I saw this article and was like “there must be somewhere specific I can post this” but couldn’t remember. Yes, here!

I think we will be able to communicate in basic ways with whales at some point in the not too distant future, which is wild to say in a sentence but there is a lot of fascinating research going on and their language seems very sophisticated but also understandable to a human perspective.

I went at length on this topic in !ethology@mander.xyz (the comm about animal behaviour). Here’s a link. But, to keep it short:

As far as we know, cetacean communication is **proto-**linguistic. Not quite Language yet, but not too far from it. The article shows abstraction of smaller units, but it doesn’t show the recursion Language shows, of blocks building block-building blocks.

And that recursion is damn important. It’s what allows us to pick a finite number of elements, and create an effectively infinite number of utterances out of them.

we have to be careful what we say near them. if they figure out what the fuck we call them they’ll have questions.