Their linguistic prowess is limited but hilarious.
My bird knows probably a dozen or more human vocalizations and their rough usage. He has maracas that he likes to fiddle with and sometimes he will tap it against his head, which makes it rattle, and he will say “stahp eht”(stop it). He has a hatred of things that rattle or jingle and he loves to destroy things to make them stop. He is trying to tell the maracas to stop making noise that he causes. He will approach a toy that rattles and will say “stahp eht”, and then pick it up or knock it about as if telling it to not make noise will make it not make noise; entirely absent is the concept that he is causing it to make noise.
It is quite funny to be told by a 63g bird to “shaddap” when the TV is too loud for him to sleep in his covered cage at night.
I do wish he would use “bed tyme” more appropriately for when he wants to be put to bed and not just whenever he wants to take one of his 6-10 naps a day. Close enough for an Amazonian Hitler pigeon with a final solution to the rattle and jingle question, I guess.
That is so adorable, I want to hear him say “stahp eht” so badly, lol.
He unfortunately is paranoid, skittish, and believes a phone can steal his soul; so recording him doing cute stuff is nigh impossible. If I can catch him in the act and remember, you’ll get delivery.
neigh impossible
Bird is horse?
Words are hard man.
So are commas, apparently.
All of grammar, and punctuation really; it would be easier if I wasnt so Stoopid?
This reminds me of when I was in college and was undiagnosed Bipolar disorder, and my roommate was undiagnosed OCD. I was up and bopping at 3 am and decided to help my OCD roommate with the dishes since he was up and bopping but for very different reasons. I was drying a dish when our third, neurotypical, roommate came out to ask us to stop since we were being loud.
I looked at the dish I was washing and shushed it and told it to be nicer to my roommate.
IMO, this is one of the better arguments for parrots having some of the most human-like intelligence in the animal world outside of primates. Having had both toddlers and parrots, they do exhibit a lot of similarities in behavior patterns, and I could swear my kids have done exactly what this person describes their bird doing.
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Some of the people who study Dolphins think that they might actually have a language that can be learned.
It doesn’t seem to be a “might” but a “probably definitely”. Couldn’t find the link right now but one of the few actually uses of AI that I’ve seen was to map out animal languages (specifically dolphins and other cetaceans) to develop a translator, Something something if you throw different (human) languages at a space and then dimension reduce it you get quite similar structures even though the languages are vastly different on the surface, and things like dolphins apparently aren’t that far off and definitely not less complex.
Or, put differently: Yes, they’re actually building a universal translator based on the assumption that because language-capable beings end up speaking roughly similar things you get structural overlaps if you have a sufficiently abstract representation of language (such as a neural net that learned to distinguish it from other stuff).
Aside from that it’s been known for a longer time that dolphins are capable of relating complex information to another, e.g. you put one in one pool, the other in another, they can hear but not see another, and they can coordinate pressing buttons in one pool to get at fish in the other.
Also dolphins can recognise that a human gal is afraid of their teeth, disarm themselves with a tennis ball, and thus succeed in their task to get a handjob. That was part of Lilly’s programme to teach dolphins English (they really struggle with consonants) which is a book honestly everyone should have read. Don’t ask me which book in particular involves an injured dolphin co-habituating with the experimenter (aforementioned gal).
and thus succeed in their task to get a handjob
That’s hella cool. I remember talk as far back as the 90s that dolphins might actually have a meaningful language, but I thought those hypotheses just ran into dead ends.
A lot of research like thay runs into dead ends. I think the issue is that their vocalisations are in such a broad range. But the study that I got the coles notes version indicated that dolphins may have named the researchers.
Exactly what I was thinking when I posted this!
“I’m a naughty boy”
My mom had an African grey that would bark like the dog then yell at itself for barking.
It also liked to beep like the answering machine.
We have friends who had an African Grey, and that bird had an insane range of sounds and phrases, etc that she would mimic. Not just repeating words and phrases but impersonating the voice of whomever would say it to her. Like the AOL “You’ve got mail” voice when she’d hear the modem sounds. If we were smoking weed, the bird was having a coughing fit and dinging a pipe on an ashtray. If we were laughing and talking, the bird was over there laughing it’s ass off too. From calling the dogs, to having one-sided phone conversations, to setting off a car alarm whenever anyone would leave, her repertoire was seemingly endless. And then there was the smoke alarm. She liked to pull that one out if she wanted attention, and it would split your eardrums…
its always funny to me that a perfect imitation of a sound, is often more eerie than someone simply repeating it.
To my understanding, birds don’t understand english, they understand noises, and have the capability to replicate a lot of noises. So what happens is they often just replicate words and phrases, as if it was a noise. But due to human psychology, that shit weirds us out more than you would think it should.
if i wasn’t such a fucking isolated person by nature i would totally fuck with having birds as pets.
Goofy ass motherfuckers.
It’s a three year old that stays that way for 50 years
yes which is why i find it fucking hilarious. But also the reason i will never have a bird lmao.
My old roommate had a budgie called Bobby. We lived in a shitty flat near a junction that led out of town so a lot of police cars and ambulances went past. Bobby fairly quickly started imitating the siren sounds with his whistles.
Completely unrelated, my favorite moment in learning non-American English expressions was discovering that an international version of “banana hammock” is “budgie pocket”
Or “budgie smugglers” here in the UK.
Yes, that’s another! Love it
My new veterinarian has an office parrot and it replicates a smoke alarm perfectly.
