hashiveinu

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69701&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=animal-calls-are-not-comparable-to-human-speech

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69701

But can they still tell us something useful about language?  Here are two new papers that address that question:

I.

"What the Hidden Rhythms of Orangutan Calls Can Tell Us about Language – New Research." De Gregorio, Chiara. The Conversation, May 27, 2025.

In the dense forests of Indonesia, you can hear strange and haunting sounds. At first, these calls may seem like a random collection of noises – but my rhythmic analyses reveal a different story.

Those noises are the calls of Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), used to warn others about the presence of predators. Orangutans belong to our animal family – we’re both great apes. That means we share a common ancestor – a species that lived millions of years ago, from which we both evolved.

Like us, orangutans have hands that can grasp, they use tools and can learn new things. We share about 97% of our DNA with orangutans, which means many parts of our bodies and brains work in similar ways.

That’s why studying orangutans can also help us understand more about how humans evolved, especially when it comes to things like communication, intelligence and the roots of language and rhythm.

Research on orangutan communication conducted by evolutionary psychologist Adriano Lameira and colleagues in 2024 focused on a different species of orangutan, the wild Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii). They looked at a type of vocalisation made only by males, known as the long call, and found that long calls are organised into two levels of rhythmic hierarchy.

This was a groundbreaking discovery, showing that orangutan rhythms are structured in a recursive way. Human language is deeply recursive.

Recursion is when something is built from smaller parts that follow the same pattern. For example, in language, a sentence can contain another sentence inside it. In music, a rhythm can be made of smaller rhythms nested within each other. It’s a way of organising information in layers, where the same structure repeats at different levels.

Has wonderful videos.  The orangutans sound like they're saying something.  Listen.

Discussing "Third-Order Self-Embedded Vocal Motifs in Wild Orangutans, and the Selective Evolution of Recursion." De Gregorio, Chiara et al. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (May 16, 2.

Abstract

Recursion, the neuro-computational operation of nesting a signal or pattern within itself, lies at the structural basis of language. Classically considered absent in the vocal repertoires of nonhuman animals, whether recursion evolved step-by-step or saltationally in humans is among the most fervent debates in cognitive science since Chomsky's seminal work on syntax in the 1950s. The recent discovery of self-embedded vocal motifs in wild (nonhuman) great apes—Bornean male orangutans’ long calls—lends initial but important support to the notion that recursion, or at least temporal recursion, is not uniquely human among hominids and that its evolution was based on shared ancestry. Building on these findings, we test four necessary predictions for a gradual evolutionary scenario in wild Sumatran female orangutans’ alarm calls, the longest known combinations of consonant-like and vowel-like calls among great apes (excepting humans). From the data, we propose third-order self-embedded isochrony: three hierarchical levels of nested isochronous combinatoric units, with each level exhibiting unique variation dynamics and information content relative to context. Our findings confirm that recursive operations underpin great ape call combinatorics, operations that likely evolved gradually in the human lineage as vocal sequences became longer and more intricate.

II.

"Animals Can't Talk like Humans Do – Here's Why the Hunt for Their Languages Has Left Us Empty-Handed." Jon-And, Anna et al. The Conversation, June 9, 2025.

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don’t? It’s one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive languages built on complex structures, which let us talk about the past, the future, imaginary worlds, moral dilemmas and mathematical truths. No other species does this.

Yet we are fascinated by the idea that animals might be more similar to us than it seems. We delight in the possibility that dolphins tell stories or that apes can ponder the future. We are social and thinking creatures, and we love to see our reflection in others. That deep desire may have influenced the study of animal cognition.

Over the past two decades, studies of thinking and language in animals, especially those highlighting similarities with human abilities, have flourished in academia and attracted extensive media coverage. A wave of recent studies reflects a growing momentum.

Two recent papers, both in top-tier journals, focus on our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos. They claim these apes combine vocalisations in ways that suggest a capacity for compositionality, a key feature of human language.

In simple terms, compositionality is the capacity to combine words and phrases into complex expressions, where the overall meaning derives from the meanings of the parts and their order. It is what allows a finite set of words to generate an infinite range of meanings. The idea that great apes might do something similar has been presented as a potential breakthrough, hinting that the roots of language may lie deeper in our evolutionary past than we thought.

But there is a catch: combining elements is not enough. A fundamental aspect of compositionality in human language is that it is productive. We do not just reuse a fixed set of combinations; we generate new ones, effortlessly. A child who learns the word “wug” can instantly say “wugs” without having heard it before, applying rules to unfamiliar elements.

That flexible creativity gives language its vast expressive power. Yet while animal calls can be combined, nobody has observed animals doing this to create new meanings in an open-ended productive manner. They don’t scale into the layered meanings that human language achieves. In short: there are no wugs in the wild.

Significant progress in the conceptualization of what is humanlike about animal calls:  recursion, compositionality.

Selected readings

• "Archive for Animal communication"
• "Archive for Animal communication", part. 2
• "The implications of chimpanzee call combinations for the origins of language" (5/29/25)
• "'Chimps have tons to say but can't say it'" (1/11/10)
• "Nim: the unproject" (8/16/11)
• "Seidenberg on Singer and Nim" *8/27/11)
• "Annals of animal communication" (10/20/10)
• "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/16/25)

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69701&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=animal-calls-are-not-comparable-to-human-speech

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69701

Posted by Mark Liberman

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69687&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=unit-utility

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69687

Today's xkcd:

The mouseover title: "'This HAZMAT container contains radioactive material with activity of one becquerel.' 'So, like, a single banana slice?'"

explainxkcd currently fails to explain the strip's implicit reference to the entry for bogosity in the Jargon File:

1. [orig. CMU, now very common] The degree to which something is bogus. Bogosity is measured with a bogometer; in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say “My bogometer just triggered”. More extremely, “You just pinned my bogometer” means you just said or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one might also say “You just redlined my bogometer”). The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat.

2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see quantum bogodynamics. See also bogon flux, bogon filter, bogus.

The Jargon File gives this explanation of "microLenat":

The unit of bogosity. Abbreviated µL or mL in ASCII. Consensus is that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use. The microLenat, originally invented by David Jefferson, was promulgated as an attack against noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a tenured graduate student at CMU. Doug had failed the student on an important exam because the student gave only “AI is bogus” as his answer to the questions. The slur is generally considered unmerited, but it has become a running gag nevertheless. Some of Doug's friends argue that of course a microLenat is bogus, since it is only one millionth of a Lenat. Others have suggested that the unit should be redesignated after the grad student, as the microReid.

More of the (complex and contested) background can found in the 8/29/2006 LLOG post.  Wikipedia's only coverage (I think) is an entry in a List of Humorous Units of Measurement., although the dimensional analysis issues are well explained in the entry on the FFF system.

Update — My favorite unit is the scruple, which Wikipedia defines as

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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69687

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69680&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=linguistics-vs-archeology-and-physical-anthropology

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69680

Subtitle:  "A cautionary note on the application of limited linguistics studies to whole populations"

A prefatory note on "anthropology".  In the early 90s, I was deeply involved in the first ancient DNA studies on the Tarim mummies* with Paolo Francalacci, an anthropologist at the University of Sassari. Sardinia.  Paolo was deputed to work with me by the eminent population geneticist, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza of the Stanford medical school genetics department, who was unable to endure the rigors of the expedition to Eastern Central Asia. 

[*Wikipedia article now strangely distorted for political reasons.  Be skeptical of its claims, especially those based on recent DNA studies.] 

After we had collected the tissue samples in the field, Paolo took them back to Sassari to extract and analyze the attenuated DNA.  This involved amplification through PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a process that later gained great fame during the years of the coronavirus pandemic, inasmuch as it is an essential step in the detection and quantification of messenger RNA (mRNA).  Indeed, two Penn scientists, Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on mRNA technology, which was crucial in the development of COVID-19 injections.

Paolo's analysis extended over several years.  About halfway through, I flew to Sardinia and visited Paolo in his "anthropology" lab.  That was a revelation, because his whole department seemed more like it belonged to the hard sciences than to the social sciences, as I had become accustomed to for anthropology departments in the United States.  Indeed, Paolo's own specialty, evolutionary biology, was full of zoological and botanical specimens, chemical reagents and apparatus, but showed little evidence of the cultural and social investigations I was familiar with in American departments of anthropology.

I told Paolo how surprised I was by the difference between the anthropology I knew of in America and what I was seeing in Sardinia.  He smiled at me benignly and said, "We do physical anthropology," with a tone of voice and attitude that led me to believe that he considered physical anthropology to be real anthropology.

Enough by way of methodological preface.

Last week I posted "A cautionary note on the application of limited genetics studies to whole populations" (6/21/25) in which I decried overemphasis on genetics at the expense of archeology, linguistics, and many other disciplines that could be applied to the study of ancient populations.  In this post, I will come at the juxtaposition between  genetics and linguistics from the opposite angle, with history, archeology, art history, climate studies, and other relevant disciplines looking on as interested bystanders.

Once again, a claim has been made that the Xiōngnú and the Huns spoke a Paleo-Siberian Language:

Svenja Bonmann and Simon Fries, "Linguistic Evidence Suggests That Xiōng-nú and Huns Spoke the Same Paleo-Siberian Language", Transactions of the Philological Society (June 16, 2025).

Abstract

The Xiōng-nú were a tribal confederation who dominated Inner Asia from the third century BC to the second century AD. Xiōng-nú descendants later constituted the ethnic core of the European Huns. It has been argued that the Xiōng-nú spoke an Iranian, Turkic, Mongolic or Yeniseian language, but the linguistic affiliation of the Xiōng-nú and the Huns is still debated. Here, we show that linguistic evidence from four independent domains does indeed suggest that the Xiōng-nú and the Huns spoke the same Paleo-Siberian language and that this was an early form of Arin, a member of the Yeniseian language family. This identification augments and confirms genetic and archaeological studies and inspires new interdisciplinary research on Eurasian population history.

Here are the sections of the Bonmann and Fries paper:

1 Introduction
2 Earlier hypotheses on the linguistic origins of the Xiōng-nú and the Huns
3 Loanwords in Turkic and Mongolic (and how to detect them)
4 The Jié couplet and Xiōng-nú glosses
5 Hunnish anthroponymy
6 Toponymic and hydronymic evidence

In general, the appearance of the new Bonmann and Fries paper has been met with enthusiasm.  Wolfgang Behr, who posted notices about the paper on X and Bluesky, has this to say about it:

There is an exciting new paper on the language of the Xiongnu out in TPS (attached), arguing,
with fresh evidence, that it was indeed Yeniseian, as first surmised by Lájos Ligeti (1902-1987) in 1950, more specifically a variety related to the Proto-Arin branch.

In passing, it also contains good arguments against the dubious ārya-,'Aryan' *[ɢ,g]ˤraʔ > xià 夏 equation proposed by Beckwith via hypothetical,"East Scythian" (for internal etymologies of the name, cf. Behr, Asiatische Studien, LXI.3, 2008, 727–754), and plausible ideas about a Yeniseian background of the notorious Eurasian Wanderwort for 'silver' (on which cf. Anton Antonov & Guillaume Jacques, "Turkic kümüš ’silver’ and the lambdaism vs sigmatism debate", Turkic languages, 2011, 15 (2), pp. 151-170. halshs-00655014).

For, among others, the reasons alluded to above, I have reservations about the findings of this paper.  The tentativeness of the enterprise is evident in the hypothetical language in which it is couched:  "probable / probably", "seem(s)", "(un)likely" "suggest(s) / suggestive", and so forth.

I would concede that, just as Southeast and South Sinitic languages may embody substratal Austronesian and Austroasiatic elements, Paleo-Siberian / Yeniseian / Arin may constitute a substratal component of the languages of the Xiōngnú / Huns, nevertheless we should be wary of jumping to the  conclusion that Southeast and South Sinitic languages were ipso facto Austronesian and Austroasiatic and that Xiōngnú / Hunnic were Paleo-Siberian / Yeniseian / Arin languages.

When all is said and done, the base line of our researches on ancient civilizations should be their physical remains:  textiles, metals, pottery, basketry, structures, associated animals and plants, middens, pits, bones, coprolites, usw.

Specifically, with regard to the identity of the Xiōngnú / Huns, we cannot ignore the Iranian inputs in the confederation, as the late Elling Eide, who worked on this problem for decades, had assembled mountains of supporting evidence.  I believe that his records may still exist at his magnificent research library in Sarasota, Florida.

Finally, as Étienne de la Vaissière has demonstrated in his authoritative article on "Xiongnu" in Encyclopædia Iranica, the Xiōngnú were basically mounted warriors and nomads with steppe affinities to the west.  

XIONGNU (Hsiung-nu), the great nomadic empire to the north of China in the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, which extended to Iranian-speaking Central Asia and perhaps gave rise to the Huns of the Central Asian Iranian sources.

Origins. The Xiongnu are known mainly from archaeological data and from chapter 110 of the Shiji (Historical Records) of Sima Qian, written around 100 BCE, which is devoted to them. Comparison of the textual and archaeological data makes it possible to show that the Xiongnu were part of a wider phenomenon—the appearance in the 4th century BCE of elite mounted soldiers, the Hu (Di Cosmo, 2002), on the frontiers of the Chinese states which were expanding to the north. The first mention of the Xiongnu in Chinese sources dates to 318 BCE. Archaeologically, these Hu cavalrymen seem to be the heirs of a long development (the Early Nomadic period, from the end of the 7th to the middle of the 4th century BCE), during which the passage from an agro-pastoral economy to one dominated at times exclusively by equestrian pastoralism had taken place. Among these peoples, in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE the Xiongnu occupied the steppe region of the northern Ordos as well as the regions to the northwest of the great bend of the Yellow River. Numerous archaeological finds in Inner Mongolia and in Ningxia demonstrate the existence of a nomadic culture that was socially differentiated and very rich, in which both iron and gold were in common use and which was in constant contact, militarily as well as diplomatically and commercially, with the Chinese states (in particular Zhao to the southeast).

The Xiōngnú  were not hunter-gatherers and fishermen of the Yenisei Valley.  I am amazed and dismayed that the linguists who propose that the origins of Xiōngnú language are to be found in Ket, Yeniseian, or other Paleo-Siberian language are oblivious to this basic reality of existence and ecology.

Selected readings

• Chau Wu, "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)
• "Sogdians and Xiongnu / Huns" (2/21/22)
• "Xiongnu (Hunnic) Shanyu" (7/16/21)
• "The complexities of a basic word for "barbarian" in Sinitic and neighboring languages" (6/28/20)
• "Xiongnu Official Title Danghu and Jurchen Tanggu ‘Hundred’" (1/13/25
• "Heavy Velar vs Meager Bilabial Articulations in Xiongnu Language" (4/15/22)
• [Thanks to Ted McClure]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69680&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=linguistics-vs-archeology-and-physical-anthropology

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