Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve Women in Democratic Republic of Congo
Lukas Bierhoff, Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project
Bonoboes combine calls in a complex way that make up different sentences, this type of syntax is more disappearing than previously thought.
The human language is often described Our distinctive speciesIt is made up of many different blocks of building blocks. A block of Korea is syntax, where significant units are combined in longer sequences, as in sentences. It is possible through the composition, where the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of parts.
The composition in itself is not the only one for humans. For example, Chimpanzees combine calls snakes to warn others. But so far, only the “trivial composition” has been identified in non-human animals, each unit adds an independently in its entirety. For example, the phrases “dancer blonde” has two independent units: it is also a dancer. Humans are in addition to being a “non-insignificant composition”, the words in a combination means something that means solo. For example, the phrases of “bad dancer” do not dance a bad person who dances.
The subject was the biologist says no tool to allocate the voice of animals to the voice of the animal Mélissa Berthet Swiss Zurich University, so could not be sure if a combination was not trivial or trivial.
Berthet and his colleagues spent years of years to learn and adapt to linguistics, trying to find evidence of insignificant composition in our closest experiences. After 30 months after the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, five months after five months in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he recorded almost 1000 cases when a bonobo called. Of these half, about half, at least two different types of different calls were linked in a row.
In a new step, researchers indicated everything that was happening at the time of the call and in the following minutes. They recorded more than 300 observations, what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and after the vowel of the caller and audience.
To reveal the meaning of each call, they used linguistic techniques to create a cloud to create a cloud, which closed together the vowels that occurred together in similar situations. “We settled this dictionary,” Berthlet says. “We have a vocalization and a meaning.”
When they had this semantic cloud, the calls in a combination could say whether they were different meanings, and were close to units of combinations, which would propose composition. Using this view, four compositional calls identified, three of which were not insignificant, with their meanings do not overlap directly with their components. For example, “High-Hoot + Low-Hoot” combines calls that mean “attention” because “I focuses on me”, when he often used help to call it for another person.
Bonobos’ All News was coordinating the team, says Berthlet. Team member Martin Surbeck Harvard’s University is thought of the Bonobos fissional team because the dynamic dynamics, where smaller groups can do their things.
“It is for the first time in animal species, a non-trivial syntax, which is not a non-trivial composition, so that the game changes,” he says Maël Leroux Rennes university in France. “It is a revolution. The main focus of comparative linguistics is basically basically and evolutionary linguistics.”
This finding does not mean that Bonoboes have a language, as the language is a human communication system, as Berthet says. “But we are showing that they have a very complex communication system that shares parallel human.”
Now, we have shown that the syntax of fireplaces and bonobs, it is essential that this ability to composition inherited from our last ordinary ancestor, Leroux says. “They simply showed that this block of the base building is an ancient evolutionary due to at least 7 million years old, and maybe older.”
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