OK real talk if we start understanding whales and they have lives and feelings. What are we gonna do about compensation for using their property and destroying it. Like are we gonna genocide the whales when we discover we owe them like a trillion dollars
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
I can try but they weren't cryptic or anything, just didnt make sense to the humans. The humans were swimming underwater and using some tech to translate. They asked the dolphins if they missed the oceans of earth or something to that effect and the dolphins mention that they miss the "great voices" which is implied to be a reference to whales. There were also some casual-seeming phrases that were essentially just word salad to the humans, and they compared it to speaking to a 1 year old human. They end the interaction with the dolphins saying over and over that there are no sharks there and that they miss them, which makes no sense to the narrator so he turns off the translator with the realization that he just can't understand what they mean because they share no mutual contexts.
edit: also presumably part of the problem was that the human's questions were just as context-less to the dolphins as the dolphin answers were to the hupeople
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
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
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?