David Farrier’s Guardian piece on AI and animal communication is a classic thumb-sucker — take some half-understood and poorly digested scientific news and mix it with wild speculation ad libitum — but the idea at its center is of some interest:
The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy.
Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026.
The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals’ interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another’s native vocabulary.
The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic “conversation” with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as “whup/throp” with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U.
It goes on to reference the impressively mustachioed Jakob Johann von Uexküll and his notion of Umwelt; does anyone know the derivation of his surname? At any rate, I suspect that, as usual, whatever sounds exciting is wrong or misunderstood, and whatever is accurate is not that interesting (I can well believe that scientists exchanged “whup/throp” with a whale for twenty minutes; did the whale get bored, or did they?). I’m quite sure none of these animals use anything comparable to human language. But still, if the complex calls can be analyzed in any fruitful way, well, that’s a result. Thanks, Trevor!
“If a whale could whup/throp us, we could not throp/whup him,” as I think a Noted Philosopher put it.
There is an English Wikipedia article on Ikšķile with speculation on the origin of the placename.
I also like the name “Ogre Municipality” there.
“a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U”
Ah, such ego-free creatures, there is no “I” in dolphin! No, wait…
There is an English Wikipedia article on Ikšķile
Thanks!
Can a dolphin learn to distinguish between UE and Ü, as in Uexküll?
It’s odd to see both <ue> and <ü> in the same word, both (per WP) pronounced the same, and both (per Xerîb apud WP) of the same source vowel (maybe).
BTW, as presented, I think the project is a fool’s errand. “Language”, if this is such a thing, is a very different concept for humans and dolphins and sparrows. AI or otherwise, I don’t think anyone here even knows what the question is, let alone how to answer it.
Quite so. But it’s catnip to journalists!
The Ikšķile article also lists Üxküll, so where did Uexküll come from? A convention in which umlauts were not used on capital letters maybe.
The Far Side on dolphin communication.
AI or otherwise, I don’t think anyone here even knows what the question is, let alone how to answer it.
Ah, but you are not taking into account the fact that “Generative AI” has magical properties. It is not necessary to know what the question is. “AI” can (and will) answer it anyway. (The answer with probably be “forty-two.”)
You’re so 2024. We don’t need to know the answer. It will be communicated to another robot, far more brilliant than us.
When I was a kid, my mother told me that if you heard a cardinal singing, you could imitate him by whistling, and he’d whistle back, and you could keep the exchange going for a long time. Eventually, of course, I realized that he’d keep singing, with the same pauses between songs, even if you didn’t whistle. In northeastern Ohio they sound more like whit whit whit tew tew tew tew tew than like whup or throp, though.
a dolphin named Zeus
we don’t need to really start worrying until the computers are being fed material by an orca named loki.
In addition to the doubts expressed above, it seems to me that cetaceans are a poor choice for this research. You can’t begin to understand meanings if you don’t know the context of the utterances. And with cetaceans being under water, often far apart, their context is invisible.
We have mountains of recordings of spoken English, but throwing those into an AI would tell you some things about patterns of speech and stimulus/response, but nothing about meaning.
Urmas Sutrop, University of Tartu, on the origin of the name, but not the odd spelling: “Names are more than names: A note about the name Uexküll” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270479996_Names_are_more_than_names_A_note_about_the_name_Uexkull
Thanks very much for that! Here’s the heart of it:
The article Kull 2001 is available here for those with De Gruyter Brill access; Jung 1881, Läti Hendriku: Liiwi maa kroonika ehk Aja raamat [The Chronicle of the Land of Hendrik the Livonian, or the Book of Time], is available at the excellent Estonian DIGAR site (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4).
Exactly.
What’s described in the quote isn’t Generative; it’s just the pattern recognition in oodles of data that AI really is good at.
Indeed: it is the journo who introduced the magic word “generative”, in line with the usual journalistic understanding of the issues surrounding “AI” (which certainly is in terms of magic, though they would no more accept this label than a homeopathist would.)
So the name is the same as Wexford. The Vikings really got everywhere 😊.
Again, already? This whale AI thing was last seen here just over a year ago. The project’s publicists are earning their pay.
Obligatory lion comment, check. In fact, if you click through to the Guardian article, the lion is already in it: “ ‘If a lion could talk,’ writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, ‘we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.’ ” And props to the Guardian for including Wittgenstein as one of three bookshop links at the bottom of the article!
Obligatory Nagel comment… doesn’t seem to have appeared here yet. It’s in last year’s thread.
Is there anything new here since last year? OK, the “AI program to translate dolphins”, that’s new. Jon said:
Very important point. It isn’t in the article, but if you click on the DolphinGemma link in the quote, Google’s getting data from a scientific organization (much older than Google itself) that tries to do exactly that:
(And yes, it’s modeled on Jane Goodall.) But Google’s model is only trained on the audio, to “predict the likely subsequent sounds in a sequence” like any other LLM. I guess the implication is that this will still be of some use to humans who have spent enough time diving and watching through underwater cameras to associate the sounds with what the dolphins are doing, but that’s where Google’s blog post gets vague.
The first text translated into Dolphin would be the Lord’s Prayer? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Safety instructions for a toaster?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Surely that would (rightly) be taken as a provocation?
The Lord’s Prayer would need some fairly radical paraphrasing … dynamic equivalence …
“Give us this day our daily fish”? “At sea as it is in heaven”? (And what is “heaven” to a dolphin, anyway?)
“Kingdom” might be the trickiest concept to translate, now I think about it…
And never mind dolphin baptism, controversial linguistically and theologically.
The first text translated into Dolphin would be the Lord’s Prayer?
I’d go with the Feeding of the 5000.
Very relatable… And recounted in all four Gospels!
And never mind dolphin baptism, controversial linguistically and theologically
I imagine it might involve leaping through a hoop in mid-air.
@Xerîb:
Yes, good call. Miraculous feeding of a multitude would probably go fairly easily into most dialects of Animal.
Except Fish, I suppose. Have to ask St Anthony about that one.
Another problem is that dolphins would be unlikely to be persuaded by Noah’s Ark as a typological prophecy of salvation via the Church, since their ancestors did not need that Ark to survive the relevant Flood and are not said to have been invited aboard.
“Safety instructions for a toaster” would be an unwise choice. Analysis by dolphin sages might easily lead to their understanding the secrets of our technological dominance. It would be like exporting advanced Generative AI to China.
“Kingdom” might be the trickiest concept to translate, now I think about it…
With “hallowed” coming in second. And do dolphins know what names are?
With “hallowed” coming in second
Hard enough to convey in many human languages. The Kusaal, Mampruli and Mooré versions all just go with “may your name have prestige.”
The Kusaal Bible translators have never really found a good way of rendering “holy, sacred.” The 1976 and 1996 versions just use “good”, and the 2016 version uses a Mampruli loanword which is used for “holy” in the Mampruli version but actually seems to have the core meaning of (literally) “clean, spotless.”
The concept is just too culture-bound. You can explain it in Kusaal, of course, but there is no “word for it.” Or even standing expression for it. At least there wasn’t. I suppose that now there is.
The 2016 version choice was apparently controversial, though I think that was chiefly because it wasn’t thought to be a proper Kusaal word at all, rather than because it was felt not to capture the meaning properly. I suppose the very fact that it isn’t a native Kusaal word actually makes it a better choice to render the exotic concept “holy” in Kusaal than it is in Mampruli, where it retains its literal “clean” meaning too.
I just want the eventual dolphin-to-human translator to have a computer-generated voice that sounds like Darwin’s Vocorder on seaQuest.
Jerry, DE, everything is strange about this word.
1. I did not remember what it means in English. Meanwhile I’m an English reader and much, much, much better at reading than speaking or writing or listening.
And of course I have read the prayer in English many times (but this means nothign, because I know it in Russian).
2. the Russian word is not used outside of this prayer.
3. I can’t remember the IRISH word!!!!! Irish is the first foreign language I studied, the prayer was one of my first Irish texts, and given that I was not interested in religion I knew it much better than the Russian text.
I’m confident that I can’t remember this word because I’m trying to remember it:))) If you asked me what word is used for…. Yesssssss!!!! I remembered it.
I tried to imagine how I’m trying to remember some other word, and thought “go naofar d’ainm, …” instead of “go [????] d’ainm”.
@LH, I don’t understand your scepticism. “Nothing comparable to human language” can mean either
1. serious quantitative difference in complexity
2. quantitative difference so serious that you can think of it as qualitative
These two refer to same thing (e.g. human trade pidgins) but viewed differently.
3. qualitative difference so serious that you won’t call it a ‘language”.
1 and 2 are interesting, so I think you mean 3. I don’t understand how one can be “sure” about something like that.
Another very strange thing about this word is how I understood it when I first read it.
I thought it means: “actively occupied by being holy [or making itself holier]”.
(It is a reflexive verb with the root “holy”)
And do dolphins know what names are?
If what is stated for sperm whales is also true for dolphins, that they have different sets of clicks for different individuals, then they could have the concept.
Of course my first reading is a bit strange. It is God’s name, not God’s Word, why it will do anything?
Besides, while being a holy man (woman) IS logically an activity this is not how we speak of holy people. And also (agian, I’m talking of me from when I first read it) it is a quality for which we praise people, but what’s the point of praising holiness of God if “holy” is almost same as “God”? If he says it is holy, then it is holy.
Of course NOW I understand that believers have a human-centered concept: holy can also be what people treat so rather than as an objective property having objectively to do with God and almost synonymous with him. But I read it in USSR, where nothing is holy, and religion is some medieval thing still found among really, really backwards people somewhere in mountains and deserts. Which shifted “holy” towards “pertaining to religion”
When it comes to Islamic terms, “Straight Path” is bound to pose some translation difficulties underwater. (You might think “current”, but currents save you energy and paths don’t.) Let alone the “white road, as visible by night as by day, from which only the doomed turn aside” of Friday sermons…
Of course, humans trying to preach to dolphins would be pure cheek. The messengers were sent to humans, and maybe to jinn; any message God might wish to convey to other species would presumably be sent to one of their own, familiar with the experience of living in a finned body. But I digress.
I think if a very religious person (whether Muslim or Christian) meets an alien species who have either no idea of God, a different idea of God or same idea of God, she will (practically) be choosing her line of behaviour and of talking about God.
Ramadan fast is not a problem, of course, but factual statements (or knowledge) which are a part of the religion… Of course she will say to this alien that God is one. I don’t know whether this is preaching or not.
she will say to this alien that God is one
The big problem there is “God.” Without even getting into zooglossy, that is difficult to express in even a great many human cultures/languages.
Kusaal Wina’am “God-with-a-Capital-G” is a loanword from Mooré, and etymologically it means not “chief god” as is usually claimed, but “godly chieftaincy.” A concretised abstract noun.
In greetings and proverbs, the Creator is called Win, but this is just win “spiritual identity”, a thing which human beings (and many other things) have, and the closest equivalent in SAE is “soul.” So probably, in origin, “Soul (sc. of Everything.)” To say “God is one” would then just be a tautology. As They Might Be Giants have taught us, There’s only one everything.
It’s always seemed likely to me that the “God” sense is due to Muslim influence, which goes a long way back in West Africa.
You don’t pray to Win in traditional culture. “(S)he prays” means “(s)he is a Muslim.”
You can call on local wina for help, though calling that “praying” is probably a subtle mistranslation. And the central “religious” activity is not “prayer” (in that sense) but casting lots for guidance, which is normal before any major decision. You need to consult a professional to do that for you, a ba’a. A ba’a is in no sense a priest. (The Bible translation, in its ecumenical way, uses the equivalent ba’akɔlʋg daan “owner of divinatory equipment” for “sorcerer.” It doesn’t mean that, either.)
Well, askign God for guidance is a prayer….
Of course it is difficult, I only mean that I’m not sure how much difference there is between “prozelytising” and “simply telling what you think about what”.
(there is also difference between “X” and “we[, Muslims, Christians…,] believe that X” and I’m not certain about it either)
The “hallowed be thy name” part of the Lord’s prayer is closely parallel to a repeated theme in the so-called “Mourner’s Kaddish” used by Jews, which may be an older text although the history is a bit underdocumented once you get back that far. There are lots of different English translations, but one typical one begins “Magnified and sanctified is the great name of God throughout the world.” But who is doing this magnifying and sanctification? Is it the humans saying the prayer? Why would God even need them to do that? I.e., the same set of mysteries.
Although some commenters note Ezekiel 38:23, in which God himself says (in the KJV wording) “Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the LORD.” It may be fair exegesis to read the Lord’s Prayer as similarly assuming the Father’s name to be self-hallowing, as it were.
But who is doing this magnifying and sanctification? Is it the humans saying the prayer? Why would God even need them to do that?
The same reason he wants people to believe in him, because he’s an attention hog?
Yes, plus angels.
It’s left over from before monotheism and the whole omnimax thing.
It made me wonder how the Western Oti-Volta translators coped with e.g. Ezekiel 39:7 “holy name”, given that “clean” for “holy” is a more startling metaphor when you’re talking about something more abstract than an object or person.
Kusaal goes with the usual Mampruli loanword, which seems fair enough, as the word has no other sense in Kusaal. Unfortunately, there isn’t a Mampruli version of Ezekiel to compare it with.
Mooré has mam yʋʋrã sẽn welg toorã “my name which is separated aside”, which is evidently a worthy attempt to convey the sense; you do wonder quite what a Mooré speaker who hadn’t already been instructed in the mysteries of Christianity would make of it, though. (I suppose the answer is that they wouldn’t actually be reading Ezekiel at all.)
I wonder if versions of the Lord’s Prayer in languages with a more elaborate set of explicitly-marked verbal moods than English has would yield exegetical insight (or at least insight into the translator’s interpretation). In the Greek, the “hallowed be” verb (ἁγιασθήτω), as well as the next few after it, are in the imperative mood, but in third person. As an explanation of non-Scriptural Greek (Euclid’s Elements, as it happens) puts it, while we think of the imperative as involving demands/commands, “The third person imperative is quite different. It is a statement that something should exist, or an action should be taken.” Even with a “should” as mild as “Let there be an isosceles triangle,” which is not necessarily fully parallel to “Let there be light.” So on that account the utterers of the LP are certainly in favor of the name being hallowed, but are not necessarily committing to do it themselves.
Classical Latin actually had a 3rd-person imperative, but used it very sparingly. The Vulgate goes for the passive subjunctive: sanctificetur. As soon as sanctus has its Christian meaning, the German translation werde geheiligt is accurate.
Literary Welsh has a 3rd person imperative too: Deled dy deyrnas “Thy kingdom come.” There isn’t an impersonal (kinda “passive”, but not really) imperative, though, so you get the subjunctive instead in Sancteiddier dy enw “Hallowed be thy name.” (All this is long since lost from Welsh as She is Actually Spoke.)
So how would you say it in WSAS?
What I don’t know, especially with the rustiness of my never-that-advanced command of Greek, is whether it’s Obviously Significant that the Greek uses the third-person imperative rather than e.g. the so-called volitive optative, or if there’s enough semantic overlap between various available constructions that this is a situation where the choice of one rather than another doesn’t tell you all that much about the meaning.
The same reason he wants people to believe in him, because he’s an attention hog?
Maybe he needs to be. The explication of Racine’s version of Esther’s prayer that Hat linked in his COD post says that God needs attention to exist: le rapport Dieu/créature est inversé et cf. la théologie juive ou les psaumes : c’est le peuple élu qui est utile à Dieu pour le faire exister.
Do Jewish theology and the psalms really say that (Edit: or am I misunderstanding “cf”)? Wouldn’t Racine have gotten into trouble for putting that idea into his heroine’s mouth?
By the way, one can also give a psychological or propagandistic explanation of why people should praise and thank God and magnify and hallow his name all the time: That encourages the proper frame of mind toward the Creator and Judge.
Apparently some people (both contemporaneously and since) have interpreted Racine’s retelling of the Esther narrative as an allegory with intended political relevance suggesting that perhaps the local Ahasuerus (Louis XIV) should stop persecuting whoever the Jews supposedly represented (the Huguenots, the Jansenists, or both). The persecution did not stop, but Racine did not personally get in trouble, so make of that what you will.
So how would you say it in WSAS?
The Rocky Horror Beibl.net version has
dŷn ni eisiau i dy enw di gael ei anrhydeddu.
“we want your name to get honoured”
which is certainly demotic enough to be going on with.
Even the Beibl Cymraeg Newydd Diwygiedig “Revised New Welsh Bible” of 2004 still has sancteiddier dy enw, though you can understand a reluctance to tamper with such a familiar text. The 2004 version is usually a bit more hip and happening than that.
(It just occurred to me that the rather odd construction of the corresponding passage in the 2016 Kusaal version probably reflects the 1976 version’s syntax for indirect speech, which spoken Kusaal uses much more extensively than English does. Indirect speech was almost totally replaced by direct quotation already in the 1996 version, but again, this passage was presumably too familiar to mess with.)
c’est le peuple élu qui est utile à Dieu pour le faire exister
Not in any kind of mainstream Christian, Jewish or Muslim theology …
(The orthodox Christian position is that God did not even need to create the universe, much less worshippers.)
The idea is quite popular in certain circles, mind:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodsNeedPrayerBadly
Mind you, in Numbers 14, when God tells Moses he’s going to wipe out the Israelites and pick better Chosen People, Moses points out that the optics of this would be suboptimal:
Possibly this sort of thing is what the learned commentator had in mind.
Thanks for confirming what I suspected about theology.
That TVTropes page corroborates my vague suspicion that Lord Dunsany was an early user, if not the inventor, of the idea that gods need worshippers.
There’s a big difference between saying that failing to save the Jews would be bad for God’s reputation and saying it would end his existence. I understand Racine’s Esther to be saying the former, but the learned commentator is quite clear that he means the latter.
nous sommes les seuls à te célébrer (sous-entendu : donc si tu veux exister, sauve-nous)
Incidentally, that’s a bit dissonant with Esther’s line, Et confonds tous ces dieux qui ne furent jamais. Those gods never were, though people believed in them.
Maybe he’s read too much Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman. No, let me rephrase that: Maybe he’s been taking them too seriously.
Yeah, I’m not sure that commentator is as learned as might be hoped.
@ JW Brewer,
…the third person imperative is quite different. It is a statement that something should exist, or an action should be taken…
Thanks for this; it answers a question I didn’t know how to formulate. I posted here once about the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnstile_%28symbol%29
which seems to fit this context.
@JF:
Yes, I think you’re right: the reputational side is what Esther (and Racine) has in mind, while the commentator … erm … perhaps needs to read up on the background a bit. (I think that if the Jansenists had held the view that God’s existence was contingent on that of his worshippers, the Jansenists’ many enemies would probably have mentioned it.)
Noticed a nice touch in the Kusaal version of the Numbers 14 passage:
linzug ka o gʋ’ʋŋi kʋʋ ba mɔɔgin.
therefore and he fail.LINKER kill them grass.at
[Because the Lord wasn’t to bring this people into the land which he swore to them] “therefore he failingly killed them in the bush.”
Gʋ’ʋŋ “fail” seems to be entirely the translators’ addition.
(Looking at the Hebrew, I see that Moses actually says “and slaughtered them” (with שׁחט.) He is not cool with this …)
This is as good a demonstration as any of the verb šḥṭ expanding its semantics from ‘killing an animal’ (for food or other use), or else similarly killing a person with a sharp weapon, to a plural verb, ‘killing a multitude’ (typically of people); in 14:12, a few verses up, God proposes killing everyone by striking them with a plague, no weapons involved (for paying no heed to His neat miracles. To which Moses successfully argues that it would make Him look like a sore loser, and what will the neighbors say?)
The collective plural meaning is also reflected in 14:15, ‘and you would put to death this people as one man’ (with hēmattâ, causative of mwt ‘die’).
@DE: Looking up a Jewish translation, I went to sefaria.org and found the one I’d seen before that takes the interesting approach of leaving a number of words in Ashkenazic transliteration. For instance, Numbers 1.54–55 is
At 14.17 it uses “slaughtered”. I don’t know anywhere near as much Hebrew as you, but I know enough to approve.
More conventional translations are also available at sefaria.org.
“therefore he failingly killed them in the bush.”
I suppose that would be an epic fail, or rather a scripture fail.
@Hans: If what is stated for sperm whales is also true for dolphins, that they have different sets of clicks for different individuals, then they could have the concept.
Thanks, I should have noticed that.
@DE: The previous clause is “…because He failed to bring the people…” could the Kusaal ‘fail’ verb have somehow have leaked into the “therefore” clause?
@Y:
Kusaal has kɔdig “slaughter one” versus kɔt “slaughter many”, but it’s the mode of dispatch rather than species of the victim that it refers to: specifically “kill by cutting the throat.” The root is presumably cognate with that of kʋkɔr “voice” and of Mooré kòɛɛgá “voice”, and kòkórè “throat”, which goes all the way back to proto-Volta-Congo (proto-Bantu *-kòdò “throat/voice.”)
Kusaal kɔdig/kɔt “slaughter” is derived (historically) with the “separative-reversive” suffix, which goes back to proto-VC too. So “dethroat”, “unthroat.” Lovely …
Some languages have a small set of verbs with verbal number, i.e. distinct verbal roots according to the number of the argument. (This is not super common, but more so e.g. in West Africa and North America.) When they do, the set of such verbs invariably includes ‘die’ and/or ‘kill’. English ‘kill’/’massacre’ is somewhat like that, but the use of the latter is governed by pragmatics, whereas in other languages the choice is strictly a matter of number agreement.
‘Walk’/’run’ etc. verbs are almost as universal that way, cf. English ‘stampede’.
To me, this is a truly mysterious language universal. Why should ‘die’/’kill’ be the first to get this special status, again and again, in many independent languages all over the world?
“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic”?
could the Kusaal ‘fail’ verb have somehow have leaked into the “therefore” clause?
No, but in a way, yes.
Gʋ’ʋŋ is one of a number of verbs in Kusaal which is commonly used idiomatically in what are traditionally called “serial verb constructions”, which is what the LINKER gloss is about. (They actually aren’t SVCs in Kusaal, but there are a lot of parallels.) So e.g.
Ka ba mak ye ba lɛbis o gʋ’ʋŋ.
and they measure that they answer him.LINKER fail
“They tried in vain to answer him.”
So gʋ’ʋŋ actually has an established quasi-grammatical role as a sort of correlative particle in a clause following a clause which describes trying to do something that turns out not to work: that makes it natural for a Kusaal speaker to insert it here.
The preceding part in Kusaal goes
Zugsɔb la pʋ nyaŋi mɔr nidib la keŋ teŋ kanɛ ka o kaanb ka pɔ ye o na mɔri ba keŋ la
Lord the not succeed.LINKER have people the.LINKER go land which and he promise and swear that he IRREALIS have.LINKER them.LINKER go the
“The Lord did not succeed in bringing the people to the land that he had promised on oath that he would bring them to”
So the pʋ nyaŋ “did not succeed” has kinda induced the gʋ’ʋŋ in the next clause, which is a thing that happens in Kusaal.
Incidentally, all those LINKER glosses represent a real particle, even when you can’t actually see anything in the text: it has interesting sandhi behaviour …
DE: I don’t doubt you, but still I will say that it’s impossible for a language to do this.
Some languages have a small set of verbs with verbal number, i.e. distinct verbal roots according to the number of the argument. (This is not super common, but more so e.g. in West Africa and North America.) When they do, the set of such verbs invariably includes ‘die’ and/or ‘kill’.
Actually, no …
(You said “invariably” in a linguistic context! What were you thinking?)
Kusaal has quite a few pairs like this, but not huge numbers. Mooré has dozens, but they don’t include a pair for either “die” or “kill.”
I have to concede that this is not actually productive in Western Oti-Volta: no form of verb derivation by suffixes is, although there are so many sets of verbs related by derivational suffixes that it looks certain that it was productive in proto-Oti-Volta. The system has been screwed up in WOV by the fact that regular historical sound changes have led to at least one inherited derivational suffix ending up with a zero reflex.
In Nawdm, on the other hand, the pluractional/monactional distinction pervades the whole verb system. Almost all underived root-stem verbs are pluractional, but “die” is (unsurprisingly) an exception, and is monactional. However, it does have a pluractional derivative.
(“Pluractional” here is a bit of a shorthand: it can mean, more than one subject, more than one object, or more than one action: with transitive verbs it usually means more than one object. All the Oti-Volta languages for which I have adequate data make this distnction, but it’s most rigorously applied in Nawdm. Underived verbs usually default to pluractional, and that seems to have been how it was in POV, but again, the system seems to have been disrupted by the fact that the usual monactional suffix ended up with zero reflexes by regular sound changes in most OV branches.)
If what is stated for sperm whales is also true for dolphins, that they have different sets of clicks for different individuals, then they could have the concept.
By serendipity, I received a WWF newsletter today from which I learnt that orcas a) also distinguish individuals by different signals and b) are technically dolphins.
still I will say that it’s impossible for a language to do this
Which is it of the six impossible things I was describing that you doubt?
(Oh, the instance of LINKER in “have.LINKER them” was spurious. Got carried away there …)
You said “invariably” in a linguistic context! What were you thinking?
That was literary “invariably”. If I wanted to be all scientifical I would have said “unexceptionally”…
Which is it of the six impossible things I was describing that you doubt?
That the verb wanders off from the main clause into the secondary clause. If it were Latin, where everything is scrambled to utter opaqueness, it would be a little easier to take.
I don’t doubt it, I’m just saying it’s impossible. Like the proverbial provincial who sees a giraffe for the first time.
Gʋ’ʋŋ is not really a refugee from the first clause: it just reflects the air of failure arising from the frustration of the main-clause verb casting its own sense of futility over the second clause.
Verbs in serial-verb constructions often end up with what from a SAE POV are “adverbial” meanings (as I say, Kusaal doesn’t have echt SVCs, but this construction often functions in a very similar way.)
Mak ye … gʋ’ʋŋ “measure in.order.that … LINKER fail” is actually the usual way to say “try in vain to …” in Kusaal.
Or my sister when I played dlala to her.