451
Scientists Discover a 'Phonetic Alphabet' Used by Sperm Whales, Moving One Step Closer to Decoding Their Chatter
(www.smithsonianmag.com)
this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
451 points (99.1% liked)
science
14806 readers
338 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's morphemes, rather than a phonetic alphabet, right? Unless the whales have become literate?
They're putting chemicals in the water, making the frickin whales literate!
Every time someone references the frog quote from Alex Jones, I always end up hearing it with a techno beat
my friend and I constantly reference this and his fiancee absolutely hates it lolololol
We’re confusing a few different terms here - a phone in a phonetic “inventory” (let’s use that term instead of alphabet) is just a unit of sound*. A morpheme is a unit of meaning.
And we won’t know which is which in whale-tongue** until we can confirm what any one word means. (See: “Arrival”)
*theres more to it but I’m tired so I’m not explaining
** what’s the teeth grill thing they eat krill with? let’s use that instead of “tongue” 🤪
Thank you, I was mixing up terms. I suppose I was thinking of phonemes, but I see they're also not purely the sound... Though (I didn't actually read the article yet!) I wondered if that is what they think they found: units of sound that can vary in exact audio/phonetic expression but 'mean' the same sound to the whales. (And from which longer audible communication structures are built.)
Okay, side thought, since I'm also tired and don't feel like looking things up properly:
In simple communication, such as one might assume whale-baleen* to be, perhaps a one to one mapping of phonemes to morphemes is likely.
*I think the baleen is that krill-filtering thing you were after?