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
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?
We’ll find out all they say is “dangit it’s wet over here too.”
I have a whale friend and he filled me in:
IMMMMMMMM BOOOOOOORRRREDDDDD
SOOOOOOO BOOOOORRREEEDDD
We’re going to end up finding that they’re racist, aren’t we?
I don’t know about whales, but dolphins are well known to be absolute degenerates.
Well, if that means they are talking shit about humans, they are probally justified.
I wonder if they HATE dolphins
This reminds be of the book Hyperion in which there was this paradise ocean world planet, Maui-Covenant. Maui-Covenant had motile isles, giant plant/animal moving islands. They were herded by dolphins. Humans made a device that could translate and talk to the dolphins. All the dolphins committed suicide when the hegemony of man (some sort of capitalistic state) arrived and ruined the planet to extract all the oil.
That part is so eerie and so cool, they ask the dolphins questions but the answers are so alien to them that they realize they just dont have to context to understand them. They miss shark… edit: also if you haven’t read chasm city by alastair reynolds, I heavily recommend it and it also has some dolphins that are being transported to a new colony world with humans
Man the AI translations of all those calming tracks are gonna be wild, were gonna hear some sweet old whale gossip.
“Iiiiiiiiiiiiiii’mmmm hooooooooooooorneeeeeeeeeey caaaaaaaaaaaaaaan aaaaanyyyyyyooooneeee heeeeeeeeeaaar meeeeeeeeeee ooooooooveeeeeeeer theeeeeeseee fuuuuuuuuuuckiiiing boooooooooooats?”
AI: “I speak whale”
The rest of the world: “No you don’t”
You just CAN’T, Nemo! I mean AI
They speak fucking Entish. One letter at a time. Take a goddamn year to say a sentence.
Sure it can work out the structure of language but without context will it ever be able to decrypt the actual meaning?
“Fuck that boat.”
“Yeah, let’s go sink it.”
- Orcas
Correct, no one REALLY knows anything until you can reliably “say” sound X and, I guess, observe them do reaction Y which would suggest it means word Z. I guess because I don’t know because I’m not a xenolinguist which also no known human is one of those yet
And when we finally learn their language. We can long distance shit post on the whale’s social media
we’re so fucked.
Fuck Yes
Genuinely interesting. Perhaps they’d have something to teach us. We humans could use the help. 😏
“Stop genocide.”
Oh right right. We’ll get right on that didn’t realize it was a big deal.
“Poisoning the ocean is like, not cool man” 🐋
I’d hate to know how they’d feel if they knew how humans would respond to this…
This is the shit I’m alive for. Fucking amazing.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world
Good bot.
Perfect, my whole life I dreamed of speaking whale. Now I will be able to understand my mother-in-law.
