dolphinspeak

[chelidon]

Nifty article:

Dolphins have different 'accents'

Is this a genuine linguistic difference, or just the kind of regional variation you'd find in comparatively simple territorial marking behaviour as with, say, birdsong?

It's been a good many years since my college days, when one of the things I dove into was cognitive, computational and neurolinguistics, trying to find ways to model and represent language and knowledge, and to dig down to how language actually works (as one way of delving into how people think). One of the most interesting parts to me was cross-species studies, always a controversial topic, always underfunded. I'm glad there are still at least a few folks out there still doing that work. And, well, dolphins rock.

Comments

[ravenedgewalker.livejournal.com]

there was some interesting Orca stuff going on while I was doing my phd int eh lab, on similar themes.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Seems like there's always plenty of debate about how much is "language" and how much is simple territorial markers, signaling, sonar and so on. I'm excited that there's folks looking at it, it's nifty from so many angles...

[strangevibe.livejournal.com]

You know me from Austin/Vortex circles if you don't recognize the handle.
I didn't know we had this common interest.
The most interesting work I know of being done at the intersection of linguistics and computational in 2007 is by Peter beim Graben, now in Clinical Language Sciences at Reading in the UK, previously in Potsdam.
His theories at the borderlines of language, dynamical systems and quantum mechanics are probably the closest to my own of anybody on the planet.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll have to check out his work -- I haven't kept up regularly on the journals in some years, but it's still an area of great interest to me. So which Austin/Vortex person are you?

[elnigma.livejournal.com]

Detritus from my brain that I thought I should share in a dream you guys had announced you'd renamed a pet brown long-haird dwarf chihuahua puppy you had named "Fudgie" "Biggit" as a joke.

Don't ask me where that came from, I don't know.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Um. Wow. I'm not quite sure how to respond to that, except to note that you have a fascinating dreamscape... ;> I will, however, keep an eye out for stray Chihuhahuas, but around here, I'd suspect the owls'd take care of most of 'em...