
Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans - fezz
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/dolphin-intelligence/foer-text
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ThomasBombadil
I want to say that they might've had a language at some point, but the damage
whaling and fishing industries have wrought on them, might've had an effect on
dolphins the same way more than a quarter century of no formalized school
system, due to war, has been detrimental to Afghanistan's intelligentsia.

I can't prove this, but consider that hand writing is pretty much the only
thing that allows humans to provide extended reach to their accumulated
learning, across generations and centuries.

Without hand writing, or something like it, to act as a physical artifact and
provide shortcuts to skip over expensive processes of trial and error, I doubt
that a codified language, borne of strictly oral traditions among small pods
of disorganized dolphin social groups, would survive across generations, to
jump the inheritance gaps introduced by being hunted nearly to endangered
status by predators like us.

If they're as smart as their neurology suggests, maybe they could learn our
codified languages, or one we can develop cooperatively and share, through
careful training on both sides.

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flueedo
If you put a bunch of humans (children) together, each with no previous
knowledge of language, on an isolated island, they will in all likelihood come
up with one. (Something close to this, as a live example, is a documented case
I remember having read years ago of an all-new sign-language that emerged
spontaneously among a large group neglected deaf-mute children at an
institution a few decades ago. I think this was in Nicaragua or some other
country in that region) What I mean is, our linguistic ability isn't dependent
on culture (though tremendously enriched by it), it's biological. Why wouldn't
the same hold for dolphins. I think they're very smart, but I don't believe
they ever had something we could decently call a language.

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RevRal
Language is a strange and large territory. And, almost by definition, any
social animal must be able to communicate with each other; And, in order to
communicate, there must be shared formal rules. In essence: syntax.

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ThomasBombadil
Well, yeah, but those rules will only be unique and useful for probably 5 or
10 dolphins. The rest of dolphin kind won't have any innate concept of the
vocabulary they've developed.

Grammar, syntax, vocabulary, implicit context, mood and tone. You'll be
starting at square one, with every separate pod, with minimal potential of
cross-pollination across pods, based on dolphins that leave one group, and
join another, and whatever they bring with them, and manage to learn from new
dolphins they meet.

Even the presumable token words, which _surely_ must exist: air, water, fish,
dirt. One pod in isolation from the rest might not build these conceptual
ideas, or use their noises the same way, and then what of another pod halfway
around the world, which they've never met?

Sure, _the capacity_ for language remains, but there's no persistent
implementation. Each variant of a dolphin language dies with the dolphin that
knows it.

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moyix
The article mentions that dolphins are the only species known to use names in
the wild, but that's not quite true:

[http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/07/dont_call_me_polly_parr...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/07/dont_call_me_polly_parrots_hav.html)

~~~
tzs
Penguins [1] might also be an example. At least according to a documentary I
saw, when the one of a pair that went off to hunt returns to the egg or
hatchling to take its mate's place so the mate can go hunt, it finds its mate
by recognizing the mate's distinct call among the thousands of other penguins
calling out for their mates.

Wouldn't that count as a name? It meets the dictionary definition: "a word or
set of words by which a person, animal, place, or thing is known, addressed,
or referred to" (assuming an animal sound can count as a word).

The article did say that the dolphins choose their own sound. The penguin
documentary did not say how penguins get their distinct sound. I wonder if the
article is only counting as names things that are chosen, so if the penguin's
distinct sound is not something chosen by the penguin it does not count?

[1] I'm not sure what specific species I'm talking about here.

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gizmo686
It is common for animals to have personally identifiable sounds. However, most
animals only make their own sound, not the sound of others. For example, a
penguin might identify himself as Bob, but a penguin will not ask where Bob
is.

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LoSboccacc
The tandem experiment is a very clever way to have them communicate.

This doesn't exactly prove anything about a language but it is a good way to
obtain valuable sound data.

I wonder if higher order training could be achieved. I.e. Instructor signal
one dolphin a secret command, dolphin communicate with second dolphin and
second dolphin does the trick - to test if sounds used to organize the tandem
are the same or related in any way to sounds used to relay the secret.

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noiv
I tend to think dolphins communicating might have a huge technical advantage:
Water transports waves way more exact and farer. Also the ability of
echolocation points to a far better usable bandwidth. Humans read, speak and
listen at a few bytes per second. What if dolphins send/receive information
magnitudes faster?

Just imagine you could clearly hear everyone speaking within a radius of let's
say one mile, regardless of walls or other sound absorbers. We would be forced
to compress sentences into tiny time slices to avoid overlaps and distortion.

Just a thought...

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rm_-rf_slash
This was mentioned in Cosmos. Time was when whales could communicate
flawlessly almost around the entire circumference of the earth. Then human sea
travel, especially motor-powered ships, basically acted as a really loud fan
that makes it hard to communicate over. So yes, they can stil talk over long
distances, but the difference is between the ability to call someone on the
phone, and jury-rigging one with two cups and a string.

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thret
"Herzing’s goal is to get a handful of juvenile females she has known since
birth to associate each of three whistle sounds broadcast by the CHAT box with
a specific object: a scarf, a rope, and a piece of [brown seaweed]."

I don't see how a dolphin can be expected to know what a scarf is. Helen
Keller's first word was 'water'. Something she understood completely. If
they'd tried to teach her 'guitar' she may not have gotten anywhere.

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scribu
> I don't see how a dolphin can be expected to know what a scarf is.

Nobody has that expectation.

It's possible that dolphins already have sounds associated with familiar
objects (like seaweed), which might interfere with learning a new sound. Hence
the use of a foreign object.

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JackFr
Just as there are colors we cannot see, and sounds we cannot hear, it seems
possible that there are thoughts we cannot think. That quite literally the
dolphin thoughts are inconceivable to us. Thus by extension the language will
be forever incomprehensible to us.

That our brains have led us to believe that our brains are universal and
comprehensive thinking machines is a quirk of evolution. It doesn't make such
a belief true.

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fsiefken
The last time I read about the subject I understood that some researcher
thought that communication not just involved whistles and clicks but also
movements, postures and bubbles. I can't remember where I read that though.

Like Linear-A or the Voynich script this seems to be a difficult thing to
decode - if there even is a meaningful symbolic communication. Perhaps the
cynic Justin Gregg is right. But like that poster on Fox Mulder door says: 'I
want to believe'!

More info:
[http://www.dolphincommunicationproject.org/](http://www.dolphincommunicationproject.org/)
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576514...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457651400246X)

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henriquemaia
"They’re a kind of alien intelligence sharing our planet—watching them may be
the closest we’ll come to encountering ET."

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

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WalterBright
Makes me wonder why, if dolphins are so smart, they aren't figuring out a way
to decipher our language and communicate with us monkeys.

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goodcanadian
It is not widely accepted by dolphins that humans have language. :-P

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rjurney
What if the dolphins know terrible secrets people shouldn't know?

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rm_-rf_slash
Like seeing their climate being eviscerated around them with no way to deal
with it. :(

