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@begusgasper

New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels. The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them. We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels. Like in Slovenian, some vowels prefer particular tones. Like in human language, there’s a lot of coarticulation (a process when you say “tense” but the word sounds like “tents”). Observing vowels in whales is a matter of timing. Our vowels are fast, whale vowels are slow. Beats become pitch if they’re fast enough. If you slow down human vowels, they start sounding like whale clicks. Applying linguistic tools to whales shows us that we’re much more similar to these wonderful ocean creatures than we previously believed and that their language is much more complex and structured. @projectCETI @UCBerkeley

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