First thought: yay, now that’s the future in translation I want to branch out into!
Then again, I never could be arsed to learn the human phonetic alphabet.
Another thing I’m wondering about, and ultimately it’s the same with human languages: there is a risk of losing a lot of information if we focus on sound alone. There’s rich information for example in the skin color and feather display from birds - I imagine it to be as detailed and information-rich as the sounds they produce at same time, and ultimately just making sense in combination.
Yeah, sound is definitely not the whole story. I was just reading this paper on Combinatoriality and Compositionality, and they talk some about the importance of multimodal data when studying communication.
Multimodal communication in humans can take on the form of co-verbal gesturing, where spoken utterances are combined with movements of the arms and hands (Morgenstern, 2014). In apes, multimodal communication can include the co-occurrence of distinct facial expressions with manual gestures, such as variants of the reach gesture (Oña et al., 2019), the integration of visual and acoustic features in behaviors, such as lip-smacking (Micheletta et al., 2013), or the combination of social calls with different gestures (Genty et al., 2014). Bird song also can show variability in call combinations (Suzuki et al., 2019). For instance, bird songs often combine with coordinated visual displays whose performance can affect listener response (Girard-Buttoz et al., 2020; Williams, 2004). In all cases, the meaning of the units combined varies depending on how they are joined into larger aggregates, as well as how they are used in differential sociocultural settings.
First thought: yay, now that’s the future in translation I want to branch out into!
Then again, I never could be arsed to learn the human phonetic alphabet.
Another thing I’m wondering about, and ultimately it’s the same with human languages: there is a risk of losing a lot of information if we focus on sound alone. There’s rich information for example in the skin color and feather display from birds - I imagine it to be as detailed and information-rich as the sounds they produce at same time, and ultimately just making sense in combination.
Yeah, sound is definitely not the whole story. I was just reading this paper on Combinatoriality and Compositionality, and they talk some about the importance of multimodal data when studying communication.