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hamster
Joined: 24 Apr 2007
Posts: 448
Location: Wokingham (Berks.), UK
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 Posted: Mon Jun 18, 07 12:36 pm Post subject: Re: is rural life getting to me? |
 
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| madmonk wrote: |
| Just sitting thinking that chances are that if you are born in France you would grow up speaking French, ok same goes for Germany etc., so how does a cuckoo know how to cuckoo? |
They just do!!
In some ways it's the same with animals and humans - French children hear their parents speaking French, so they learn French, just as cuckoos hear adult cuckoos making cuckoo-noises and pick those up too.
Basically, a lot of animals use sound to communicate a need, but most animal communication is restricted to a few basic functions, e.g. signalling danger, attracting a mate, showing aggression etc etc. Babies cry when they're hungry, wet, need comfort etc, and what happens when humans learn to speak is different from animals learning to communicate.
Human language is fundamentally different from animal communication in that it is arbitrary and words only have a meaning because we ascribe a meaning to them (i.e. a table is only a table because we all agree it's a table, not because there's any intrinsic reason why that particular combination of sounds should denote that particular object). So, learning to speak is about learning the system of words and sounds of your particular language, even though we all have the same linguistic tools in our brains. (It's similar to birds or cows having 'accents' but more drastically different.)
Because animal communication is significantly less complex than human language, then it's much closer to the kind of instinctive sounds animals make anyway. There is evidence that in birdsong, some notes may mean certain things, but it's still more basic than human language. There was an experiment when a bird was isolated from other birds, and it still learnt to sing, but the structure of its song was different from other birds of the same species. However, when they re-introduced it to other birds who had grown up normally, it quickly adjusted its singing to fit in with the others.
This wouldn't happen with human children. If children aren't exposed to language before the age of about 7, they won't pick it up, but they would still make noises to communicate certain basic needs. When we're born, we have the capacity to learn any language, but we learn the one we hear other people speaking around us. Children learn which sounds their language uses, and grammatical things like how the tenses work, as well as what words mean i.e. they learn how to use language, which is essentially an arbitrary and culturally-specific system, unlike animal communication which is more basic and less specific.
I'm such a geek. 
*takes linguistics student hat off* |
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mochyn
Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 24585
Location: mid-Wales
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hamster
Joined: 24 Apr 2007
Posts: 448
Location: Wokingham (Berks.), UK
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| Posted: Mon Jun 18, 07 4:55 pm Post subject: Re: is rural life getting to me? |
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| mochyn wrote: |
| hamster wrote: |
| madmonk wrote: |
| how does a cuckoo know how to cuckoo? |
They just do!!
In some ways it's the same with animals and humans - French children hear their parents speaking French, so they learn French, just as cuckoos hear adult cuckoos making cuckoo-noises and pick those up too. |
But, surely, cuckoos aren't brought up by other cuckoos, are they? So why don't they speak chaffinch? |
Ooh, that's a very good point. I didn't think of that. I've now spent all afternoon googling to see if cuckoos communicate differently from other birds and haven't applied for any jobs at all! *sigh* Haven't found anything out either...
Edited to add: This website says that cuckoos learn a full song even if they haven't been exposed to it, whereas the bullfinch learns any song it's exposed to. I guess, then, that the cuckoo maybe knows it instinctively, to compensate for being brought up by other birds, while other kinds of bird don't.
https://www.ling.udel.edu/colin/courses/ling101/idsardi_notes/acquisition.html |
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