reproduction/sex, etc. We look at body language to help interpret other people's statements.
The more I think about it, the less I can differentiate between all these meanings. In the end, all communication seems to be expressing emotion, even our abstract, technical language.
If we didn't feel these things were important, we wouldn't care about it. Rationality, reason, and logic are only implemented by people who feel they're important and useful.
I see lizard doing those push-ups all the time! I remember musing on the reasons behind this behavior as a kid. And now my childhood mystery has finally been answered
Although these videos do have lower viewcounts, I think these are some of the best on the channel! I love how deep you dug to uncover all this information, and the methodical way it is presented in these videos!
i love learning about language
Doin it fer the joy, and fer the education!! NOT just fer views (which for the record you DO deserve WAY more of!!), THAT'S why you are one of my favorite UA-camrs!!! Keep up the great work!!
I think the low view count just means people haven't discoverd this. Maybe once the whole video (at the end of the series) comes out, the algorithm will push it and more people will discover the amazing work youve put in!
It's been out for only 30minutes 👀
I think another reason is UA-cam notifs sucking. I have notifs on for this channel, and I only saw the video after scrolling down on my home page quite a bit
where i grew up a lot of people will probably never accept any of this because they consider it unchristian
Your segways remind me of the Eyewitness videos I watched as a kid.
A thought to add is that humans will also use words as emotional expressions rather than signals to someone else, so the two categories aren't always clearly separate. .
Now, I find this kind of research a lot more interesting than trying to teach human languages to nonhumans. Not only is the latter presumptuous, and dehumanizing to actual humans who use sign and augmented communication tools, I think we can learn so much more from studying communication between creatures on their own terms. After all, *our* languages must have come from somewhere.
Exactly. "Can animals talk (the way a human would)?" is the wrong question to ask. "To what extent do animals talk (among each other) and how?" is so much more interesting. For one, it's not a polar question with arbitrary criteria on what constitutes language. Just start with any communication they exhibit, and work your way up to the complicated aspects from there.
special knead
Well, why not do both?
The button cats and dogs who are, right now, getting many of their needs met much better than before they learnt to use buttons with human words to communicate those needs, would beg to differ. Especially with respect to their health needs, including such things as surgery and medication. But also simply with respect to their everyday needs for food, water, play, pets and things like planning their upcoming days, for those who like that. Regardless of whether they just use a single button to get their point across, or strings of three, four and even five words at once. Bottom line is, these animals are healthier and happier than they were without those buttons. Why deprive them of this improved quality of life?
Not to mention the parrots who enjoy chatting to their parrot friends through video calls that they themselves initiate. An activity which requires less communication with their humans, but they do need to learn how to let those humans know when they want to use their tablets to call those far-away feathered friends. Again, why deprive them of this improved quality of life?
One approach really does not exclude the other. And for the record, I'm talking about peer reviewed research here.
I love this series, am always looking forward to the next part. I've wondered about this topic for so long (my cat definitely communicates with me using mews, but how much is actually about telling me anything and how much is just getting my attention?? Maddening to not know.)
only half-way!? amazing, eager for more
I really love this series!! I'm sorry it isn't getting as much attention as your usual videos. Please keep it up!!
I have two indoor cats. One of them will walk up to me and make the same sequence of about four unique sounds, every time she wants me to sit on the couch so that she can snuggle on my lap. I do wonder if this is a "sentence" to her, or four "words" (Hey! Couch? Sit? Stroke?), or just five attention-getting noises she uses for me.
I can't wait until he gets to the part about Prairie Dog dialects 😊
birds have regional accents and dialects too, i find it all so interesting
I once read that painted dogs sneeze as a form of voting for whether they should go hunting or not.
I wonder how long someone had to study mice to figure out all the sounds they make and did they just stick a bunch of microphones in their cages. I can just imagine some researcher with a mouse sized auditorium and they're taking notes on a clipboard while occasionally petting and feeding them.
Dear Josh your low viewcounts are a result of the algorithm, I click on your vids every time they are recommended to me, but the algorithm prefers people who upload atleast weekly.
I personally don't care about the frequency of uploads.
How does this only have 1.1k likes?
"intensify your begging call," cracked me up, I think I'll be using that to describe certain felines in my life.
Sorry to hear the series has gotten lower view counts, so I'm commenting for the algorithm. Great video!
I'm surprised this series has such low views for a topic people seem to obsess over whenever a new example comes up.
Interesting as always! Your videos make my day and I love to revisit them to refresh. Thank you!
This is really cool, and I'm glad you made this video. Thanks!!
On top of its remarkable feats of communication, the Amazon giant river otter manages the impressive acheivement of being an otter and still being ugly
Not extemely so, but... you're not wrong.
This is kind of me wanting more from the Jacky dragon example, but I honestly think that an episode just on lizard linguistics could be interesting. I used to have a bearded dragon and while she didn't have any vocalizations (at least for us; I've heard some of them hiss when they feel threatened), she was much more expressive than some cats I've met. She would sometimes head bop if she liked something (although it's also a dominance display), she would wave at us all the time to show she was submissive to us, she had a beard that she could flare out and change color to indicate she was stressed (and gape her mouth if she really didn't like something - I actually saw her do all of that once when her heat lamp flickered out suddenly during a thunderstorm we had), she licked everything she was curious about, and I swear that sometimes she had the smallest hint of a smile or frown (depending on her mood and comfort). That last part could very well be me anthropomorphizing her but everyone I met who has owned some specific lizards and especially bearded dragons have said that they can be surprisingly expressive, maybe even emotional even if it's not the same as human emotions. (I do think lizards have emotions but they don't feel them in the same way humans do)
Anyway I'm only just seeing you're making this series and I'll be tuning in for more, I haven't really thought about the ways we potentially learn from animals to see what language is and how we might define language. It could be a bias of mine thinking mostly as an anthropologist more than a linguist but being reasonably open to what others have to say on the subject is what opened my world to learning more about language in the first place.
Chantek the orangutan self-identified as human in part because he knew sign language while the "orange dogs" (as he called other orangutans) were not able communicate as he could. The experiment with him was stopped precisely because it was successful in showing that an animal can learn a human language, at least to some extent.
Have you studied chickens yet? I’m not how well-accepted this is academically, but I read a book called “How to speak chicken” (clearly marketed for backyard chicken keepers) and I’ve been observing and communicating with my chickens. They have different types of vocalisations and they combine different sounds to create what I would call phrases or expressions. I’ve mastered the greeting “buh-dup” well enough to be understood and get a response from chickens I’d never met before! I can also understand their alarm call, they’re “look: Food!” noise, and the “egg song” that they make when they’ve just laid an egg or are celebrating with another hen who’s just laid an egg. Roosters have a slightly different vocabulary. There’s the obvious crowing call, but mine also understands and speaks with the hens effectively. They’re constantly communicating with one another and according to the book, they give each other names! I’d love if you’d investigate and see if there’s been academic research that corroborates this!
Huzzah, NativLang video!
I love all NativLang videos!
I heard some clown fishes make some weird grunts when they used their vocal cords called Vocalization
I am enjoying the series
From my perspective, my dog makes slightly different barks for different emotions or wants and I can understand them, so I would say at least some animals have a small amount of language in them
So maybe Lassie really was specifically telling Timmy about how someone had fallen down an abandoned well. And Timmy was a young Dr. Dolittle.
How does this have lower nombers of viewers? This is soo cool! Continue your greate work!
I'm so hyped for the next parts! 😁
While I watch this video my cat is vocalizing a whole book on why I must feed him right now
He is already well overweight
this is such a cool series!
Thank you for humanizing these little guys
I'm pretty confident that a mouse (or possibly a rat, I didn't get a good look) cussed me out once. Was walking along a stretch of sidewalk that was covered by long grasses from the vacant lot next to it and accidentally kicked a rodent. Lemme tell ya, that little guy had opinions on my carelessness. If that was not the mousey equivalent of "Hey! I'm walkin' here!", then I'll eat my hat.
I'm excited about when you'll get to the part where you talk about the dogs that communicate by pressing single-word buttons 😂
YESSSS IVE BEEN WAITING FOR SO LONG
I think the main property that a anything that can be dubbed a language has to have is arbitrarity. As long as meanings are universally assigned to a call, this is no different to a human smile or crying, which are not part of a language. Once the correspondence between the sign and the meaning becomes arbitrary, it immediately implies there's something happening in the brain rather than the genes, and opens up a possibility for things being learned. This is how you get different dialects, languages and languages groupes, after all. Interstingly enough, this phenomenon dies exist at large in birds - their songs are often not genetically inherited but instead learned from their parents, reulting in geographically distributed dialets of bird song.
As for the Clever Hans phenomenon, I personally believe that this very same phenomenon lies at the heart of learning a human language as kids: we simploy mimic what people around us do. That is why learning a language with a textbook that much more difficult, I assume: if you want a foreign language as efficiently as you have your mothertonge, it has to be about exposure rather then memorization. The more you try to mimic other people speak, the more effortless it becomes for you to speak the same language as they do. At elst that's my conjecture.
The most "youtube comment on a linguistics video" comment of all time
@@williamdittmann9281 Well, for one animal communiaction is a very underresearched area to have any set in stone principles so it often comes down to what one wants to believe, unfortunately for now at least, as these videos showcase. But the importance of arbitrary meaning-sign assignment is either way mentioned in many monographies on linguistics by prominent linguists to invite speculation on it in an intruguing but yet poorly understood area.
Note: Primatologists are collecting a corpus of non-human ape sign-language.
Each of the non-human great-ape species is being observed in the wild, and the signs they make written down. In fact, @NativLang, remember your lingusit's-first-contact survival-kit video? Yeah, these primatologists seem to be using those same techniques to record the [possible] meanings of the different signs.
It's all really fascinating. You may wanna have a look at it.
this topic is very fascinating
always wonder how would non-human animal vocalize
Engaging for the algorithm. Very enjoyable.
I keep chickens. They have a number of meaningful calls associated with different aspects of their flock behavior.
Great video!
I read a great book on animal communication; the segments on the vocalizations (& what they signalled) of prairie dogs (which have warning vocalizations that are way more complex than people would realize, indicating the type of predator spotted, & even the general direction from which it's coming), bats, & whales were especially super intriguing.
Bees were interesting, of course, & frogs were kind of neat.
I once read a Nat Geo article that said that dolphins have vocalizations/"names" for each other, that they remember for decades.
I'm sure there's a lot to learn about animal communication.
I don't think animals have our capacity for grammar, though; even primates that were taught to sign lost the ability after a couple of generations, or so (i.e., some of the signs [but always less] would be passed to the next generation, & even less to the next).
after episode 8 we need a season 2 right
Maybe animals like dolphins use "perfect pitch" to communicate. Its vary rare in humans but maybe they use pitch to give signals.
Please do a video about how languages started using spaces between words in writing.
There is a thing I started to wonder after seeing this video: if human language is learned/developed during socialization, isn't it the same for animal language? I mean, we're looking for paterns, but isn't more likely that different groups have different patterns? And if an individual or a small group is kept apart from the others (like lab rats or even cats and dogs that live in apartments), couldn't they develop a language structure completely different from other groups of the same species?
Ok I’m a minute in from the rec screen. I’ll be back after I watch the previous ones haha
Am I the only one who saw the lizard communication sequence and thought "Shouryuken!"?
Can animals grammar? Yes. Crows grammar a lot, but I don't really understand it. When we brought our new dog home, the crows started dive-bombing her. After they realized she was not a threat, all crows left her alone. A neighbour dog used to get hassled all the time. They looked very much the same, but the birds were able to explain to each other the differences between the two dogs, ignoring the one and pestering the other. I probably can't hear the nuances of their calls, but they have no problems understanding each other.
Have you found “forward error correction” used in the animal language world? Great series so far!
fascinating video as always!
Merry Christmas
I can guess very little about a dog from hearing a call. I have no idea if the bark is angry or playful.
Honestly really neat.
my cat does the call thin when he brings dead corpses.
Just lovely!
I'm pretty sure that there are people that can hear the "lows" of rats. We call them "squeaks".
My cat can say 4 words that we've come up with together
you should make a video on the language with the longest words on average
I will go back and watch the others in this particular series because I'm curious as to why birds are not duscusseed (maybe you already covered them, or they will appear in the next installment).
I'd like to ask, could you do a video on the background and spread of Celtic languages?
I'm pretty close by Brittany in the grand scheme of things, and I've even visited once or twice; but only recently did I learn of the existence of Brezhoneg from looking into the history of _Wat Zullen We Drinken._ Turns out it's a Dutch adaptation of a Brezhoneg workers' song created in the early 20th Century.
Wake up Babe!, new episode of "Can aninal grammar?" just dropped!
Went will we have a video about the ampersand?
8:03 I don't get it. I wish you had explained this list.
I miss you!
Can you do a video about Prairie dog communication? Please?
Hey! you finally woke up after a month! Could you make a video on Meiteilon after you are done with your animal thingies? No linguistics channel i have reached out to has never made a video on meiteilon. I know it isnt that easy to just ask someone to do smthn and expect them to do it for you but my oldest request like this is 1 month and a half old on another channel! as of now, i have requested 4 channels to do this. Maybe you could be the first or first ever? Thanks!
This feels riggarous. Riggerous. Something.
Plot twist: humans ARE animals. ❤
Please for the love of G-d do one all about ants! I don’t care how long it takes
Sorry, but what about cetaceans? they are known to have quite elaborate languages (is the term appropriate though?), individual names and sing songs just for fun, like we do.
I don't know why you get fewer views, these are some of the best videos you've made
Did I miss spotted hyena’s? How could you skip such a talkative species?
00:37 wheesh
The shortfall in views might be telling you that you've fostered a fanbase interested in anthropology first and language second.
I love this series, but that's my thought.
Doctor Doolittle episode?
If you haven’t seen those videos of people training their pets to “talk” you need to look them up. They record words on buttons they can push, and it’s astonishing the way dogs and cats are able to legitimately communicate.
Right after the Frieren finale. We eating good tonight.
*grammanimal* ✨🤭
These chapters are so temporally spaced out that as an audience member and student I would lose interest because you keep piquing my interest and then offering just 10 minutes of content every three months or so. If you need more time to complete your project, I would really recommend you do that first, and then release the complete content in one go or maybe over the course of just a few days or at most weeks. By the time you release a new chapter, I've already forgotten most of the concepts discussed in the previous chapters. Please take this as constructive criticism. I'm a long time channel fan and I haven't missed a video in years.
Appreciate your thoughts on this. It was a source of anxiety for me when I began the project, and now I've had good and detailed feedback in both directions. Very valid criticism, especially given how long it takes me to research and animate each minute of content. Thank you.
Yeah I agree
I disagree, the time between each episode is not a problem.
Well monetarily it doesn’t maybe work out. But this video has already been sent to director animal behavior at John’s Hopkins. Probably get passed around from there. Temporal problems are temporary.
It's just 10 minutes, if I forget the previous episode it's not that hard to rewatch it 🤷♀️
Nifty