Welcome • User Guide
ToS • Privacy • Canary
Donate • Bugs • License

©2025 Poal.co

664

I think most animals are smarter than we give them credit for. What about you?

Archive: https://archive.today/538Qd

From the post:

>All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf’s law. Researchers have hunted for evidence of this pattern in communication among other species, but until now no other examples have been found. In new research published today in Science, our team of experts in whale song, linguistics and developmental psychology analysed eight years’ of song recordings from humpback whales in New Caledonia. Led by Inbal Arnon from the Hebrew University, Ellen Garland from the University of St Andrews, and Simon Kirby from the University of Edinburgh, We used techniques inspired by the way human infants learn language to analyse humpback whale song.

I think *most* animals are smarter than we give them credit for. What about you? Archive: https://archive.today/538Qd From the post: >>All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf’s law. Researchers have hunted for evidence of this pattern in communication among other species, but until now no other examples have been found. In new research published today in Science, our team of experts in whale song, linguistics and developmental psychology analysed eight years’ of song recordings from humpback whales in New Caledonia. Led by Inbal Arnon from the Hebrew University, Ellen Garland from the University of St Andrews, and Simon Kirby from the University of Edinburgh, We used techniques inspired by the way human infants learn language to analyse humpback whale song.

(post is archived)

You are currently inside a comment thread.
Click here to see all the comments (10).
[–] • 1 pt 2mo

They are very smart as it is, without much of a speech apparatus, they figure out how to tell us things with their eyes, pointing at things with their noses or even tapping things with their paws. Hell, we have to spell out certain words (walk, treat etc) because she would come running and look at you like she was going to get that thing right now. Well, she figured out what we were spelling over time. The we started replacing her name with "someone" and the object/activity with "something". Because we didn't change the rest of the sentence, she figured those out too.

If she ever had a thing that read out her thoughts, and she realized that we could understand exactly what she was thinking, she would talk non-stop. It would be very interesting to hear from a dog about things we can perceive, like the deeper scent of things, or sounds we don't hear.

[–] • 1 pt 2mo

May we live in interesting times. Hopefully in the better side of that statement.