Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Let's talk!

Untitled by Wanderfull1
Untitled, a photo by Wanderfull1 on Flickr.

Con Slobodchikoff, a biologist who has been studying the American prairie dog since 1959, speculates that prairie dogs barking at each other across open fields are gossiping. Slobodchikoff was able to identify nine words used in non-random ways. That is to say, some words would appear at the beginning of conversational sentences, others in the middle, and still others at the end of sentences – similar to Mandarin Chinese where the word "ma" at the end of a sentence signifies a question. Anyone familiar with prairie dogs has seen them chirp and whistle danger warnings, but Slobodchikoff discovered that they also describe in detail the nature of that danger. When various researchers wandered near a prairie dog community, not only did the sentry bark the alarm call for a human intruder, their call also described who the intruder was based on the colors of the shirts they were wearing. Phoneme patterns allowed Slobodchikoff to identify the part of the alarm call that coded for the shirt color. He also discovered that the same barks occurred in various prairie dog communities throughout the United States, but with slight variances in dialect.

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