is rural life getting to me?

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is rural life getting to me?
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Cathryn

Joined: 16 Jul 2005
Posts: 19856
Location: Ceredigion

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 9:21 am Post subject:
Birds do apparently have regional accents so - no it isn't! Samantha

pricey

Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Posts: 6444

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 10:26 am Post subject:
Mate I will be coming to see you in a couple of months, Hang on in there till I get there, Dont go Mad yet

Blue Sky

Joined: 30 Jan 2005
Posts: 7658
Location: France

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 10:28 am Post subject:
Too late me thinks

Gervase

Joined: 17 Nov 2004
Posts: 8655

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 10:30 am Post subject:
Nurse!!!

wellington womble

Joined: 08 Nov 2004
Posts: 15051
Location: East Midlands

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 10:59 am Post subject:
Ah, great unanswered questions! Write to the New Scientist - I've always wanted to know, if pitch is so important to meaning in Mandarin, how do you sing in China?

sean
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 42219
Location: North Devon

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 11:03 am Post subject:
King James 1 believed that if you brought up a child any verbal input it would speak Hebrew.

Green Man

Joined: 23 Jul 2006
Posts: 5272
Location: Rural Scotland.

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 11:23 am Post subject:
Some noises are just instinct. I heard my three year old taunting another with the " Na na nanan nan aaa" noise that he most certainly did not learn from us.

Went

Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 6968

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 12:12 pm Post subject:

ruby wrote:

Birds do apparently have regional accents so - no it isn't!

Samantha

Spanish Blackbirds definitely have a 'spanish' song compared with those we remember from the UK.....

Tay

Joined: 08 Oct 2006
Posts: 2811
Location: Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 6:56 pm Post subject:

It depends upon whether or not you are speaking about French cuckoos or 'foreign' cuckoos...

French cuckoos (like all other creatures, including humans here) are given a 24 volume set of files on 'how to be a good xxxx' (please insert applicable animal name) when they are born. Volume 5 teaches 'how to communicate'. There is no natural instinct, just bureaucracy.

With reference to the importance of pitch in China, and how do people sing, the answer is clear. They can't sing. What is the population of China? And how many famous Chinese singers are there? None that I know of. When at uni, I had the misfortune to have a room adjacent to a Chinese bloke who adored Celine Dion's voice. Not only did I have to listen to 'my heart will go on' each morning at 7.30, he would also attempt to sing along to the song. He sounded like a hyena which was being disembowelled.

He happened to agree that there aren't any well-known Chinese singers, and strangely enough, he couldn't explain why...

madmonk

Joined: 08 May 2006
Posts: 835

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 07 7:03 pm Post subject:
Oh bloody hell and there I am thinking that the daddy cuckoo used to sneak back and say " alright son after me" cuckoo cuckoo, well there you go you learn something everyday.

NannyP

Joined: 26 Aug 2005
Posts: 118
Location: Vienne, France

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 07 1:34 pm Post subject:

Tay wrote:

When at uni, I had the misfortune to have a room adjacent to a Chinese bloke who adored Celine Dion's voice. Not only did I have to listen to 'my heart will go on' each morning at 7.30, he would also attempt to sing along to the song. He sounded like a hyena which was being disembowelled.

Oh, I have to listen to Hyena's disemboweling all day long

I just thought, c'et normal

Tay

Joined: 08 Oct 2006
Posts: 2811
Location: Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Posted: Sun Jun 17, 07 1:46 pm Post subject:
Are your neighbours howling, or is it Mark?

hamster

Joined: 24 Apr 2007
Posts: 448
Location: Wokingham (Berks.), UK

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 07 12:36 pm Post subject: Re: is rural life getting to me?

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*

mochyn

Joined: 21 Dec 2004
Posts: 24585
Location: mid-Wales

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 07 12:46 pm Post subject: Re: is rural life getting to me?

hamster wrote:

madmonk wrote:

how does a cuckoo know how to cuckoo?

But, surely, cuckoos aren't brought up by other cuckoos, are they? So why don't they speak chaffinch?

hamster

Joined: 24 Apr 2007
Posts: 448
Location: Wokingham (Berks.), UK

Posted: Mon Jun 18, 07 4:55 pm Post subject: Re: is rural life getting to me?

mochyn wrote:

hamster wrote:

madmonk wrote:

how does a cuckoo know how to cuckoo?

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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