Comment on Whales are Chinese
bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 6 days agoThanks for sharing the actual research.
I’m curious to dive into this (pun intended). It sounds like a bit of a stretch to analogize these whale signals to Mandarin or any other human language simply because of this:
However, our analogy has a limit: while in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.
The jump is, though they may be referring to the whale sounds as “tones”, in human languages “tone” and “pitch” are two distinct concepts which share a modality. The former has to do with meaning, while the latter has to do with things that are extrasentential or even extralinguistic. Consider the rising pitch at the end of a question in English: this nudges the listener into thinking they heard a question, but it doesn’t carry meaning in the lexical sense, which makes it pitch and not tone (cf. the various books like e.g. the Cambridge series on Pitch vs. Tone, even though there are common terms like “intonation” which belie the scientific terms).
If there is no evidence of a mapping between meaning and pitch in whales (as the above quote suggests) then it really isn’t linguistic “tone”, even if it musical tone or some other type. It’s certainly a sound with some sonorant quality, minimally pitch.
Could all be entirely wrong. As I mentioned, I haven’t yet read the paper fully.
tristan@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 6 days ago
Especially, Chinese is not « structurally » complex. It’s got no numbers, no genders, no cases, the grammar is very analytical and straightforward.
bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 6 days ago
Indeed, which is why it is generally classified as an analytic language (as opposed to e.g. fusional). It is sometimes misclassified as an isolating language, which it really isn’t, since Mandarin does have compounds. It is worth noting, though, that no natural language fits perfectly into the morphological prototypes.
That said, fewer complexities in one part of a grammar tend to even out in others. In fact, there is some tendency of tonal languages to lean isolating or analytic exactly because the ratio of morphemes-to-word is lower (often 1-to-1); given that syllables can only be so complex (a limitation of anatomy), analytic languages will tend to have more homophones than non-analytic ones, and thus the tone tends to be required to maintain the same information density. To look at it another way, tone is a method for distinguishing what are otherwise homophones.
Now, how any of that relates to whales… well, it very likely doesn’t.