We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it. The ocean is basically a noisy internet with their calls like alien packets that are mixed with a complex natural langue. Elephants have a similar thing. They make long sub-bass vocalizations that they can feel for miles with their feet.
As far as I know, prarie dog [0] is the closest we've come to a rosetta stone for another species. We can translate things like "brown fox north" and such.
>We know a lot about the language of large ocean mammals but it's just not as one to one with how we would translate it.
Well, not exactly.In fact, we still know surprisingly little. For the humpback song, one of the most studied topics up to date, there is still a major disagreement if it is a reproductive display or something else.Humpbacks make tons of other sounds as well, those have not been studied as much as their songs. For bottlenose dolphins, the most studied species, we sort of know the function of the signature whistles (again, not everyone agrees), but know very little about the function/meaning of other whistles and other sounds like burst pulses or LFNs.Echolocation has been studied a lot, still, we do not know if it is used in communication in any way.
Sorry, that was a bit unclear. I meant that we have studied a lot but that doesn't scratch the surface of whats there. So much distance, such a wide range of movement, and hidden social activity that while we can listen its hard to see the environmental context to decode it.
They can communicate with us pretty ok. Notorious acid head government contract grifter John Lilly's assistant [0] got a young male dolphin to screech count all the way up to six (i think) in english in exchange for erotic massage.
It's crazy to think about, but to have the sort of view of dolphins that we have of a prairie dog town we are gonna need some way better tools if it's even possible. If I could share a language with one or many dolphins I don't even know what I'd tell them that they'd care about.
Oh, yes, Dr. Lilly and his NASA funded study. All acid, sex and other things aside, some of the stuff he did was indeed interesting, if only to get to know dolphins in a way impossible in the wild. There was one NPR interview with Margaret some time ago, she mentioned that Peter (the dolphin she worked with) was absolutely captivated by her knees. He would echolocate on them and investigate them constantly. If you think about it, dolphins must know each other's anatomy pretty well due to their echolocation abilities. So a human knee (having no analog anywhere in a dolphin's body) was the constant focus of Peter's interest. But wild dolphins do not seem to be captivated by human knees, so this difference in their motivation is very interesting. In fact, the question about curiosity and motivation to communicate is a important one, even if we do a playback and use all correct sequences, if the dolphin is not motivated to reply in any way, the experiment will fail and we will never know why.
As far as I know, prarie dog [0] is the closest we've come to a rosetta stone for another species. We can translate things like "brown fox north" and such.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discov...