A great example is the best animal: THE DOGGO
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Comment on Non-language-using animals must think humans are the worst songbirds ever.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Animals are generally good at understanding that not everyone is them.
A great example is the best animal: The House Cat. Cats are pretty famous for catering their sounds to different targets. Mom not paying attention? Squeaky cry. Something needs to be taught who the big err… cat is? Growl. Content and happy? Purr.
Need something from a human? Meow. Because they understand that humans don’t understand purrs and body language to the same degree.
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 months ago
redisdead@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m pretty sure most humans understand what purring and growling means
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Animals are good at interpreting other animals’ nonverbal cues, and can often pick up a human’s general intentions without understanding their speech. But the speech itself probably seems like a bad attempt to create an accompanying musical score.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Again, cats aren’t singing. They understand it is just a different (much less efficient and much more danger prone) method of communication.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 2 months ago
When cats meow, there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the aural qualities of the sound and the communicative intent of the cat—the same meow doesn’t have different meanings depending on the preceding and following meows. That’s how animals normally use sound to communicate.
There are two common exceptions, where animals string arbitrary sounds together in longer sequences in which the individual components don’t have separate meanings in the way animals usually interpret them: songbirds and humans.
dubyakay@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I miss the old world so much. There was a blackbird couple nesting in our apartment building’s courtyard. Every morning it’s a cacophony of the most beautiful and randomly iterated melodies. I loved waking up and snoozing in to it at 5am.