A research team led by Klaus Zuberbühler of the University of St. Andrews has been studying the calls of the Campbell's monkey, a primate found in the Ivory Coast. The team looked at how the calls of adult male monkeys vary in response to various stimuli. Campbell's monkeys have six different types of individual calls, each of which has a distinct meaning. What's surprising, however, is that these monkeys actually string together multiple types of calls to create communications with entirely new meanings. Zuberbühler and his team claim this is a form of syntax, suggesting that Campbell's monkeys have developed a sort of sentence structure. Other primates, such as chimpanzees, have shown an understanding of language, able to connect words and symbols with specific meanings, but haven't been able to combine those words into sentences.

The team has identified the meanings of the individual calls, as well as how they can be combined to form completely different communications:

The "boom-boom" call invites other monkeys to come toward the male making the sound. Two booms can be combined with a series of "krak-oos," with a meaning entirely different to that of either of its components. "Boom boom krak-oo krak-oo krak-oo" is the monkey's version of "Timber!" - it warns of falling trees.

Combining the "boom-booms" and "krak-oos" with a third sound, "hok-oo," warns monkeys of the presence of other monkey groups. It appears that initially, the monkeys developed the calls to warn each other of specific predators, such as leopards and eagles, but their anti-predator vocabulary has evolved into something much more sophisticated.

Boom! Hok! A Monkey Language Is Deciphered [NY Times]

[via Topless Robot]

As part of his worldbuilding for Avatar, James Cameron sought to create an actual language for the Na'vi to speak on screen. So he tapped Paul Frommer, a Hollywood linguistic consultant and a professor of clinical management at the University of California's Marshall School of Business. Cameron has a few dozen Na'vi words including characters' names, and he looked to Frommer to build a language that was melodious and exotic, but still pronounceable by human actors.

Frommer developed syntactical rules for Na'vi as well roughly 1000 words between the movie and the video game. He limited the syllables spoken by the Na'vi in order to shape the language, and added ejectives, voiceless consonants that occur in a minority of the world's spoken languages. Of course, there were limits on what Frommer could bring to the language:

"The constraint, of course, is that the language I created had to be spoken by humans," Frommer said. "I could have let my imagination run wild and come up with all sorts of weird sounds, but I was limited by what a human actor could actually do."

Like Klingon, Na'vi could be learned and spoken, and Frommer hopes Avatar fans will take to the musical Na'vi the way Star Trek fans have learned the more gutteral Klingon. He says that information about the language will be made available online, and he's looking forward to the day when he can converse with another human being in Na'vi.

It may be too early to start translating Hamlet into the language of Pandora's blue aliens, but it's fascinating to read about Frommer's process and the detail that went into creating Na'vi.

USC professor creates an entire alien language for 'Avatar' [Hero Complex]

The term grew out of futurism and science fiction that dealt with what humanity would look like in a world of cyborg implants and rampant biological engineering. In many ways cyberpunk told some of the first post human stories, with its plug heads and neuro-enhanced fighters.

What Anissimov found was that the term entered into people's searches just about three years ago, and then began showing up in news stories roughly one and a half years ago. Science fiction fans and futurists, however, have been using this term for over a decade. Most likely we're seeing a rise in the use of his term in mainstream media because biotechnology is catching up to science fiction. People really are turning into cyborgs, with smart implants – and we even have the technology to tissue engineer new organs for ourselves.

So it's no wonder that transhumanism has emerged from science fiction into everyday speech.

Via Accelerating Future

Researchers study apes living at the Trust to learn more about their intellect, behavior, and capacity for communication. Bonobo siblings Panbanisha and Kanzi have a rather advanced capacity for language, able to understand human speech, comprehend abstract concepts, and communicate with humans through a lexigram keyboard. Apes are given the choice as to whether to participate in activities like painting, but the researchers have found that the apes perceive the experience as fulfilling, allowing them to convey thoughts, senses, and memories without the limitations of verbal language.

“The apes’ daily lives are enriched immeasurably by these creative opportunities,” [project overseer Peter] Clay said. “Choosing canvases and colors, and choosing to make small, careful marks or big dramatic ones, these are all within their control.

In the Apes Helping Apes project, the Trust sells the apes’ painting, some created in collaboration with artist Sue Buck, to support ape conservation in the wild. The above painting by Panbanisha is currently up for auction online.

[Great Ape Trust via New Scientist]

Conlangers include everyone from Marc Okrand, the linguist who wrote Klingon, to the nerds who invented the most perfectly logical language in the world, known as Lojban. Anthony Burgess invented a little conlang for his characters in Clockwork Orange, and Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy is all about a group of rebel women linguists who create their own language to subvert their ultra-sexist society. Sometimes Hollywood employs conlangers to make alien talk seem more realistic, and sometimes conlangers wind up going into computer programming, where they can invent computer languages to their heart's content. Larry Wall, inventor of scripting language Perl, is a conlanger, for example. And nobody who has ever used Perl will be surprised to hear that. Chart via Bartleby.

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