Humpback whale song shown to be structurally similar to human language
Humpback whale song shown to be structurally similar to human language
Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it out as distinct from the communication of all other species. However, research published in Science has uncovered the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language in humpback whale song.
Apparently humpback whale songs show a few features in common with human language; such as being culturally transmitted through social interactions between whales.
"The authors found that whale song showed the same key statistical properties present in all known human languages" - my guess is that the author talks about Zipf's Law, that applies to both phoneme frequency and word frequency in human languages.
[Dr. Garland] "Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language." - so while it is not language yet it's considerably closer to language than we'd expect, specially from non-primates.
Babelingua was right