[Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research
suggests that isn’t so. ]
[[link removed]]

THE ANIMALS ARE TALKING. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?  
[[link removed]]


 

Sonia Shah
September 20, 2023
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research
suggests that isn’t so. _

,

 

Can a mouse learn a new song?

Such a question might seem whimsical. Though humans have lived
alongside mice for at least 15,000 years, few of us have ever heard
mice sing, because they do so in frequencies
[[link removed]] beyond the
range detectable by human hearing. As pups, their high-pitched songs
alert their mothers to their whereabouts; as adults, they sing in
ultrasound to woo one another. For decades, researchers considered
mouse songs instinctual, the fixed tunes of a windup music box, rather
than the mutable expressions of individual minds.

But no one had tested whether that was really true. In 2012, a team of
neurobiologists at Duke University, led by Erich Jarvis, a
neuroscientist who studies vocal learning, designed an experiment to
find out. The team surgically deafened five mice and recorded their
songs in a mouse-size sound studio, tricked out with infrared cameras
and microphones. They then compared sonograms of the songs of deafened
mice with those of hearing mice. If the mouse songs were innate, as
long presumed, the surgical alteration would make no difference at
all.

Jarvis and his researchers slowed down the tempo and shifted the pitch
of the recordings, so that they could hear the songs with their own
ears. Those of the intact mice sounded “remarkably similar to some
bird songs,” Jarvis wrote in a 2013 paper that described the
experiment, with whistlelike syllables
[[link removed]] similar to
those in the songs of canaries and the trills of dolphins. Not so the
songs of the deafened mice: Deprived of auditory feedback, their songs
became degraded, rendering them nearly unrecognizable. They sounded,
the scientists noted, like “squawks and screams.” Not only did the
tunes of a mouse depend on its ability to hear itself and others, but
also, as the team found in another experiment, a male mouse could
alter the pitch of its song to compete with other male mice for female
attention.

Inside these murine skills lay clues to a puzzle many have called
“the hardest problem in science”: the origins of language. In
humans, “vocal learning” is understood as a skill critical to
spoken language. Researchers had already discovered the capacity for
vocal learning in species
[[link removed]] other
than humans, including in songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, cetaceans
such as dolphins and whales, pinnipeds such as seals, elephants and
bats. But given the centuries-old idea that a deep chasm separated
human language from animal communications, most scientists understood
the vocal learning abilities of other species as unrelated to our own
— as evolutionarily divergent as the wing of a bat is to that of a
bee. The apparent absence of intermediate forms of language — say, a
talking animal — left the question of how language evolved resistant
to empirical inquiry.

When the Duke researchers dissected the brains of the hearing and
deafened mice, they found a rudimentary version of the neural
circuitry that allows the forebrains of vocal learners such as humans
and songbirds to directly control their vocal organs. Mice don’t
seem to have the vocal flexibility of elephants; they cannot, like the
10-year-old female African elephant in Tsavo, Kenya, mimic the sound
of trucks
[[link removed].] on
the nearby Nairobi-Mombasa highway. Or the gift for mimicry of seals;
an orphaned harbor seal at the New England Aquarium
[[link removed]] could utter English
phrases in a perfect Maine accent (“Hoover, get over here,” he
said. “Come on, come on!”).

But the rudimentary skills of mice suggested that the
language-critical capacity might exist on a continuum, much like a
submerged land bridge might indicate that two now-isolated continents
were once connected. In recent years, an array of findings have also
revealed an expansive nonhuman soundscape, including: turtles that
produce and respond to sounds to coordinate the timing of their birth
from inside their eggs; coral larvae that can hear the sounds of
healthy reefs
[[link removed]];
and plants that can detect the sound of running water and
the munching of insect predators
[[link removed]]. Researchers have found
intention and meaning in this cacophony, such as the purposeful use of
different sounds to convey information. They’ve theorized that one
of the most confounding aspects of language, its rules-based internal
structure, emerged from social drives common across a range of
species.

With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity
and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the
linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique
in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding
the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics,
biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language
might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of
animals in ways that could help stitch language into their
evolutionary history — and our own.

FOR HUNDREDS OF years, language marked “the true difference between
man and beast,” as the philosopher René Descartes wrote in 1649. As
recently as the end of the last century, archaeologists and
anthropologists speculated that 40,000 to 50,000 years ago a “human
revolution” fractured evolutionary history,
[[link removed]] creating
an unbridgeable gap separating humanity’s cognitive and linguistic
abilities from those of the rest of the animal world.

Linguists and other experts reinforced this idea. In 1959, the M.I.T.
linguist Noam Chomsky, then 30, wrote a blistering 33-page takedown
[[link removed]] of a book by the celebrated
behaviorist B.F. Skinner, which argued that language was just a form
of “verbal behavior,” as Skinner titled the book, accessible to
any species given sufficient conditioning. One observer called it
“perhaps the most devastating review ever written.” Between 1972
and 1990, there were more citations of Chomsky’s critique than
Skinner’s book, which bombed.

The view of language as a uniquely human superpower, one that enabled
Homo sapiens to write epic poetry and send astronauts to the moon,
presumed some uniquely human biology to match. But attempts to find
those special biological mechanisms — whether physiological,
neurological, genetic — that make language possible have all come up
short.

One high-profile example came in 2001, when a team led by the
geneticists Cecilia Lai and Simon Fisher discovered a gene — called
FoxP2 [[link removed]] — in a London
family riddled with childhood apraxia of speech, a disorder that
impairs the ability of otherwise cognitively capable individuals to
coordinate their muscles to produce sounds, syllables and words in an
intelligible sequence. Commentators hailed FoxP2
[[link removed]] as the
long sought-after gene that enabled humans to talk — until the
gene turned up in the genomes
[[link removed]] of
rodents, birds, reptiles, fish and ancient hominins such as
Neanderthals, whose version of FoxP2 is much like ours. (Fisher so
often encountered the public expectation that FoxP2 was the
“language gene” that he resolved to acquire a T-shirt that read,
“It’s more complicated than that.”)

The search for an exclusively human vocal anatomy has failed, too. For
a 2001 study, the cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch cajoled goats,
dogs, deer and other species to vocalize while inside a cineradiograph
machine that filmed the way their larynxes moved under X-ray. Fitch
discovered that species with larynxes different from ours
[[link removed]] —
ours is “descended” and located in our throats rather than our
mouths — could nevertheless move them in similar ways. One of them,
the red deer, even had the same descended larynx we do.

Fitch and his then-colleague at Harvard, the evolutionary biologist
Marc Hauser, began to wonder if they’d been thinking about language
all wrong. Linguists described language as a singular skill, like
being able to swim or bake a soufflé: You either had it or you
didn’t. But perhaps language was more like a multicomponent system
that included psychological traits, such as the ability to share
intentions; physiological ones, such as motor control over
vocalizations and gestures; and cognitive capacities, such as the
ability to combine signals according to rules, many of which might
appear in other animals as well.

Fitch, whom I spoke to by Zoom in his office at the University of
Vienna, drafted a paper with Hauser as a “kind of an argument
against Chomsky,” he told me. As a courtesy, he sent the M.I.T.
linguist a draft. One evening, he and Hauser were sitting in their
respective offices along the same hall at Harvard when an email from
Chomsky dinged their inboxes. “We both read it and we walked out of
our rooms going, ‘What?’” Chomsky indicated that not only did he
agree, but that he’d be willing to sign on to their next paper on
the subject as a co-author.
[[link removed]] That
paper, which has since racked up more than 7,000 citations, appeared
in the journal Science in 2002.

Squabbles continued over which components of language were shared with
other species and which, if any, were exclusive to humans. Those
included, among others, language’s intentionality, its system of
combining signals, its ability to refer to external concepts and
things separated by time and space and its power to generate an
infinite number of expressions from a finite number of signals. But
reflexive belief in language as an evolutionary anomaly started to
dissolve. “For the biologists,” recalled Fitch, “it was like,
‘Oh, good, finally the linguists are being reasonable.’”

Evidence of continuities between animal communication and human
language continued to mount. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome
in 2010 suggested that we hadn’t significantly diverged from that
lineage, as the theory of a “human revolution” posited. On the
contrary, Neanderthal genes and those of other ancient hominins
persisted in the modern human genome, evidence of how intimately we
were entangled. In 2014, Jarvis found that the neural circuits that
allowed songbirds
[[link removed]] to
learn and produce novel sounds matched those in humans, and that the
genes that regulated those circuits evolved in similar ways. The
accumulating evidence left “little room for doubt,” Cedric Boeckx,
a theoretical linguist at the University of Barcelona, noted in the
journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
[[link removed]] “There
was no ‘great leap forward.’”

As our understanding of the nature and origin of language shifted, a
host of fruitful cross-disciplinary collaborations arose. Colleagues
of Chomsky’s, such as the M.I.T. linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, whose
early career was shaped by the precept that “we’re smart,
they’re not,” applied for grants with primatologists and
neuroscientists to study how human language might be related to
birdsong and primate calls. Interdisciplinary centers sprang up
devoted specifically to the evolution of language, including at the
University of Zurich and the University of Edinburgh. Lectures at a
biannual conference on language evolution once dominated by
“armchair theorizing,” as the cognitive scientist and founder of
the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Language Evolution, Simon
Kirby, put it, morphed into presentations “completely packed with
empirical data.”

ONE OF THE THORNIEST problems researchers sought to address was the
link between thought and language. Philosophers and linguists long
held that language must have evolved not for the purpose of
communication but to facilitate abstract thought. The grammatical
rules that structure language, a feature of languages from Algonquin
to American Sign Language, are more complex than necessary for
communication. Language, the argument went, must have evolved to help
us think, in much the same way that mathematical notations allow us to
make complex calculations.

Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., thought this was
“a cool idea,” so, about a decade ago, she set out to test it. If
language is the medium of thought, she reasoned, then thinking a
thought and absorbing the meaning of spoken or written words should
activate the same neural circuits in the brain, like two streams fed
by the same underground spring. Earlier brain-imaging studies showed
that patients with severe aphasia could still solve mathematical
problems, despite their difficulty in deciphering or producing
language, but failed to pinpoint distinctions between brain regions
dedicated to thought and those dedicated to language. Fedorenko
suspected that might be because the precise location of these regions
varied from individual to individual. In a 2011 study, she asked
healthy subjects to make computations and decipher snatches of spoken
and written language while she watched how blood flowed to aroused
parts of their brains using an M.R.I. machine, taking their unique
neural circuitry into account in her subsequent analysis. Her fM.R.I.
studies showed that thinking thoughts and decoding words mobilized
distinct brain pathways
[[link removed]].
Language and thought, Fedorenko says, “really are separate in an
adult human brain.”

Sign up for The New York Times Magazine Newsletter  The best of The
New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week, including
exclusive feature stories, photography, columns and more. Get it sent
to your inbox.

At the University of Edinburgh, Kirby hit upon a process that might
explain how language’s internal structure evolved. That structure,
in which simple elements such as sounds and words are arranged into
phrases and nested hierarchically within one another, gives language
the power to generate an infinite number of meanings; it is a key
feature of language as well as of mathematics and music. But its
origins were hazy. Because children intuit the rules that govern
linguistic structure with little if any explicit instruction,
philosophers and linguists argued that it must be a product of some
uniquely human cognitive process. But researchers who scrutinized the
fossil record to determine when and how that process evolved were
stumped: The first sentences uttered left no trace behind.

Kirby designed an experiment to simulate the evolution of language
[[link removed]] inside
his lab. First, he developed made-up codes to serve as proxies for the
disordered collections of words widely believed to have preceded the
emergence of structured language, such as random sequences of colored
lights or a series of pantomimes. Then he recruited subjects to use
the code under a variety of conditions and studied how the code
changed. He asked subjects to use the code to solve communication
tasks, for example, or to pass the code on to one another as in a game
of telephone. He ran the experiment hundreds of times using different
parameters on a variety of subjects, including on a colony of baboons
living in a seminaturalistic enclosure equipped with a bank of
computers on which they could choose to play his experimental games.

What he found was striking: Regardless of the native tongue of the
subjects, or whether they were baboons, college students or robots,
the results were the same. When individuals passed the code on to one
another, the code became simpler but also less precise. But when they
passed it on to one another and also used it to communicate, the code
developed a distinct architecture. Random sequences of colored lights
turned into richly patterned ones; convoluted, pantomimic gestures for
words such as “church” or “police officer” became abstract,
efficient signs. “We just saw, spontaneously emerging out of this
experiment, the language structures we were waiting for,” Kirby
says. His findings suggest that language’s mystical power — its
ability to turn the noise of random signals into intelligible
formulations — may have emerged from a humble trade-off: between
simplicity, for ease of learning, and what Kirby called
“expressiveness,” for unambiguous communication.

For Descartes, the equation of language with thought meant animals had
no mental life at all: “The brutes,” he opined, “don’t have
any thought.” Breaking the link between language and human biology
didn’t just demystify language; it restored the possibility of mind
to the animal world and repositioned linguistic capacities as
theoretically accessible to any social species.

THE SEARCH FOR the components of language in nonhuman animals now
extends to the far reaches of our phylogenetic tree, encompassing
creatures that may communicate in radically unfamiliar ways.

This summer, I met with Marcelo Magnasco, a biophysicist, and Diana
Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who studies dolphin cognition,
in Magnasco’s lab at Rockefeller University. Overlooking the East
River, it was a warmly lit room, with rows of burbling tanks inhabited
by octopuses, whose mysterious signals they hoped to decode. Magnasco
became curious about the cognitive and communicative abilities of
cephalopods while diving recreationally, he told me. Numerous times,
he said, he encountered cephalopods and had “the overpowering
impression that they were trying to communicate with me.” During the
Covid-19 shutdown, when his work studying dolphin communication with
Reiss was derailed, Magnasco found himself driving to a Petco in
Staten Island to buy tanks for octopuses to live in his lab.

During my visit, the grayish pink tentacles of the octopus clinging to
the side of the glass wall of her tank started to flash bright white.
Was she angry? Was she trying to tell us something? Was she even aware
of our presence? There was no way to know, Magnasco said. Earlier
efforts to find linguistic capacities in other species failed, in
part, he explained, because we assumed they would look like our own.
But the communication systems of other species might, in fact, be
“truly exotic to us,” Magnasco said. A species that can recognize
objects by echolocation, as cetaceans and bats can, might communicate
using acoustic pictographs, for example, which might sound to us like
meaningless chirps or clicks. To disambiguate the meaning of animal
signals, such as a string of dolphin clicks or whalesong, scientists
needed some inkling of where meaning-encoding units began and ended,
Reiss explained. “We, in fact, have no idea what the smallest unit
is,” she said. If scientists analyze animal calls using the wrong
segmentation, meaningful expressions turn into meaningless drivel:
“ad ogra naway” instead of “a dog ran away.”

An international initiative called Project CETI, founded by David
Gruber, a biologist at the City University of New York, hopes to get
around this problem by feeding recordings of sperm-whale clicks, known
as codas, into computer models, which might be able to discern
patterns in them, in the same way that ChatGPT was able to grasp
vocabulary and grammar in human language by analyzing publicly
available text. Another method, Reiss says, is to provide animal
subjects with artificial codes and observe how they use them.

Reiss’s research on dolphin cognition is one of a handful of
projects on animal communication that dates back to the 1980s, when
there were widespread funding cuts in the field, after a top
researcher retracted his much-hyped claim that a chimpanzee could be
trained to use sign language
[[link removed]] to converse
with humans. In a study published in 1993, Reiss offered bottlenose
dolphins at a facility in Northern California an underwater keypad
[[link removed]] that
allowed them to choose specific toys, which it delivered while
emitting computer-generated whistles, like a kind of vending machine.
The dolphins spontaneously began mimicking the computer-generated
whistles when they played independently with the corresponding toy,
like kids tossing a ball and naming it “ball, ball, ball,” Reiss
told me. “The behavior,” Reiss said, “was strikingly similar to
the early stages of language acquisition in children.”

The researchers hoped to replicate the method by outfitting an octopus
tank with an interactive platform of some kind and observing how the
octopus engaged with it. But it was unclear whether such a device
might interest the lone cephalopod. An earlier episode of displeasure
led her to discharge enough ink to turn her tank water so black that
she couldn’t be seen. Unlocking her communicative abilities might
require that she consider the scientists as fascinating as they did
her.

WHILE EXPERIMENTING WITH animals trapped in cages and tanks can
reveal their latent faculties, figuring out the range of what animals
are communicating to one another requires spying on them in the wild.
Past studies often conflated general communication, in which
individuals extract meaning from signals sent by other individuals,
with language’s more specific, flexible and open-ended system. In a
seminal 1980 study, for example, the primatologists Robert Seyfarth
and Dorothy Cheney used the “playback” technique to decode the
meaning of alarm calls issued by vervet monkeys
[[link removed]] at Amboseli
National Park in Kenya. When a recording of the barklike calls emitted
by a vervet encountering a leopard was played back to other vervets,
it sent them scampering into the trees. Recordings of the low grunts
of a vervet who spotted an eagle led other vervets to look up into the
sky; recordings of the high-pitched chutters emitted by a vervet upon
noticing a python caused them to scan the ground.

At the time, The New York Times ran a front-page story heralding the
discovery of a “rudimentary ‘language’” in vervet monkeys.
[[link removed]] But
critics objected that the calls might not have any properties of
language at all. Instead of being intentional messages to communicate
meaning to others, the calls might be involuntary, emotion-driven
sounds, like the cry of a hungry baby. Such involuntary expressions
can transmit rich information to listeners, but unlike words and
sentences, they don’t allow for discussion of things separated by
time and space. The barks of a vervet in the throes of leopard-induced
terror could alert other vervets to the presence of a leopard — but
couldn’t provide any way to talk about, say, “the really smelly
leopard who showed up at the ravine yesterday morning.”

Toshitaka Suzuki, an ethologist at the University of Tokyo who
describes himself as an animal linguist, struck upon a method to
disambiguate intentional calls from involuntary ones while soaking in
a bath one day. When we spoke over Zoom, he showed me an image of a
fluffy cloud. “If you hear the word ‘dog,’ you might see a
dog,” he pointed out, as I gazed at the white mass. “If you hear
the word ‘cat,’ you might see a cat.” That, he said, marks the
difference between a word and a sound. “Words influence how we see
objects,” he said. “Sounds do not.” Using playback studies,
Suzuki determined that Japanese tits, songbirds that live in East
Asian forests and that he has studied for more than 15 years, emit a
special vocalization
[[link removed]] when
they encounter snakes. When other Japanese tits heard a recording of
the vocalization, which Suzuki dubbed the “jar jar” call, they
searched the ground, as if looking for a snake. To determine whether
“jar jar” meant “snake” in Japanese tit, he added another
element to his experiments
[[link removed]]: an eight-inch
stick, which he dragged along the surface of a tree using hidden
strings. Usually, Suzuki found, the birds ignored the stick. It was,
by his analogy, a passing cloud. But then he played a recording of the
“jar jar” call. In that case, the stick seemed to take on new
significance: The birds approached the stick, as if examining whether
it was, in fact, a snake. Like a word, the “jar jar” call had
changed their perception.

Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews who
works with great apes, developed a similarly nuanced method. Because
great apes appear to have a relatively limited repertoire of
vocalizations, Hobaiter studies their gestures. For years, she and her
collaborators have followed chimps in the Budongo forest and gorillas
in Bwindi in Uganda, recording their gestures and how others respond
to them. “Basically, my job is to get up in the morning to get the
chimps when they’re coming down out of the tree, or the gorillas
when they’re coming out of the nest, and just to spend the day with
them,” she told me. So far, she says, she has recorded about 15,600
instances of gestured exchanges between apes.

To determine whether the gestures are involuntary or intentional, she
uses a method adapted from research on human babies. Hobaiter looks
for signals that evoke what she calls an “Apparently Satisfactory
Outcome.” The method draws on the theory that involuntary signals
continue even after listeners have understood their meaning, while
intentional ones stop once the signaler realizes her listener has
comprehended the signal. It’s the difference between the continued
wailing of a hungry baby after her parents have gone to fetch a
bottle, Hobaiter explains, and my entreaties to you to pour me some
coffee, which cease once you start reaching for the coffeepot. To
search for a pattern, she says she and her researchers have looked
“across hundreds of cases and dozens of gestures and different
individuals using the same gesture across different days.” So far,
her team’s analysis of 15 years’ worth of video-recorded exchanges
has pinpointed dozens of ape gestures
[[link removed]] that
trigger “apparently satisfactory outcomes.”

These gestures may also be legible to us, albeit beneath our conscious
awareness. Hobaiter applied her technique on pre-verbal 1- and
2-year-old children, following them around recording their gestures
and how they affected attentive others, “like they’re tiny apes,
which they basically are,” she says. She also posted short video
clips of ape gestures online and asked adult visitors who’d never
spent any time with great apes to guess what they thought they meant.
She found that pre-verbal human children use at least 40 or 50
gestures
[[link removed].] from
the ape repertoire, and adults correctly guessed the meaning of
video-recorded ape gestures at a rate “significantly higher than
expected by chance,” as Hobaiter and Kirsty E. Graham, a
postdoctoral research fellow in Hobaiter’s lab, reported in a 2023
paper for PLOS Biology.

The emerging research might seem to suggest that there’s nothing
very special about human language. Other species use intentional
wordlike signals just as we do. Some, such as Japanese tits and pied
babblers, have been known to combine different signals to make new
meanings. Many species are social and practice cultural transmission,
satisfying what might be prerequisite for a structured communication
system like language. And yet a stubborn fact remains. The species
that use features of language in their communications have few obvious
geographical or phylogenetic similarities. And despite years of
searching, no one has discovered a communication system with all the
properties of language in any species other than our own.

FOR SOME SCIENTISTS, the mounting evidence of cognitive and
linguistic continuities between humans and animals outweighs evidence
of any gaps. “There really isn’t such a sharp distinction,”
Jarvis, now at Rockefeller University, said in a podcast. Fedorenko
agrees. The idea of a chasm separating man from beast is a product of
“language elitism,” she says, as well as a myopic focus on “how
different language is from everything else.”

But for others, the absence of clear evidence of all the components of
language in other species is, in fact, evidence of their absence. In a
2016 book on language evolution titled “Why Only Us,” written with
the computer scientist and computational linguist Robert C. Berwick,
Chomsky describes animal communications as “radically different”
from human language. Seyfarth and Cheney, in a 2018 book, note the
“striking discontinuities” between human and nonhuman loquacity.
Animal calls may be modifiable; they may be voluntary and intentional.
But they’re rarely combined according to rules in the way that human
words are and “appear to convey only limited information,” they
write. If animals had anything like the full suite of linguistic
components we do, Kirby says, we would know by now. Animals with
similar cognitive and social capacities to ours rarely express
themselves systematically the way we do, with systemwide cues to
distinguish different categories of meaning. “We just don’t see
that kind of level of systematicity in the communication systems of
other species,” Kirby said in a 2021 talk.

This evolutionary anomaly may seem strange if you consider language an
unalloyed benefit. But what if it isn’t? Even the most wondrous
abilities can have drawbacks. According to the popular
“self-domestication” hypothesis of language’s origins, proposed
by Kirby and James Thomas in a 2018 paper published in Biology &
Philosophy, variable tones and inventive locutions might prevent
members of a species from recognizing
[[link removed]] others
of their kind. Or, as others have pointed out, they might draw the
attention of predators. Such perils could help explain why
domesticated species such as Bengalese finches have more complex and
syntactically rich songs than their wild kin, the white-rumped munia,
as discovered by the biopsychologist Kazuo Okanoya in 2012; why tamed
foxes and domesticated canines exhibit heightened abilities to
communicate, at least with humans, compared with wolves and wild
foxes; and why humans, described by some experts as a domesticated
species of their ape and hominin ancestors, might be the most
talkative of all. A lingering gap between our abilities and those of
other species, in other words, does not necessarily leave language
stranded outside evolution. Perhaps, Fitch says, language is unique to
Homo sapiens, but not in any unique way: special to humans in the same
way the trunk is to the elephant and echolocation is to the bat.

The quest for language’s origins has yet to deliver King Solomon’s
seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak
to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le
Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the
“kinetic sea writings” of penguins and the “delicate, transient
lyrics of the lichen.” Perhaps it never will. But what we know so
far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among
mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the
conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.

_SONIA SHAH is a science journalist and the author, most recently, of
“The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the
Move.” She is currently writing a book on the history and science of
human exceptionalism. DENISE NESTOR is an artist and illustrator in
Dublin. She is known for her finely detailed hand-drawn art, often
inspired by nature._

_A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 24, 2023,
Page 39 of the Sunday New York Times Magazine with the headline: A
Manner of Speaking. Subscribe
[[link removed]]_

* Science
[[link removed]]
* linguistics
[[link removed]]
* animal communication
[[link removed]]
* language
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]