Do you think that only you can conduct a conversation with other people in complete sentences? Well, think again. It's not just humans who understand or speak in groups of words. It's the incredibly intelligent dolphin that is able to speak to its friends in total sentences of five whole words apiece.
Most dolphins communicate in clicks and whistles, as everyone knows. However, could they speak in complete sentences, by varying the pitch and volume of each sound and word? That is a discovery that is totally new and mindblowing.
The discovery was made by researchers at Karadag Nature Reserve in Feodosia, Russia. The scientists recorded a couple of verbose Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, Yasha and Yana, who were talking a lot---conducting an interesting conversation. With new kinds of high-fidelity underwater microphones, scientists could pick up the dolphins' various sounds and found that beasts could use "words" to articulate what they feel and think. One dolphin would even wait in patience until the other one completed its side of the conversation.
Now what Yasha and Yana were talking about is mystery. Were they engaged in love talk? A business transaction? A verbal duel? It isn't too clear---yet. Figuring out their words and meanings will take time. But it is amazing that the dolphins actually exchanged a conversation in full sentences for a considerable period of time.
"The analysis of [sounds] registered in our experiments showed that the dolphins took turns in producing [words and phrases] and did not interrupt each other, which gives reason to believe that each of the dolphins listened to the other's pulses before producing its own," the study, led by Dr. Vyacheslav Ryabov, said. "Essentially, this exchange resembles a conversation between two people. The fundamental difference between the dolphin exchange of information and the human conversation is in the characteristics of the acoustic signals of their spoken language."
The findings were published in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics.
