this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
50 points (98.1% liked)
Linguistics
1360 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!
Everyone is welcome here: from laypeople to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.
Rules:
- Instance rules apply.
- Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
- Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. And avoid unnecessary mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
- Post sources when reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
- Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
- Have fun!
Related communities:
- !linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works
- !languagelearning@sopuli.xyz
- !conlangs@mander.xyz
- !esperanto@sopuli.xyz
- !japaneselanguage@sopuli.xyz
- !latin@piefed.social
Resources:
Grammar Watch - contains descriptions of the grammars of multiple languages, from the whole world.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Chimps, too. I couldn't find the article to link here, but I remember seeing somewhere that they have discrete howls that can be combined for subtler meaning; not too far from having a howl for "leopard", another for "close", and then using both to say "there's a leopard nearby".
The key difference between chimps, corvids and dolphis vs. humans is that humans developed that system to the point it eclipsed non-verbal communication (although we still use it a fair bit).