Babel's Dawn: A Talking Elephant

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« News that Really is News | Main | Verbs Are the Keys to Sentences »

A Talking Elephant

I’ve been getting some off-blog messages from a reader drawing my attention to a story about an elephant that has learned Korean. Story here and video here. (Thanks to Vic Sarjoo.)

The elephant is a young male raised alone in a Korean zoo. He has taught himself a way to stick his trunk in his mouth and produce a variety of recognizable words, recognizable to Korean speakers that is.

The New York Times has a story whose main purpose seems to be to explain away the effect. Move along folks, nothing to see here.

A number of animals can learn to produce words—whales, a variety of birds, so it is not incredible that another species has been added to the list. Many other animals can learn to respond to words.

This blog has said many times that we have ample evidence that other animals are smart enough to at least get started speaking words and phrases, so we need some other explanation than intelligence to learn why—as a rule—only humans talk.

A second recurring theme on this blog is that the biggest pressure for language is social. We are much more communal than our nearest ape relatives, so it is not surprising that we have a tool that cements each human community together. Nor is it surprising that the animals that start mimicking human speech are also highly social creatures who have been robbed of their society.

Zoos have much to answer for. As a boy who often visited the zoo in Washington, DC I became quite familiar with a number of bears who had been driven insane by their captivity and would make constant, repetitive actions. A young elephant raised apart from all other elephants is probably a unhappy and bored as a human child would be if it was raised in solitary confinement and would probably try to make contact with whatever guards were available.

The Korean elephant offers somebody a real chance to see how far language mimicry can be taken. The elephant has already done the seemingly impossible of figuring out a method of making recognizable words. It would be quite something if a person came along who (a) loves elephants and (b) is willing to work with this one to learn how deeply the contact can go. There will probably never be a more willing pupil.

November 04, 2012 | Permalink

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