The answer to the question in the title is currently believed to be no, but please read on. There is one highly qualified scientist and author who is able to answer the question in the title with precision. His name is Dr Arik Kershenbaum. He a fellow, Director of Studies and tutor at Girton College Cambridge and his subject is natural sciences (physical and biology) specialising in zoology. He is featured in The Sunday Times today. The newspaper tells me that “he has dedicated his career to interpreting animal communication”.
He knows how “dialects differ among wolf packs and [he has] established the vocal complexity among different social classes of small African mammals called hyraxes”.
He’s got a huge library of audio recordings of animal sounds which he has interpreted, coded and translated. I think he is one of the world’s experts on animal vocalisations as a form of communication. We have to listen to him and this is what he says about the possibility of specific animal sounds meaning specific words.
He said that we have to forget the idea that animals have a language. He added:
“They don’t have words or sentences. They don’t have the kind of language that we have. Animal calls are very fuzzy in their meaning, much more fuzzy than our communication.”
He has used artificial intelligence to find correlations between the sounds that animals, such as whales, make and the activity that they are engaged in. So, for instance, certain sounds are made when whales are feeding.
Separately, I’ve just written an article about whales fighting to find a mate rather than singing to them over a long distance. He would probably say that the singing sounds that whales make or which they used to make before they started to fight because of increased numbers, could be correlated with calling to a female over a long distance to announce their presence.
But he would admit right now that he doesn’t know what those specific sounds mean in terms of human language. They are just correlations. He says that people interpret the sounds but the interpretations are based on assumptions.
He wants to know whether specific animal sounds can mean specific words which is what the question is asking. At the moment the answer is no.
He has written a book which will be published next year, How Animals Talk, which refers to a solution to this problem. He wants to ask the animals themselves what they mean.
He hopes, with the help of his team, to train highly intelligent animals such as dolphins and chimpanzees to answer questions.
He added:
“I could train a chimpanzee to recognise icons – one might mean banana. Then I place an icon on the table and play a recording of a chimp call. If the sound means banana, I would expect the chimp to go to the banana icon. You then see if that particular sound elicits consistent responses.”
If you live in the UK and if you are interested, he is speaking about animal communication in Cambridge as part of the Darwin College Lecture Series on Friday evening, as reported by The Sunday Times.
