Imagine that you're a football (aka soccer) player. And of course all your teammates are football players too.
To communicate explicitly on the football pitch, you use a combination of names, pronouns, short phrases, hand gestures, head movements, etc. But actually most of the communication on the pitch is implicit--players observing each other, inferring the mental state of each other, and making changes based on those inferences. That's how players running at full speed are able to improvise complex plays involving long passes.
This is how I think of the communication between smart social animals like wolves or dolphins. They are like a football team. Every individual is an athlete, with essentially similar physical characteristics and skills. And they interact to accomplish essentially athletic goals, like hunting, or asserting dominance, or mating.
So, I'm not holding out hope that dolphins have a secret rich language, or even an interest in developing one. Heck, even among humans, professional athletes do not have a strong reputation as deep thinkers. But they think a lot about their particular sport.
The movie Avatar, while terrible overall, got this right, I think. Scientists failed utterly to make a connection with the big blue natives. It wasn't until a warrior (by accident) took on the task that the connection was made. The big blue natives were themselves warriors, so of course that is the type of communication they valued most.
The other side of the coin is that there really might not be any actual pattern to pull out of any single dolphin's vocalizations.
Just because dolphins possess a possible capacity for language doesn't mean that any language exists.
I'd figure the mutlitude of dolphins in the wild all establish personal colloquial parlances, organized according to the whims an experiences of each individual pod.
Kind of like in that movie Nell, where the children grew up learning to make noises like their stroke-afflicted mother. If there are no regimented social constraints to enforce teaching and learning, wild animals have no externalized motive for establishing the codified norms of a symbolic language.
I agree with this idea. Wordless shouts can get a lot of communication done on a football pitch when accompanied with some gesturing and a rich understanding of the immediate context.
Even among humans, with our highly codified and atomic language, there is a lot of research that hints at how important nonverbal cues are to communication.
Dolphins can seemingly identify themselves verbally, but does that mean it's part of language? It doesn't seem to be conceptually different the fact that big cats and dogs identify themselves to each other, although they do it with complex chemical markers instead of sound waves. But I don't think anyone expects to find a highly codified chemical language of "words" among cats.
I don't understand the distinction that you're making here...a lack of intergenerational transmission? Isn't all language at heart a personalized colloquial parlance? The contemporary world of highly codified standard international languages is novel and weird.
If the dolphins, in their signature whistles, invent arbitrary symbols that are assigned meanings in a social context, that's ultimately linguistic behavior that outmatches even the most precocious sign-language-using ape.
There was a great RadioLab episode [1] that followed Denise Herzing during one of her tests. Also in the same episode they discussed the controversial co-habitation communication research done by Margaret Howe in the 1960s. A really fascinating episode for anyone interested in this topic.
Personally, My main motivation for learning about artificial intelligence has been to break thE barrier of being able to communicate with dolphins . At this point I only understand the principles of machine learning and pattern recognition and this challenge should be overcome soon . I think there could be more advances in communications with other creatures.
To communicate explicitly on the football pitch, you use a combination of names, pronouns, short phrases, hand gestures, head movements, etc. But actually most of the communication on the pitch is implicit--players observing each other, inferring the mental state of each other, and making changes based on those inferences. That's how players running at full speed are able to improvise complex plays involving long passes.
This is how I think of the communication between smart social animals like wolves or dolphins. They are like a football team. Every individual is an athlete, with essentially similar physical characteristics and skills. And they interact to accomplish essentially athletic goals, like hunting, or asserting dominance, or mating.
So, I'm not holding out hope that dolphins have a secret rich language, or even an interest in developing one. Heck, even among humans, professional athletes do not have a strong reputation as deep thinkers. But they think a lot about their particular sport.
The movie Avatar, while terrible overall, got this right, I think. Scientists failed utterly to make a connection with the big blue natives. It wasn't until a warrior (by accident) took on the task that the connection was made. The big blue natives were themselves warriors, so of course that is the type of communication they valued most.
Edit just for fun:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xqrzuj_the-life-aquatic-wit...