Prairie dogs' language decoded by scientists
Human-animal translation devices may be available within 10 years, researcher says

Did that prairie dog just call you fat? Quite possibly. On The Current Friday, biologist Con Slobodchikoff described how he learned to understand what prairie dogs are saying to one another and discovered how eloquent they can be.

Slobodchikoff, a professor emeritus at North Arizona University, told Erica Johnson, guest host of The Current, that he started studying prairie dog language 30 years ago after scientists reported that other ground squirrels had different alarm calls to warn each other of flying predators such as hawks and eagles, versus predators on the ground, such as coyotes or badgers.

Prairie dogs, he said, were ideal animals to study because they are social animals that live in small co-operative groups within a larger colony, or "town" and they never leave their colony or territory, where they have built an elaborate underground complex of tunnels and burrows.

In order to figure out what the prairie dogs were saying, Slobodchikoff and his colleagues trapped them and painted them with fur dye to identify each one. Then they recorded the animals' calls in the presence of different predators.

They found that the animals make distinctive calls that can distinguish between a wide variety of animals, including coyotes, domestic dogs and humans. The patterns are so distinct, Slobodchikoff said, that human visitors that he brings to a prairie dog colony can typically learn them within two hours.

But then Slobodchikoff noticed that the animals made slightly different calls when different individuals of the same species went by.

"With a sudden intuition, I thought, 'What if they're describing the physical features of each predator?'" he recalled.

He and his team conducted experiments where they paraded dogs of different colours and sizes and various humans wearing different clothes past the colony. They recorded the prairie dogs' calls, analyzed them with a computer, and were astonished by the results.

Clothing colour, size described

"They're able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they're able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun," Slobodchikoff said.

The animals can even describe abstract shapes such as circles and triangles.

Also remarkable was the amount of information crammed into a single chirp lasting a 10th of a second.

"In one 10th of a second, they say 'Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.'"

Besides being a researcher, Slobodchikoff is an author of the book Chasing Doctor Doolittle: Learning the Language of Animals, in which he profiles many other animals with complex language, including crows and ravens, chickens and vervet monkeys. He believes complex speech is probably common within the animal kingdom.

"It's just that we have not looked," he said. He blames the fact that humans have long assumed animals are incapable of such intelligence.

Computer translation

Slobodchikoff said he has been working with a computer scientist to develop a device that uses voice pattern recognition techniques and artificial intelligence to translate between human and animal speech.

"We could potentially have something maybe the size of a cellphone in five to 10 years where a dog would say, 'Woof' and the device would say. 'I want to eat chicken tonight" or a cat could say, 'Meow,' and the device would say, 'My litterbox is filthy, please clean it.'"

He thinks if humans and dogs could understand one another more clearly, it would reduce the number of animals euthanized each year because of behavioural problems, which he blames on a lack of communication. In the meantime, Slobodchikoff said, he has found that just knowing that animals can share complex ideas makes people more empathetic toward them.

"When people realize that prairie dogs and other animals as well can talk … suddenly they see these animals with a new perspective," he said. "They're actually thinking, breathing things not that much different from us."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/06/21/science-prairie-dog-language-decoded.html

can skills only swampman now possesses become widespread within a decade?

roseweird posted:

swirls i don't want to argue with you again but i simply feel i must—MUST—rearticulate that absolutely all of your thoughts and ideas about language are dumb and wrong

You know fuck all about anything.

...
The basic issues are:

* the phonological principle, so that words consist of strings of a relatively small number of discrete elements, combined in different ways;

* the elaboration of a large (and variable) lexicon, containing words from which new words can be derived, and to which an unrestricted supply of completely new words can be added;

* syntactic principles for combining words and other morphemes into sentences, consisting typically of a verb and its participants; and

* the existence of a hierarchical compositional semantics, where the meaning of the whole is a function of the meaning of the parts in some way more complex than simple summation of the correlates of independent displays.

All of these elements seem to be missing from natural communication among non-human animals, including primates. They have also not been demonstrated among primates to whom researchers have attempted to teach something like human language.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080617083349/http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2004/ling001/lecture9.html

TG posted:

prairie dogs are dumb as hell. they dart out in front of my bike like they want me to hit them

swirlsofhistory posted:

jools posted:

swirls is wrong about everything except abstract political economy and language as far as i can tell. wittgenstein ftw

Wait until you see me combine 'em

mccaine's bachelors thesis was on rorty and marxism

TG posted:

prairie dogs are dumb as hell. they dart out in front of my bike like they want me to hit them

just more proof of their intelligence. theres a reason that collision/slip & fall claims are known as "the jewish lottery"

tpaine posted:

it would be pretty funny if it turned out that the prairie dog word for humans is "faggot", like they say "that faggot with the red hat and ipod is back again, mate" and "big faggot with what looks like a spade approaching from the north, hope he doesn't fuck up this big tunnel i just dug" and "you fucking faggot, you shot my mother" lmao.

The prairie dog language is fairly fucking problematic.