The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
A lot more than just parroting back
Humans are far from the only animals to use language, as Arik Kershenbaum’s intriguing study shows
288pp, Viking, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
“If a lion could speak,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “we would not understand him.” This characteristically gnomic utterance has usually been interpreted as meaning that a lion’s experience of the world must be so different from ours that we would have no shared point of reference to communicate about. But Wittgenstein did not know about Alex, the African grey parrot whose famous last words to his trainer in 2007 were: “You be good, I love you. See you tomorrow.” Alex could correctly answer questions about colours and shapes, and ask for particular foods such as bananas. So it seems that some animals can talk after all.
Parrots, of course, don’t speak English in the wild; they must have some latent brain plasticity that can be encouraged to grasp some fundamentals of human language through patient education. More interesting, for our zoologist author, is the wide variety of ways in which other animals communicate with one another, and how we miss the singularity and richness of those alien systems if we compare them disparagingly to human speech.
Take dolphins, for example. Remarkably, they all have names – unique whistles to identify individuals. “As far as we know today,” Arik Kershenbaum writes in Why Animals Talk, “there is no other species in the world – none, bar humans and dolphins – that naturally, and as a part of their regular communication, give themselves names.” We can’t, so far, separate all their other sounds into distinct “words” in a human sense, though they can be trained to associate words with things (such as seaweed).
But the author’s wider point is that each animal evolves a style of communication that suits its needs in the wild. Dolphins, like humans, live in large co-operative groups, and so names are useful for them.
A wonderful chapter, meanwhile, is devoted to the howling of wolves (the author’s own speciality), which seems to be a way for pack members to keep in touch with one another over vast territories of forest or snow. For a wolf on its own to howl, Kershenbaum suggests touchingly, is rather like a person texting his friends “Oh hey, I’m over here”. Distant howls in response keep everyone copacetic. Especially cute is another star of the book, the hyrax (a rabbit-like cousin of the elephant). Like most animals, in fact, hyraxes have syntax, which is to say that the order of notes in their songs is meaningful, and males who sing more complex songs are more successful in attracting female mates. (One thinks of Pavarotti and David Coverdale.) That’s not to say that hyrax songs are pleasing to the human ear, though. As Kershenbaum writes: “An irritatingly healthy hyrax can sing pretty much continuously for over an hour, and I’ve had many people approach me and ask, ‘How do you stop them singing?’”
Moving closer to humans in a genetic sense at least, Kershenbaum embarks on a fascinating comparison between chimpanzees and gibbons. Chimps can be trained to understand human language (that brain plasticity again), but they can’t talk; they have barks, pant-hoots, and gestures. Gibbons, on the other hand, have much more complex vocalisations, analysed by scientists as consisting of 27 different note types: one more, you will notice, than the letters of our alphabet. They have different alarm calls for leopards and snakes, and sing romantic duets with their partners.
None of this, the author warns in this endlessly interesting and beautifully written book, should be interpreted as meaning that gibbons, or indeed dolphins, “have a language”: he wants to teach us that even thinking in such terms is unhelpfully anthropomorphic. Instead, the ceaseless hum of animal communication is the sound of each species performing just those wonderfully rich and strange evolved behaviours that best suit their own lifestyles and environments. If a lion could speak, maybe that’s what he’d tell us – before yawning and settling down for a nap.