Different Animals Different Languages

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this year's podcast we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing how to talk to dogs in other languages. Chris, I'm not quite sure why we're talking about this, I think a lot of interesting things to say, but lead us in, go for it.

Speaker B: 00:00:31

Basically, this comes from my observation in some of my children's books, we have English picture books and American picture books, and in the English picture books, dogs make the noise woof woof, that's how a dog noise is written. Yeah, that's what dogs do, right? That's what dogs do, exactly, but in American books and cartoons and comic books and so on, they say arf arf, so I was starting to wonder, well, hang on a minute, so we have the same language and we're talking about the same animal, why is it their sound representations are captured differently? So I started looking into it, it turns out all languages have different versions of what noises dogs make, it's blaf in Dutch, it's wa in French, as far as I can pronounce, but that's obviously me trying to pronounce those languages, depictions of those words, gav in Russian and wan in Japanese, but then there's transliteration in there as well. Anyway, I just started looking at-

Speaker C: 00:01:57

Can I just interject and say in Russian, yes, gav gav is for big dogs, but small dogs say tiaf tiaf.

Speaker A: 00:02:03

Oh, do they? Okay. Do you know what they say in Brazil? They say ow ow. Ow ow, little ones or big ones? All of them, I believe.

Speaker B: 00:02:10

Right, yeah. So, and you know, I was just kind of thinking about why when this is supposedly onomatopoeic, we actually capture it in different ways and what's going on there.

Speaker A: 00:02:22

Okay, just before we go on, I remember this coming up a lot when I was an English teacher, it was always quite a fun lesson actually talking about this and I don't remember other countries, but I remember in Brazil, which I've just talked about, but little birds in Brazil go pew pew, that's how they go. And what are the other ones? Yeah, cock-a-doodle-doo? No. Co-co-ri-co-co-ri-co.

Speaker C: 00:02:44

Yeah, well, I've looked at a lot of different examples.

Speaker A: 00:02:48

So let's hear, I guess let's hear lots of examples, I think that's quite fun.

Speaker C: 00:02:50

Yeah, I think Chris might be slightly over-egging how different the animals are, because it does vary by animal actually, what variation there are. Chickens, yeah, I've also picked out the ones I think are particularly good. Chickens generally say something like co-co, wherever you are. The Turkish chickens are great, they go git git git dak, which I think is really good. Roosters on the other hand, you're absolutely right, they more or less say kikiriki wherever you are. The English is particularly bad, cock-a-doodle-doo. It's just not really there, is it? Ducks more or less go either quack quack or quack quack, everywhere you look. Cats, cats are similar apparently. Always meow. Yeah. So I mean, I think in Ukrainian, they say niav, but I guess if you're saying it, I don't know,

Speaker B: 00:03:42

you can make that sound a bit like meow. Yeah, if it's like a, yeah. And that's the thing, we're obviously interpreting these, like I say, you know, when you transliterate something from Japanese into our alphabet even, you're making our interpretation. Yeah, in Batak, they go niong.

Speaker C: 00:04:00

What the hell is Batak? I don't know. Okay. Apologies to any Batak speaking listeners out there. Birds, as you said, they do actually all sort of go pip pip or choo choo, more or less. Yeah. What did you say they said in Brazil? Pew pew. Yeah, they all say something like that. Which also means something a bit rude as well. In Bengal though, they say kichir michir. In where, sorry? Bengal, they say kichir michir. Really? Which is sort of capturing a bit more of the Twitteriness. I kind of like that. Yeah, we've done dogs. Horses trotting. How would you do a horse trotting? Clip clop. Yeah, or clippity clop if you wanted to make it sound like it was going faster. The two I really like are in Danish, they have gadagum gadagum. And in French, they go dugadum dugadum, which is a bit more like a horse riding over earth rather than on pavement. Yeah, along a sort of a bucolic line. Cows go moo everywhere. Okay. Full on moo. Sheep either say bee or bar, except in Indonesia, where they say mbek. Pigs are all over the place. In Basque, they say kurin kurin. In Czech, they say kvik kvik. German, where we must get the word grunt from, they say grunt grunt, apparently. And I didn't, I'd never thought of grunt as being really imitative of what a pig says, but it's not bad. Elephants, again, nobody really knows what they say. In Arabic, they say nahim. Italians get this. In Italian, elephants say bar, like sheep. And in Tagalog, it's awoo, which is my favourite one. Lions generally do. In Tagalog, did you say? Tagalog, which I think is the Philippines, is it what they speak in the Philippines? Not sure. Lions all say either raw or grr, some variation of that. And bees all have z, m or n in them, which is quite good. So anyway, there you go. Quick roundup of the world of animal noises, as depicted in different languages. Okay.

Speaker A: 00:05:51

So I guess we've got to define what our question is here. And is this linguistics? Is this environment?

Speaker B: 00:05:59

Well, I think the sort of way I've been thinking about this is the way we depict sounds to sort of capture information and the way we try and capture sort of acoustically ambiguous things into a single world. It's not dissimilar to the way you might describe a colour with a word or some sort of visual reference. And I think, you know, one of the reasons why some animals all make similar noises in different languages and some are much more diverse is, I suspect, because if you think about dogs, you know, as you said, there are big, you know, a Great Dane versus a Chihuahua, that that range of noise is quite diverse. So there's much more, much more open to interpretation. Whereas a cat probably does make a similar sound, whatever size. And yeah. Yeah. And in fact, that's that sort of born out. So there's actually, there was actually a study by academics in Cambridge that actually entitled disentangling canid howls across multiple species and subspecies structure in a complex communication. And I'm not going to go into that in the channel, but they actually looked at the range of noises made across different species of, well, dogs, coyotes and different species of wolves. And they clustered, you know, multidimensional clustering. They identified 21 different types of how, like, long range communication within canids. So that suggests that there is quite a lot of diversity in there. Whereas I suspected they'd done a similar study in cats. They wouldn't have found quite so much.

Speaker C: 00:07:58

Yeah. And I think born out. I don't know how true this is, but frogs have very distinct geographic variation in how they talk, which is why in America. Apparently no frog anywhere ever said ribbit. Well, I think they're a particular species of frog in somewhere in the US, which says, I think it's an I think it's the one near Hollywood, which is why the frogs in films say ribbit. Yeah. But croak is much closer to what frogs sound like in in the UK. And I remember when I was in France hearing these strange beeping noises turned out to be frogs as well. You can't frogs all over the place. They're totally, totally different. So that's bound to be one of them. Then there's I mean, there's see that partly. OK, I mean, we're talking about things that are imitative here, but there's also the question of the idiophones. So things that are words that kind of work for particular concepts which aren't imitative. So things like zigzag, which works very well for the idea of a zigzag. It feels quite a pointy sort of word for a pointy shape. Bling for shiny things kind of works. They don't make a noise, but they sound like they look like they ought to. And then you have things like where, you know, there's a sort of imitative component to the way that we say things. So, for example, the sounds for big things are produced with your tongue at the back of your mouth, like huge and gigantic, whereas the words for small things like teeny and tiny and diddy are all pronounced with the tongue at the front of your mouth, for example. And there's words like soft, which feels soft compared to hard and words like fluffy, which really sound very fluffy to me. So and then there's I mean, I don't know, getting even more abstract. There are words that to me really sound exactly like what they mean without really being in any way onomatopoeic, like bombastic and robust and delicacy, which to me are like examples of words which feel exactly right. You know, somebody who's bombastic. You think, yeah, that word really. I get what you're saying.

Speaker A: 00:10:05

It's more than just onomatopoeia, right? Yeah.

Speaker C: 00:10:08

It's not just imitation. There's obviously something to do with the way that we represent concepts with language that at some level is mapping onto the sounds themselves. Or at least. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:10:19

Yeah. And I think, you know, there's also at play regional and cultural differences. So, you know, in some languages, they're obvious. So if you think about the the sound, the voiced dental fricative that we have in English, but isn't present in most European and Asian languages. Well, you're not going to be able. And in fact, it's not only that they don't use it and have great difficulty in sounding it themselves. It's that they don't really discern it either. They can't tell the difference between different kinds of TH noises that we can. And so there's also something at play about language and cultural differences in the use of different languages and what you can hear and discern and what you can represent. That I think is quite kind of interesting and determines how we think about sounds. If you take the bird that is named after the noise it makes in the UK, the cuckoo, right? What noise? Well, obviously we think it makes a cuckoo. And so I listened to the sound of a cuckoo because in German, it is cuck, uck. That's the noise that they, or that's the name they give the bird. And so when I was listening to a cuckoo, I could not hear the cuck at the end of it. And I tried and I tried. And eventually I could kind of think, oh, yeah, okay. Actually, maybe I can see how you could represent that. But there's something very suggestive about language, which is a little bit to do with what Nick was saying about what do we think it should sound like? And a little bit to do with once we start using a word for a sound, it then starts sounding to us like that noise. So, yeah.

Speaker C: 00:12:29

So, and I think this has been widely observed in things like, I mean, I couldn't find if this effect has a name, but the tick-tock effect where clocks don't go tick-tock, right? Everyone thinks they do. And the tick and the tock sound very distinct when you're listening to it and you're thinking tick-tock. But if you listen to the same clock and you decide it's going to start playing a waltz and you start listening to it going tick-tock-tock, tick-tock-tock, you'll hear that instead. So I think this, what that highlights is the fact that, you know, our experience of the world is a combination of a sort of top-down prior beliefs element, you know, taking kind of Bayesian framework for how we experience things. There's a kind of top-down prior belief about what we should be experiencing. And then, of course, we have the sensory information, which is probably just too rich for us to be able to synthesize entirely. And the experience we actually have is going to be some combination of the two. So, yeah, no doubt that what you've been told an animal sounds like is going to influence the way that you hear its sound. But, of course, you know, within limits.

Speaker B: 00:13:35

And, yeah, I mean, just sort of backing that up, there are a couple of studies where they've used ambiguous sounds. So there's one which can be interpreted as pale, bill or mayo. So it's got three, you know, different sounds that people can typically hear. And if you're shown a picture at the point at which you are hearing the sound, you will hear the one which is associated with the picture. And obviously, well, a lot of people will be familiar with the Yanny and Laurel sound. That was great. Yeah, which was similar to the white and gold, blue and purple dress or blue and black dress, but for audio. And, you know, there's one of the reasons they're suggesting that there is this discrepancy. Some people hear Yanny and some people hear Laurel is to do with the poor quality of the sound and that there's more room for the brain to interpret things. There was also, you know, a suggestion that if you are younger and hear higher frequency sounds, you'll hear Yanny. If you're older and don't hear those high frequency sounds, the dominance of Laurel will come through. But so, yeah, we are very, you know, we are suggestible when it comes to sounds. The brain does a lot of interpretation and fills in a lot of blanks for us, which is why we.

Speaker C: 00:15:05

Yeah. And it's a totally different experience. Yanny and Laurel, unlike the bloody dress, which I've never been able to see as blue and black. I have tried everything. I've tried every trick on the Internet to try and see it as blue and black. I cannot. Yanny and Laurel, I can switch between quite happily. And the experience of listening to that sound go Yanny is a completely different one. So the experience of hearing it say Laurel, they're just different sounds as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker B: 00:15:31

And I believe there is this sense that they are different, that they're two things overlaid and they kind of, you know, depending on which one dominates, you will hear one or the other. So, yeah, that kind of backs it up.

Speaker A: 00:15:45

OK, look, I don't know if this is dragging us in a different direction, but something I can't quite recall what you said, Chris. But there was something that you said that made me think of something, which is, I don't know, the effect of language on how we process information. And all it made me think of, I mean, do you two speak any languages other than English? Barely, barely even speak that to be honest. Bit of German, because I speak Portuguese every day because my wife is Brazilian and I speak and that's what we speak with our kids as well. And actually something I noticed a long, long, long time ago is I'm a very different person, actually, when I'm speaking Portuguese. It's a kind of a softer language. I'm more romantic. I'm kinder. And, you know, my voice is a lot softer when I speak Portuguese. So I kind of become a different person almost when I'm speaking it, with one exception, which is when I'm telling my children off, which is quite common. And if we're out and about, I always do it in Portuguese because I kind of quite like to do it quite privately and have a go at them in private, as it were, and so other people don't understand. Yeah, I don't know. Is there anything? Was that something you were starting to talk about a little bit, Chris? Any thoughts on that? Am I taking us in an interesting direction or not?

Speaker B: 00:16:54

I suppose there's an element of... So, you know, one of the things we didn't particularly look at is whether or not, you know, the reason why different languages represent different animal noises in different ways is because the animals themselves are using different languages. And I think Nick alluded to it a bit. There is evidence in lots of species of dialect, you know, studies done on sperm whales with Caribbean accents and, you know, the birds in America being, you know, having state by state different calls, even though it's the same species and so on. Now, the question is whether that affects, you know, whether sound as opposed to the structure of the language affects behavior or the way you transmit information. I mean, I was kind of taken with Nick's thought about, you know, certain sounds representing particular types of ideas consistently. So small things sounding in one way, big things sounding in another way. And I think that is, you know, that may well be culturally independent. I mean, when you read a word in English and you don't know what it is, part of the lexical inference you're doing is about the context of the word. But part of it is what does that word sound like? You know, it sounds a bit like it should be a word for somebody annoying or something. And, you know, you infer a lot by the sounds of words. So, yeah, but is that, you know, is a word that sounds big in English, even if it were a nonsense word, does that sound small in Portuguese?

Speaker C: 00:18:50

I think they've shown that those sorts of things are universal. I think they did this thing where they've shown people different shapes. You know, one is a sort of spiky shape and one is a blobby shape. And they say, which one is a bloog and which one is a cackalack, you know. And it's fairly universal. Yeah. I think the thing about, you know, languages is obviously languages really compress the range of sounds available. You know, there are lots and lots of different sounds and we've compressed them into just these little chunks, you know, phonemes, which are sort of ranges of sound within which, you know, you can vary and still be saying the same thing. So which is why you can have a conversation if someone says, you know, brass as opposed to brass or, you know, the company saying butter instead of butter. And we're going to hear it as the same thing. You're allowed to. That's a that's a way that, you know, within that phoneme, you're allowed to vary that sound. But that that, of course, means it's hard to represent within that system really precise, you know, imitations of real sounds because they're there. They will end up falling into a bucket and that bucket is sort of a phoneme, which encompasses quite a lot of sounds. And I think there's, you know, languages. But I mean, languages vary very widely in terms of the number of phonemes they have in general, because all languages have the same kind of information content. The fewer phonemes you have, the longer your words are. So, you know, you have I think there's there's variation. I think there's like 11 phonemes in a language called Rotocast and about 141 phonemes in a language called Gzoo. I don't even know how to say that. I suspect it involves being a Gzoo speaker before you can even pronounce the name of the language. So you would expect Gzoo speakers to be better at imitating animals. They've got more tools to use.

Speaker B: 00:20:52

Yeah, there's a really there's a really interesting study done by academics at Wisconsin University where they looked at how onomatopoeic words form. And the sort of structure of the study was basically they asked people to imitate noises, not to create words for, but imitate the noises of things like sloshing water or whatever it might be. And then they kind of socialized their imitations to the next group. And then the next group had to kind of propagate that to another, you know. So there are several layers of Chinese whispers, kind of like Chinese whispers. Exactly. And eventually they found that they settled. It went from being more sound like to being more word like, you know, so that I think, you know, the slosh of water became something like chong chong or I forget exactly what it was. But effectively, you know, they created their own onomatopoeic words. But it was sort of trying to accelerate the process that that would have happened by naturally in a language. And it kind of backs up, you know, Nick's idea that you're trying to encapsulate something quite abstract and not language like into something that you can nail as a concept that everybody gets.

Speaker C: 00:22:14

Yeah. Which is why we have to come up with new. And the demand for onomatopoeia is going to be driven by new technology as well. So you have, you know, guns. What do they say? What do you think a gun says?

Speaker B: 00:22:24

Bang. Pee-ow.

Speaker C: 00:22:26

Pee-ow. Yeah. Guns say pee-ow pee-ow.

Speaker B: 00:22:27

Do they?

Speaker C: 00:22:28

Yeah. What are you talking about, Fraser? And laser guns go zap, don't they? We all know they go zap. New. Yeah. New words required. Yeah. Go on.

Speaker A: 00:22:37

So I'm close to wanting to wrap up. There's something I want to move on to a final question. But before I do, I'd like to sort of, you know, if there's anything you want to add, you know, let's round it off.

Speaker B: 00:22:46

Just going back to your point about sort of, you know, differences between languages and whether some languages are more onomatopoeic than others. I don't know whether that's the case, but I think within the Qur'anic Arabic, for example, within the Qur'an, there are something like 19,000 words. And it has been noted how there are only nine onomatopoeic words in the Qur'an, which is proportionately supposed to be very, very small. And there have been, you know, a few studies trying to work out why that might have been culturally and so on. So, so, yeah, I think that, you know, it is perhaps the case that some languages are better at doing onomatopoeia than others.

Speaker C: 00:23:33

Well, one of the things you will note is how spectacularly bad English is actually at doing, at least written English, the conventions for how you write animal noises. We mentioned cock-a-doodle-doo earlier, but also things like neigh for what a horse says and, you know, woof doesn't sound very much like a dog. But one of the reasons for that that I've seen advanced is that English is comparatively very old as far as written languages are concerned. So the conventions for how you write English, it's like Chris's process that he's talking about of how these words form. The words we have for animal noises are a long way divorced from their kind of onomatopoeic origins. So I remember, you know, finding out that the word raven is supposed to be onomatopoeic, supposed to sound like raven or something. And the same with hawk and rook and lots of other sort of bird names are onomatopoeic. Like tipped. Crow, apparently. Well, it does crow as well, doesn't it? You've won crows. So, yeah. Fraser, what were you going to say?

Speaker A: 00:24:38

Yeah, I just wanted to ask, can you tell me, I don't know if there's something you think about a lot, but I do, do you have either a favourite language, you don't need to understand it, either a favourite language, or a language that you really dislike? Because I certainly have one that I dislike a lot.

Speaker C: 00:24:54

Well, as long as it's not German.

Speaker A: 00:24:56

You know, I quite like German.

Speaker C: 00:24:56

Poor old German is like the heavy metal of languages in that everyone says they don't like it.

Speaker A: 00:25:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I like German, actually. So I mean, I'll kick things off. I mean, happy to discuss this. Yeah, yeah. So I really do not like Spanish, particularly what might be called Castilian Spanish. When I hear Spanish from South America, Central America, fine. But I do not like Spanish from Spain. Because the whole th-th-th-th thing annoys me a bit. And we all know how that came about. No, it's not true. Is that not true? We all know how that didn't come about. But I don't like that. And there are just certain ways that, you know, there are certain things. And of course, I lived in Spain. So, you know, over nine months or so, I really did have enough of it. So I don't like Spanish very much. In terms of languages, I do like, well, plenty of them. You know, I think there's lots of really pretty languages. Ethiopian. I once watched a documentary about Ethiopian runners. And it was really struck by its delicacy and its musicality. And so, yeah, there we go. Those are my votes. Apologies to all our Castilian speakers out there.

Speaker C: 00:26:06

Yeah, I've got a particular favourite, actually, which is Dutch. And I don't speak a word of Dutch. What I like about it is if you hear some Dutch speakers, they're slightly out of earshot. It sounds just like they're speaking English. Because they've got a very, very similar kind of phonemic vocabulary, as it were. You know, the sounds they use are very similar to English. And even the words are often very similar. But when you get closer, it's almost like it gives you the closest sensation you can get to what it must be like to hear someone speak English, but not be able to speak English yourself. Which is quite fun. It's like reading an alphabet you don't understand.

Speaker B: 00:26:42

If you're falling asleep, you can understand them. I had an experience of falling asleep on a train with some Dutch people, you know, gabbling away. You understood every word. Well, I wouldn't say I understood every word. But there was something about that drift between the waking and the sleeping state that was more interpretive.

Speaker C: 00:27:06

So maybe Dutch is like the universal language of our unconscious or something. Any least favourites? No, it's a bit naff, I think. I think all languages are fun. I like the fact that they're all... True. Except Spanish, of course.

Speaker A: 00:27:20

Chris?

Speaker B: 00:27:21

Yeah, I think for me, I love fictional languages. So I think something like Tolkien's Elvish is tremendous. And he was obviously, you know, he had a linguistics scholar's background.

Speaker C: 00:27:33

Please tell us you speak Elvish.

Speaker B: 00:27:35

I'm afraid I don't speak Elvish.

Speaker C: 00:27:37

But can you even say my name is Chris in Elvish?

Speaker B: 00:27:40

No, maybe I should at some point learn a bit of Elvish. But just the effort that goes into creating a fictional language from scratch, usually in one creative mind's, you know, effort, I think is really, really interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in that case, in terms of least favourite language, it would probably be Orkish.

Speaker A: 00:28:12

My vote perhaps would be Klingon, you know. Okay, right. Look, let's wrap up there. Thank you very much indeed for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. And until next time, Chris-crush. Cheers. Which I believe is Klingon for goodbye. Goodbye.