Linguistics

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Humpback whale song shown to be structurally similar to human language (phys.org)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Apparently humpback whale songs show a few features in common with human language; such as being culturally transmitted through social interactions between whales.

"The authors found that whale song showed the same key statistical properties present in all known human languages" - my guess is that the author talks about Zipf's Law, that applies to both phoneme frequency and word frequency in human languages.

[Dr. Garland] "Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language." - so while it is not language yet it's considerably closer to language than we'd expect, specially from non-primates.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Babelingua was right