For some of us it comes as no surprise that the forests of this earth are alive and fully communicative. Yet their means of communication are still to complex for us simple humans to understand. Some researchers do however have qualified guesses: http://youtu.be/6ivy4Tv8FjY Forests are essential ecosystems for life on earth. They cover 30% of […]
Humanimalia is a top end scientific journal for research on human animal interface. This is how they describe their task: The past twenty-five years have witnessed an extraordinary explosion of interest in human interfaces with non-human animals. Since the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975 and the beginning of the movement for animal […]
Millions of years before we humans came along, the earth’s oceans were a vast, unbroken web of whale song. The complex courting arias of humpbacks, the distinct clicking dialects of migrating sperm-whale clans, the congalike poundings of Pacific grays, the multi-thousand-mile moans and blips of massive blue and fin whales conversing across oceans at octaves […]
Xenolinguistics is the study of the languages of alien species. The nature and form of such languages remains purely speculative because so far no search for extraterrestrial intelligence projects have detected signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The possibility of future contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life has made the question of the structure and form of potential alien language a topic […]
Like Takara Tomy’s Bowlingual, the dog “translator” device, the Meowlingual will help you decode what your cat is telling you. It can analyze the expression on your feline friend’s furry face and categorize it into six different moods. The gadget also translates around 200 words in “cat chat”. It can even interpret 21 kinds of […]
Communication among prairie dogs and other highly social animals is much more sophisticated than we think. Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University has spent the past 30 years studying a foreign tongue. But there are no instructional podcasts or evening classes to help him: Slobodchikoff is trying to learn prairie dog. Prairie dogs, a […]
Lapine, the language of rabbits, is introduced in Richard Adams classic adventure novel Watership Down, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. The fragments of language presented by Adams consist of a few dozen distinct words, and are chiefly used for the naming of rabbits, their mythological characters, and objects in their world. […]
“For centuries humans have tried to teach animals to communicate like humans,” said Michael Darre, an animal science professor at the University of Connecticut (UConn) in Storrs. “And now we’re getting to the point where we’re saying, Wait a second. Why don’t we learn their language instead of making them learn ours?” Researchers from several […]
There are many examples of animals that have been forced to adapt to human forms of communication. Often this is called “intelligent” behavior. Clearly there is something deeply problematic with the idea that intelligence can be measured by simililarity to human forms of thought and communication. Here are nevertheless a few interesting examples from a […]
In Greek mythology, Melampus (Μελάμπους), or Blackfoot, was the introducer of the worship of Dionysus, according to Herodotus, who asserted that his powers as a seer were derived from the Egyptians and that he could understand the language of animals. Part of the story of his abilities goes like this: When Melampus lived with Neleus, […]