The Human Ape, PrimatePoetic Pulp reviewed

- Posted: 05.Aug.2008.










Surely there are many unnoticed, long out-of-print books that deserve attention, a few extra readers and perhaps even a reprint. John Goelet's 'The Human Ape', a grubby paperback published by Tandem in London in 1977, is not one of those hidden treasures. It is a piece of disposable pulp that as far as its literary value is concerned is worth every stain of mold that has infested my copy. However, it has one saving grace, it is the only novel that I am aware of that explicitly deals with the great ape language project. This is the autobiographical story of gorilla Oh, who was transported from the mountains of Uganda to a research facility in the United States. Here, in the capable hands of science, he was taught English, or rather American Sign Language (ASL), by the brilliant but impotent, melancholic and alcoholic linguist Liedlich. And with what great success! Oh loves language, because he knows that the gorilla-as-he-is lives a barbarous life and is doomed to go extinct. Oh prides himself on the eloquence and speed with which he signs, or rather 'hand-dances' while the 'gobbledegook' of human speech remains an enigma to him. To his credit Oh is aware of the great responsibility part of language ability, the need to be truthful to the spirit of language, to do justice to the possibility of language to be communicate precisely and honestly. In his heart Oh wants to become a human; he even shaves himself. Unfortunately even his human friends, who taught him everything he knew, in the end regard him as a freak and not as a sentient being. At every point Oh is lied to, about the small things and about the large things of the human condition. In the end, when Liedlich's research project has gone to the dogs, Oh is remorselessly shipped to the San Diego Zoo. Like any other uncultivated beast.

Who is John Goelet? The internet does not seem to know this particular Goelet and it seems likely that it is a pseudonym for some hack author churning out a book every fortnight. It certainly reads like something written in a 72-hour stretch. The arch enemy of Liedlich is another linguist named Sandground, the proponent of the theory of Genesis Grammar. This is a thin disguise for Noam Chomsky's theory of generative grammar, the book even includes a nifty Chomskian tree-structure on page 7. Sandground resembles Chomsky in other ways as well. Liedlich's theory excludes on principle every non-human mind from language, as Chomsky's theory does. The talking ape Oh is of course defying this theory with his signing ability and this proves the driving force behind the novel's plot. Sandground wants to assassinate Oh. The most likely model for Oh is Koko, a gorilla trained by Francine Patterson at Stanford since the early 1970ties. Both the language achievements of Koko and the Chomskian contra-analysis could be found spelled out on the pages of popular science magazines at that time and I suspect that Goelet found his (or hers) inspiration there. But, though not able to link the other characters to real people, I cannot exclude the possibility that they actually are modeled from real life. Goelet might be the deep throat of ape-language research. This would hinge on the identification of Nancy Liedlich, Pansy Hacker and Sam Reech to existing persons close to animal language research. Nancy is the ambitious younger wife of Liedlich who spends most time with Koko. Pansy is the promiscuous niece of the director of the University hosting Liedlich's project and who has sexual fantasies about Macro, Oh's father, because he is so wild. Oh does not attract her because he is too human. Reech is the deaf-mute keeper of Oh who hates language because as a veteran from the Vietnam war he knows that language can only tell lies. Reech, who therefore has personal reasons to dislike Oh, introduces him to marijuana, causing Oh to screw up an important language test with dramatic results. Reech also, in the final pages, turns out to be a saboteur working for Sandground: poisoning Macro, attacking Pansy because she knows too much, causing havoc in an ape suit. The ape suit, incidentally, was a leftover of Liedlich's previous (failed) Edgar-project in which a chimpanzee, named Edgar, was raised by people wearing chimp-suits; consider the thought. At the end Reech tricks naive and goodhearted Oh into the hands of Sandground and his cronies, who then try to drown Oh by puncturing his boat. This attempt fails miserably, which shows that you should never trust even the simplest practical task to a theoretician. Reech gets paid for his service, which makes him the Judas of PrimatePoetics. At the end Liedlich, emotionally brought to his knees, claims on television that the entire Oh project is a hoax and the ape never mastered one word. I am not sure why and quite frankly I stopped caring at that point. The Human Ape is not all fun to read. The story is badly executed and moves from contrivance to contrivance, the language is dull, the inner life of Oh is dull and apart from a few pulpy details, this book is noteworthy only for its subject.

Many thanks for Nick to bringing this book to our table.

Pirahă Poetics

- Posted: 01.Aug.2008.




Jerome Rothenberg in a recent blog-entry writes that:

"Alongside the official ideologies that shoved European man to the apex of the human pyramid, there were some artists & thinkers who found ways of doing & knowing among other peoples as complex as any in Europe & often virtually erased from European consciousness. As the nineteenth century progressed, cultures described as “primitive” & “savage” – a stage below “barbarian” – were simultaneously the models for political & social experiments, religious & visionary revivals, & forms of art & poetry so different from European norms as to seem revolutionary from a later Western perspective. "

Which is spot on! And with this in mind it is interesting to dive into Pirahă, a Amazonian language that of all the languages known may be called primitive, it has for instance only 3 vowels and 8 consonants. Which is not to say that it is spoken by primitive people! Dan Everett, the most prominent Pirahă researcher, and others, think that Pirahă offers a smashing counter-example to universal grammer, and this in turn is of interest to PrimatePoetics: the Pirahăs are fully capable of language cognitively but they never developed it. Here is a PDF with a good acedemic interview with Everett.

Photographer to the Stars

- Posted: 31.Jul.2008.




Susan Kuklin was the in-home photographer to Nim Chimpsky. Above: Nim learning to sign "Nim."

Another assignment changed my professional life. Columbia University professor Herbert Terrace invited me to photograph his study that asked the question: can a chimpanzee learn language? Nim Chimpsky was one very smart chimpanzee. Using American sign language, Nim was able to "say" about 300 words. He lived in a mansion with a group of graduate students, and he traveled in a BMW to his very own classroom at the university. What a guy!
Before working with the chimp, Professor Terrace asked me to learn about fifty signs so that Nim wouldn't think I was a dummy.

The Gibbon can keep a Beat.

- Posted: 18.Jul.2008.




Thomas Geissmann, "Gibbon Song and Human Music from an Evolutionary Perspective". (PDF-link) I think I mentioned this earlier but this fascinating bit I missed. The image is by Antonio Baratti.

There is an interesting report on pulse-keeping behavior in a female whitehanded gibbon (H. lar). This zoo animal was observed to follow the beats of a metronome with its short calls as long as the speed remained within the limits of 60 to 122 (the authors probably referred to beats per minute). Outside of these tolerance limits, the animal produced short notes at a rhythm of approximately 112. The gibbon's response was best at a metronome tempo of 60, and not when presented with its own normal speed of 112. The relevance of this observation is difficult to assess. The authors provided no sonagrams of the vocalizations, but the description may refer to a form of contact call rather than a song vocalization.

What fitness advantage is there to add a steady beat to a song vocalization? The beat may help larger social groups to participate in a song, to coordinate it. A well-coordinated song may be a more effective display than a cacophony of voices, and other social groups are less likely to attack or threaten well coordinated groups. In addition, introduction of a steady beat may make it easier to assess a group's cohesiveness and therefore its strength based on the group display.

The main message of this chapter is that loud calls in modern apes and music in modern humans are derived from a common ancestral form of loud call. If this interpretation is correct, early hominid music may also have served functions resembling those of ape loud calls. Loud calls are believed to serve a variety of functions, including territorial advertisement; intergroup intimidation and spacing; announcing the precise locality of specific individuals, food sources, or danger; and strengthening intragroup cohesion.

The most widely distributed (albeit not universal) function, and probably the most likely function of early hominid music, is to display and possibly reinforce the unity of a social group toward other groups. In humans, this function is still evident today whenever groups of people, be they united by political, religious, age, or other factors, define themselves by their music. National hymns, military music, battle songs of fans and cheerleaders encouraging their favorite sports teams, or the strict musical preferences of youth gangs may serve as examples of this phenomenon, whose origin may go back to the very beginning of human evolution.

Ape Drumming

- Posted: 18.Jul.2008.


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W. Tecumseh Fitch,"The Evolution of Music in Comparative
Perspective" (PDF-link) has the following on ape singing (they can't) and music making (they are funky drummers):

Bimanual percussion on resonant objects (drumming) is a common, easily observed behavior in African great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas). Behaviors analogous to drumming or other instrumental music are quite rare in animals, the most prominent other examples being palm cockatoos (which use sticks to drum on hollow trees), many species of woodpecker (who seek out resonant trees for display drumming) or various desert rodent species who “drum” with their hind feet on the ground. Great ape drumming has been the topic of surprisingly little research and has been largely overlooked in recent discussions of the evolution of music. In gorillas, drumming behavior is prototypically seen in the agonistic displays of adult male silverbacks, where a vocal “hoo” display is commonly combined with bimanual beating on the chest (and the inflated vocal air sacs, increasing the resonance of drumming). However, gorilla drumming is also observed in females and young, often in a contagious, playful, and unstereotyped fashion, and young gorillas beat on many surfaces (including their bellies, the bodies of other gorillas, the floor, and on hollow objects). This more playful and creative context is much more suggestively similar to much of human music. In chimpanzees and bonobos, drumming is typically observed on resonant structures in the environment (rather than their own bodies), often as part of the climax of the male dominance display. Wild chimpanzees seek out particular tree buttresses and in zoo contexts sometimes discover and drum upon resonant structures (e.g., hollow walls). Finally, bonobos have a variety of clapping and drumming displays, and enculturated bonobos, such as the language-trained Kanzi, produce and apparently enjoy drumming on resonant objects bimanually in a highly coordinated fashion.

Although the discovery of tool use by wild chimpanzees generated an uproar, dethroning humans from their sole status of “toolmakers,” the existence of drumming in apes has remained largely unnoticed by musicologists. It has long been speculated that vocal and instrumental music have independent origins and evolutionary histories, and the sharp difference between ape drumming (with its similarities to human instrumental music) and ape vocal capabilities (which show no evidence of the vocal learning and control required for song) provide strong support for this hypothesis. In my opinion, ape drumming represents a striking parallel to human percussive behavior, and its appearance in our closest living relatives (but not, apparently, among orangutans or other primates) strongly suggests the possibility of an overlooked and important homology for human instrumental music making. Unfortunately, there has been little empirical research on great ape drumming, and we are currently unable to answer even very basic questions that would help evaluate this hypothesis. In particular, despite very questionable statements in the popular literature, it remains unclear whether apes can entrain their drumming to a regular, externally given beat. Vocally, gibbons may be able to entrain their calling to a metronome, and bonobos may entrain their group calling, but here too the data are inadequate at present.

Chase Kanzi

- Posted: 11.Jul.2008.


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From the National Geographic March 1992, the Ape issue. A full page about Kanzi and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

The Noisiest of Monkeys

- Posted: 10.Jul.2008.




Charles Darwin about our friend the funky gibbon in Descent of Man (1871). Notice the way it ends with a note about singing mice. Here surely darwin was wrong because they were never heard of again. Also: we now know that a gibbon is not a monkey.

CH 18: The voice of the adult male gorilla is tremendous, and he is furnished with a laryngeal sack, as is the adult male orang. The gibbons rank among the noisiest of monkeys, and the Sumatra species (Hylobates syndactylus) is also furnished with an air sack; but Mr. Blyth, who has had opportunities for observation, does not believe that the male is noisier than the female. Hence, these latter monkeys probably use their voices as a mutual call; and this is certainly the case with some quadrupeds, for instance the beaver. Another gibbon, the H. agilis, is remarkable, from having the power of giving a complete and correct octave of musical notes, which we may reasonably suspect serves as a sexual charm; but I shall have to recur to this subject in the next chapter. The vocal organs of the American Mycetes caraya are one-third larger in the male than in the female, and are wonderfully powerful. These monkeys in warm weather make the forests resound at morning and evening with their overwhelming voices. The males begin the dreadful concert, and often continue it during many hours, the females sometimes joining in with their less powerful voices. An excellent observer, Rengger, could not perceive that they were excited to begin by any special cause; he thinks that, like many birds, they delight in their own music, and try to excel each other. Whether most of the foregoing monkeys have acquired their powerful voices in order to beat their rivals and charm the females- or whether the vocal organs have been strengthened and enlarged through the inherited effects of long-continued use without any particular good being thus gained- I will not pretend to say; but the former view, at least in the case of the Hylobates agilis, seems the most probable.


CH 19: In the class of mammals, with which we are here more particularly concerned, the males of almost all the species use their voices during the breeding-season much more than at any other time; and some are absolutely mute excepting at this season. With other species both sexes, or only the females, use their voices as a love-call. Considering these facts, and that the vocal organs of some quadrupeds are much more largely developed in the male than in the female, either permanently or temporarily during the breeding-season; and considering that in most of the lower classes the sounds produced by the males, serve not only to call but to excite or allure the female, it is a surprising fact that we have not as yet any good evidence that these organs are used by male mammals to charm the females. The American Mycetes caraya perhaps forms an exception, as does the Hylobates agilis, an ape allied to man. This gibbon has an extremely loud but musical voice. Mr. Waterhouse states, "It appeared to me that in ascending and descending the scale, the intervals were always exactly half-tones; and I am sure that the highest note was the exact octave to the lowest. The quality of the notes is very musical; and I do not doubt that a good violinist would be able to give a correct idea of the gibbon's composition, excepting as regards its loudness." Mr. Waterhouse then gives the notes. Professor Owen, who is a musician, confirms the foregoing statement, and remarks, though erroneously, that this gibbon "alone of brute mammals may be said to sing." It appears to be much excited after its performance. Unfortunately, its habits have never been closely observed in a state of nature; but from the analogy of other animals, it is probable that it uses its musical powers more especially during the season of courtship.

This gibbon is not the only species in the genus which sings, for my son, Francis Darwin, attentively listened in the Zoological Gardens to H. leuciscus whilst singing a cadence of three notes, in true musical intervals and with a clear musical tone. It is a more surprising fact that certain rodents utter musical sounds. Singing mice have often been mentioned and exhibited, but imposture has commonly been suspected. We have, however, at last a clear account by a well-known observer, the Rev. S. Lockwood, of the musical powers of an American species, the Hesperomys cognatus, belonging to a genus distinct from that of the English mouse. This little animal was kept in confinement, and the performance was repeatedly heard. In one of the two chief songs, "the last bar would frequently be prolonged to two or three; and she would sometimes change from C sharp and D, to C natural and D, then warble on these two notes awhile, and wind up with a quick chirp on C sharp and D. The distinctness between the semitones was very marked, and easily appreciable to a good ear." Mr. Lockwood gives both songs in musical notation; and adds that though this little mouse "had no ear for time, yet she would keep to the key of B (two flats) and strictly in a major key." ... "Her soft clear voice falls an octave with all the precision possible; then at the wind up, it rises again into a very quick trill on C sharp and D."

Chimpanzee to the Beat

- Posted: 09.Jul.2008.




Another PrimatePoetic classic. "Chimpanzee Intelligence and its Vocal Expressions" by Robert M. Yerkes and Blance W. Learned. Yerkish is names after this man, the approach is one of a kind. The bookpages below were inverted to enhance readibility.

The records of vocal expressions presented in this volume were made under peculiarly advantageous conditions since the animals, although under control, were given a large degree of freedom and were subjected to varied conditions of observation. The study of vocal reactions, although far from exhaustive, offered such interesting materials that it was decided to publish immediately. No review or discussion of other reports on voice or speech in the young chimpanzee is given because nothing similar to these descriptions in musical notation has been discovered.

The method used in recording the utterances presupposes considerable training and experience in aural exercise and is, perhaps best compared with the taking of dictation. The element of memory came into the work occasionally. Invariably the utterances were recorded iminediately after they were heard. In addition to description of sound, the situation in which it occurred was carefully recorded. No attempt was made to discover the significance of sounds until the observational task had been completed and effort begun systematically to arrange observations. It then appeared that classification by type of situation seemed both natural and useful. The records consequently were arranged in four principal groups which may be described briefly thus: Vocalization while waiting for food; while eating; when in company with persons; and when the two chimpanzees were together.

To supplement the observation of Chim and Panzee, the principal sounds made by the adult chimpanzees at the New York Zoological Park were noted. These are reported briefly for comparison with the vocalizations of the young animals.

The description assumes that the reader is familiar with simple musical notation, yet one who knows only the most common signs, such as the dynamic marks, the staccato and legato symbols, and the rhythmic value of notes and rests, can appreciate most of what is recorded. Bar-lines indicate pauses of varying length.

As the observations covered a period of several weeks, a continuous story was impracticable. The episodes, however, are in general consecutive, especially those dealing with food, and they have been selected from an abundance of records as either typical or significant because of the circumstances.

Various minor difficulties appeared in connection with descriptive nomenclature. Chim's "whine," for example, is not necessarily complaining. Yet the term "whine" seemed best to describe these unvocalized tones.

Although the young chimpanzee uses significant sounds in considerable number and variety, it does not, in the ordinary and proper meaning of the term, speak. Consequently there is no chimpanzee language, although there certainly is a useful substitute which might readily be developed or transformed into a true language if the animals could be induced to imitate sounds persistently.

goek, goek, goek, goek, goek ha ha ha ha haaaaa

- Posted: 09.Jul.2008.




Gibbon to human. From "Evidence as to man's place in nature" (1863) by Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895:

All observers testify to the prodigious volume of voice possessed by these animals. According to the writer whom I have just cited [Dr. Salomon Miller], in one of them, the Siamang," the voice is grave and penetrating, resembling the sounds 'goek, goek, goek, goek, goek ha ha ha ha haaaaa', and may be easily heard at a distance of half a league." While the cry is being uttered, the great membranous bag under the throat which communicates with the organ of voice, the so-called " laryngeal sac," becomes greatly distended, diminishing again when the creature relapses into silence.

M. Duvaucel, likewise, affirms that the cry of the Siamang may be heard for miles - making the woods ring again. So Mr. Martin describes the cry of the agile Gibbon as "over-powering and deafening" in a room, and " from its strength, well calculated for resounding through the vast forests." Mr. "Waterhouse, an accomplished musician as well as zoologist, says, " The Gibbon's voice is certainly much more powerful than that of any singer I ever heard." And yet it is to be recollected that this animal is not half the height of, and far less bulky in proportion than, a man.

The Natural History of the Man-Like Ape

- Posted: 09.Jul.2008.




The first picture of apes in the west. From "Evidence as to man's place in nature" (1863) by Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895:

I have not met with any notice of one of these Manlike Apes of earlier date than that contained in Pigafetta's " Description of the kingdom of Congo," drawn up from the notes of a Portuguese sailor, Eduardo Lopez, and published in 1598. The tenth chapter of this work is entitled "De Animalibus quae in hac provincia reperiuntur," and contains a brief passage to the effect that " in the Songan country, on the banks of the Zaire, there are multitudes of apes, which afford great delight to the nobles by imitating human gestures." As this might apply to almost any kind of apes, I should have thought little of it, had not the brothers De Bry, whose engravings illustrate the work, thought fit, in their eleventh "Argumentum," to figure two of these "Simiae magnatum delicise." So much of the plate as contains these apes is faithfully copied in the woodcut, and it will be observed that they are tail-less, long-armed, and large-eared ; and about the size of Chimpanzees. It may be that these apes are as much figments of the imagination of the ingenious brothers as the winged, twolegged, crocodile-headed dragon which adorns the same plate ; or, on the other hand, it may be that the artists have constructed their drawings from some essentially faithful description of a Gorilla or a Chimpanzee. And, in either case, though these figures are worth a passing notice, the oldest trustworthy and definite accounts of any animal of this kind date from the 17th century, and are due to an Englishman.

The first edition of that most amusing old book, "Purchas his Pilgrimage," was published in 1613, and therein are to be found many references to the statements of one whom Purchas terms " Andrew Battell (my neere neighbour, dwelling at Leigh in Essex) who served under Manuel Silvera Perera, Governor under the King of Spaine, at his city of Saint Paul, and with him Avent farre into the countrey of Angola ; "and again, "my friend, Andrew Battle, who lived in the kingdom of Congo many yeares," and who, "upon some quarell betwixt the Portugals (among whom he was a sergeant of a band) and him, lived eight or nine moneths in the woods." From this weather-beaten old soldier, Purchas was amazed to hear " of a kinde of Great Apes, if they might so bee termed, of the height of a man, but twice as bigge in feature of their limmes, with strength proportionable, hairie all over, otherwise altogether like men and women in their whole bodily shape. They lived on such wilde fruits as the trees and woods yielded, and in the night time lodged on the trees."

This extract is, however, less detailed and clear in its statements than a passage in the third chapter of the second part of another work "Purchas his Pilgrimes," published in 1625, by the same author which has been often, though hardly ever quite rightly, cited. The chapter is entitled, " The strange adventures of Andrew Battell, of Leigh in Essex, sent by the Portugals prisoner to Angola, who lived there and in the adioning regions neere eighteene yeeres." And the sixth section of this chapter is headed "Of the Provinces of Bongo, Calongo, Mayombe, Manikesocke, Motimbas : of the Ape Monster Pongo, their hunting : Idolatries ; and divers other obser- vations."

"He differeth not from a man but in his legs ; for they have no calfe. Hee goeth alwaies upon his legs, and carrieth his hands clasped in the nape of his necke when he goeth upon the ground. They sleepe in the trees, and build shelters for the raine. They feed upon fruit that they find in the woods, and upon nuts, for they eate no kind of flesh. They cannot speake, and have no understanding more than a beast. The people of the countrie, when they travaile in the woods, make fires where they sleepe in the night ; and in the morning when they are gone, the Pongoes will come and sit about the fire till it goeth out ; for they have no understanding to lay the wood together. They goe many together, and kill many negroes that travaile in the woods. Many times they fall upon the elephants which come to feed where they be, and so beated them with their clubbed fists, and pieces of wood, that they will runne roaring away from them. Those Pongoes are never taken alive because they are so strong, that ten men cannot hold one of them ; but yet they take many of their young ones with poisoned arrowes.

From the Gibbon to the Bushman in One Straight Line

- Posted: 07.Jul.2008.


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The weirdness PrimatePoetics leads me to... Music000001, wild speculations about the origin of music. The above map traces back the music of the world to primate, most notably gibbon, duetting. As far as I can say this diagram mixes up a few million years and two continents but it is great fun in a 19th century kind a way!

Old Yerkish Setup

- Posted: 04.Jul.2008.


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Sherman and Austin's low tech keyboard.

Lord Monboddo, the Urang-Utang man

- Posted: 04.Jul.2008.

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714 - 1799) was many things. In his linguistic analysis, he is probably the first person to associate language skills evolving from primates and continuing to evolve in primitive man. He writes specifically about how the language capability has altered over time in the form not only of skills but physical form of the sound producing organs (mouth, vocal cords, tongue, throat), suggesting he had formed the concept of evolutionary adaptive change.

I still maintain, that his [the orang-utan] being possessed of the capacity of acquiring it [language], by having both the human intelligence and the organs of pronunciation, joined to the dispositions and affections of his mind, mild, gentle, and humane, is sufficient to denominate him a man.

We also find him in James Boswell - Life of Johnson:

We talked of the Ouran-Outang, and of Lord Monboddo’s thinking that he might be taught to speak. Dr. Johnson treated this with ridicule. Mr. Crosbie said, that Lord Monboddo believed the existence of every thing possible; in short, that all which is in posse might be found in esse. JOHNSON. ‘But, Sir, it is as possible that the Ouran-Outang does not speak, as that he speaks. However, I shall not contest the point. I should have thought it not possible to find a Monboddo; yet he exists.’

Coby the Privately Taught Signing Chimp

- Posted: 17.Sep.2008.




One of those strange stories. Coby appears to be the only chimp taught sign language by an individual rather then by a scientist. Like Jennie/Meshie Coby became to brash to be kept in home and was relocated to Black Pine Animal Park. Here his ability was 'discovered' by a passing scientist Patrick Drumm.

As Drumm crouches in front of Coby's cage with a jug of water, the chimp raises his palm to his mouth, forming the sign for "eat" or "consume."

Drumm corrects the gesture, showing Coby the sign for "drink," which resembles tipping an imaginary teacup to his lips.

Coby watches, keeping one eye on the enticing jug of cold water, and then signs again, "eat." Close enough, for now, Drumm gives the chimp some water.

Coby is a "sloppy" signer, Drumm explains, which is one of the reasons it is so hard to figure out what the chimp is trying to communicate. But Drumm is willing to give it a try.

When Drumm, a psychology professor at Ohio University-Lancaster, was told by a former student about a chimpanzee trying to use sign language at an animal park in Albion, the doctor was not particularly convinced.

"I said, 'No way,"' Drumm said.

Having spent many years since the late 1970s teaching chimpanzees sign language, Drumm knew where every one of the signing chimps was located. Albion wasn't on that list.

His curiosity finally got the better of him, however, and he made his first trip from Ohio to see the mystery chimp of Albion about two years ago.

After seeing Coby trying to communicate with park patrons, Drumm began to do some research into the past of this chimp who, sometime in his life, had learned how to use sign language.

Drumm was able to establish that the chimp lived with unidentified owners until he was 5 years old. During his first few years with his original owners, Coby was apparently taught how to sign.

"Our information is that he was taught about 50 signs," Drumm said.

When he reached age 5, Coby became too strong for his original owners to handle. He was relocated to Pennsylvania, where he lived with other chimps, including his current companion, Tarzan.

...

However, after spending 12 years in an environment where nobody could understand his signs, Coby's abilities began to diminish.

But, because he learned to sign during that critical period in his infancy, Drumm is convinced that, with a little help, the chimp can re-establish communication with humans.

"The interesting thing about his case is that he learned signs in that critical period, which is why he is doing what he is doing now," Drumm said. "But the extended period of deprivation seems to have degraded the quality of his signs."

Can you teach an old chimp new tricks? And why does it even really matter?

Drumm believes it is both possible and important that Coby re-establish communication with humans.

From the research point of view, Coby represents a unique learning opportunity. He is the only chimp Drumm has ever encountered who learned sign language from private individuals, not scientists. And Drumm only knows of nine chimpanzees that have been taught by scientists to sign.

That makes this case particularly unique. Drumm is interested in finding out whether Coby can recover his language skills, and hopes his research can be beneficial in studying human language development.

But, probably just as important, is the effect this will have on Coby. Drumm thinks the chimp likely feels frustration because he was taught how to communicate and then was abandoned by those who could understand him.

"We think we can make his life better," Drumm said. With the initial phase of observations over, Drumm plans to proceed, possibly as soon as next summer, to the second phase of his research. This phase will involve a concerted effort to teach Coby proper American Sign Language signs.

"If I could come out here for a month, I bet we could make significant progress," Drumm said. Drumm's ultimate goal is to establish, or re-establish, communication with Coby.

The Ghost Tantras or Mammalian Poetics

- Posted: 17.Sep.2008.




Michael McClure's Ghost Tantras (1969) written in his "beast Language" (VIA).

1
GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOO!
GOOOOOOOOOR!
GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!
Grah gooooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeer! Grayowhr!
Greeeeee
GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAGHHRR! RAHR!
RAHRIRAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!
BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE
looking for sugar!
GAHHHHHHHH!
ROWRR!
GROOOOOOOOOOH!

7

GHHHROOOOOO GAHROOOOOOO EEEKA CAR,
cargroooooooo longkarr GRAHHH!
Cowmrooooooose blooooo mewie-weeeep.
VOOOOOOOOOOOO?
Shgrarrr? Yagabb krahr yellow vipt
mwooo? Swooooooooooooo lub byeeee bwack meee!
MAKE LOVE SOUNDS.
HERE SMELL.
Grahh pallid! Gr-aaah love nowhr
bwooooooooo krahh noooo-boooooose!
Saba-groooooh stahr zaboth mwoooo
kakra graaaah grahh grrrrrrrr
mweeeeeeeee melt.

49

SILENCE THE EYES! BECALM THE SENSES!
Drive drooor from the frcsh repugnance, thou whole,
thou feeling creature. Live not for others but affect thyself
from thy enhanced interior - believing what thou carry.
Thy trillionic multitude of grahh, vhooshes, and silences.
Oh you are heavier and dimmer than you know
and more solid and full of pleasure.
Grahhr! Grahhhr! Ghrahhhrrr! Ghrahhr. Grahhrrr.
Grahhr-grahhhhrr! Grahhr. Gahrahhrr Ghrahhhrrrr.
Gharrrrr. Ghrahhr! Ghrarrrrr. Ghanrrr. Ghrahhhrr.
Ghrahhrr. Ghrahr. Grahhr. Grahharrr. Grahhrr.
Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghmhhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.
Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhr.
Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhrr.
Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr.

Apes Can't Ape, A Review of 'Jennie' by Douglas Preston.

- Posted: 15.Sep.2008.




This book reminds me of that song by Norah Jones: I would never in a million years listen to it at home but when I hear it in the supermarket I can't help but to hum along. The style and tone is too passive, too unchallenging to fully satisfy me, but I cannot but admire the intelligence of the plot and even though the fact that Disney made a film out of this book might lead you to suspect otherwise, the story never becomes sentimental and there is no happy ending. On the contrary, the ending in thoroughly unhappy with Jennie, a caged ASL signing chimp committing suicide.

Douglas Preston started as a science writer (he now writes techno-thrillers) and part of the persuasive power of this novel is that it is based on well researched facts. The fictional Archibald family raising young Jennie in their home as a part of the family is based on the real story of chimpanzee Meshie raised by the family of explorer and mammalogist H.C. Raven in the 1930ties. This is the set pattern of all such experiments: the chimp, always a she, is a lovely and funny and playful friend when young but as she matures, especially when she goes into estrus for the first time, her behaviour will change radically and the initial suggestion of domestication is destroyed in a frenzy of pure uncontrollable animal lust. An adult chimp is simply too strong and too wild to have in your home. The story of Meshie/Jennie does not deviate from this template. Meshie was never trained to communicate in American Sign Language (ASL) and this aspect of Jennie is modelled on another unlucky home-raised chimp named Lucy. Lucy was taken in by psychotherapist M.K. Temerlin and his wife in the 1970ties. She acquired over 100 signs ASL, kept a pet cat, drank gin, and used Playgirl magazine for sexual gratification, just like Jennie. The way Jennie ends her last days reminds of the fate of Nim Chimpsky. Nim ended up in a cage but was considered to be in an unresolvable limbo: "Too wild for a house and to human for a cage".

Thank goodness Preston has the sanity of mind not to tell this story from the view point of the chimpanzee. The story of Jennie is told using a patchwork of interviews with, and excerpts from memoires and notebooks by, the people who knew her best: the various members of the Archibald family, Pamela Prentiss the primatologist who, like most of the scientists in this novel gets a fair beating as an arrogant know-it-all who does not know all but never admits it and Hendricks Palliser the neighbouring reverend who tries to instruct Jennie on God. All of them have their own angle on what is best for Jennie according to their theory of Jennies true nature. The way each views adds or antagonizes the views of the others is an extremely well balanced effort.

The fictionalizing of real events often makes it hard to say where the facts stops and the fiction begins. Some paragraphs could very well be 'out-takes' unsuitable for publication in Nature but a true projection of what researchers privately believed about their apes. The following quote from an 'interview' with Dr. Prentiss about the true scope of Jennies linguistic ability might or might not be a real sentiment:

"Jennie and the other chimpanzees had this ability to convey information through facial expressions, gesture, and body language. While the utterances remained mostly one to three words, the facial expressions and body language became more and more sophisticated. You see, the problem is that this result was very difficult to quantify. It was mind-to-mind, in a way. But of course, none of that is scientific or quantifiable. If I said anything like that a meeting, they'd laugh me out of the room. Nobody knows what language is. It isn't just speech, that's for sure. But try to explain that to some of these reductionist structural linguists.
Anyway, I have a theory. I believe that we humans, in chimpanzees and gorillas ASL, stumbled upon a natural communication system already in use. We just enhanced it. This is juts my opinion and I would not dare put it in a paper."

The language of Jennie, ASL translated into English, stays close to the language of real signing apes. One of the greatest deceptions that overcame Hubert Terrace during the Nim Chimpsky project was that Nim learned a great numbers of signs very quickly but only rarely produced sentences longer than 4 words. The longest sentence Nim ever produced was the repetitive "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you". It is explained that Jennie only makes such sentences as a way to stress that she wants an orange now now now. The longest sentence Jennie ever produced is: "Bad phooey fuck you bad angry bite dirty dirty fuck you". Which makes the ape all the more human.

Over time the "animalness" of Jennie becomes invisible to the Archibalds and Jennie herself regards herself human. How could she otherwise as she had never seen other chimpanzees. The question this book poses ultimately boils down to that old conundrum of philosophy: are we truly able to understand another kind of mind. Especially in the light of the fact that it seems nearly impossible for humans to understand each other. The fate of Jennie drives the Archibald family into disarray, but without disagreement about why this has happened. All the people involved misunderstand, distrust and blame each other. Only a few things are beyond doubt: apes are like us, apes can have language, apes with language or even more able to become like us, a scientist who refers to your ape as "it" should never be trusted.

Lea Archibald points out that her son Sandy has failed to fulfil his middle-class potential but that he has something more important: real moral values. Sandy had the brain to make it as big in academia as his father, but instead he chose to live in the desert with the Navaho. Sandy grew up with Jennie as his best friend and it was he who tried to defend Jennie from the horror of 'rehabilitation' to the very end. What he claimed to have learned from Jennie was that Jennie had a core moral value that most humans had long lost: she wanted to be free at all costs. We domesticated humans are weak cowards! Other voices in this book will go against this idea of the ape as a noble savage. The ape is a complex beast not a saint. It is not only able of doing 'good' but also of doing 'bad': war, violence and murder are all in its nature and it acts upon it without guilt or remorse. We only see the ape that we want to see; this observation is as close as this book comes to an answer.

Douglas Preston has used Jennie to present the spirit behind 50 years of ape language research in an admirable way but it should be noted that it documents a closed era. Jennie is a 1970ties timepiece and is not representative for today's science. Research methodology has tightened, theory has improved, the means of ape-human communication have changed, knowledge of the ape has sky rocketed and the results have accordingly been spectacular. Within the PrimatePoetic corpus Jennie must be regarded as the most accessible memento available to all those apes at whose cost our knowledge of ape language has matured to its current state.

Jennie, by Douglas Preston, Forge, 1994.

Two Important Papers

- Posted: 15.Sep.2008.


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Missed these earlier, now they are here to stay:

Premack, D. and Premack, A. "Teaching language to an ape." Scientific American, March, 1958. (pdf-link)

Terrace, H. S. "How Nim Chimpsky changed my mind." Psychology Today, 1979. (pdf-link)

Meshie

- Posted: 14.Sep.2008.




Meshie was a chimpanzee brought from Africa by explorer and mammalogist H.C. Raven in 1931 and raised as one of the family. At the age of two Meshie became too big to be living in a human environment and was transported to a zoo. But Meshie was never saw another chimpanzee did not accustom to prison live and was stuck between between two impossibles: he was not human but he was not an ape either.

The Discovery of the Ape

- Posted: 11.Sep.2008.


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Only a few centuries ago it was not at all clear to Western eyes in what ways the people of Africa were different from the great apes in the continent. You could hold this to be further evidence of the closeness of apes to us, if only it wasn't for false philosophy and racism that is still latent today.

The Tarzan Complex, A review of Jane Goodall's 'In the Shadow of Man'

- Posted: 08.Sep.2008.







From a very young age Jane Goodall knows what she wants to do when she grows up: she wants to go to wild Africa to live with the beasts as if she was one of them. When she is offered an invitation to stay at the Kenyan ranch of the parents of one of her friends this is an opportunity she cannot let go to waste. Once she has arrived in Africa she quickly finds a job with Louis Leakey. The famous bone-digger apparently spotted many untapped talents as it was he who arranged for her to stay for six months in Tanzania to study chimpanzees. There she was, 23 years of age, an unmarried girl in an age of paternalism, in a war-torn part of Africa, in the middle of an impenetrable rain forest and without any formal academic training or indeed any knowledge of chimpanzees. Few believed she would endure these unwelcoming circumstances for longer than six weeks, but in the end she stayed on for 45 years. In the process she would lay the groundwork for a new, revolutionary understanding of the chimpanzee of which PrimatePoetics is only a recent offshoot.

Virginia Woolf wrote about that English combination of aloof eccentricity and rock-solid self-esteem as a quality that preserves a sense of humanity in the harshest of situations. It is this empire building trait of character that we also find in Jane Goodall. In the first six months of her stay at the Gombe stream she did nothing but track down a group of chimpanzees who vanished as soon as they spotted her. After six endless weeks with zero-result her Victorian persistence paid off when the chimps decided it was easier to just ignore her. From this non-event onward she could observe what no one had observed before: chimps hunting, chimps eating meat, chimps using tools, chimps making tools, chimps partaking in complex chimp societies, chimps communicating, chimps having cultures, chimps raising baby chimps, chimp children playing with baboon children, chimps fighting, chimps dying. There are many ways to measure our likeness to the great ape: chemically, anatomically, genetically, medically but these all deal with numbers. Goodall was the first to look at the behaviour of apes in their natural habitat and her findings brought home that in this respect the gap is not as big as many would like to believe. What Goodall has done is to change the way we look at ourselves.

It was while living this feral life that she fell in love with Hugo van Lawick, baron and a wild life photographer. Together they roamed the woods and hills, hiding for the torrents in make-shift huts, bended in uncomfortable postures while waiting for some chimp to appear. Chimp love-making had their special attention, probably because they too were in love. Back in England the couple married, their marriage cake featured a clay head of Goodall's favourite, the easy going David Greybeard. Large photos of all their favourite chimps were placed on the wall. A typical example, you would think, of Goodall's obsessiveness. Three days after the wedding the newly weds rushed back to Tanzania in order not to miss their first opportunity to observe child rearing in chimpanzees.

Like all ethological studies this one is mostly unreadable. And to imagine that this is only a washed down book for a non-scientific audience! But it is no fault of Goodall. At the time her discoveries were spectacular, but all descriptions of behaviour (who is playing/grooming/fighting/mating/eating with whom and where) read like the dull diagrammatic resumes they are. To make matters worse, from the point of view of a current reader, we have seen what Goodall saw in more palatable portions on Discovery Channel, Animals Planet or the National Geographic Channel. Only when the subject turns to sex, which is often, the pace steps up a little. Her descriptions of the sex live of chimpanzees are joyous and voyeuristic exercises. Her exuberant description of old Flo who, while in estrus, is mounted by the entire troop is not Victorian at all. In discussing the resemblance in love-making between human and ape she twice refers to hippie free-love. Must we read the sexual revolution of the sixties as a welcome return to ape habits?

What interests us here however is Goodall's assessment of the language of chimpanzees in the wild. Most textbooks deny off-hand that chimpanzees have language and the appendix in which Goodall gives an overview of calls and their meaning is indeed small. But language is victim to many misconceptions. The language of exams, job interviews and sales departments, (the times and places where we are assumed to use our best language,) the language that we think of as the crowing achievement of all existing 'natural communication systems', has no place in the rain forest. "I had heard chimpanzees in the zoo, of course, but out here in the African forest the sound was thrilling beyond words", writes Goodall. She continues to describe what a chimp call sounds like: "First one chimp gave a series of low-resonant pant-hoots - loud hooting calls connected by audible inhalations of breath. These grew louder and louder, until in the end the chimpanzee was almost screaming. Halfway through his calling another joined in, and then another." A mighty uproar enhanced by chimpanzee 'drumming' reverberating through the valleys. The effect must be as brutish and as stunning as a good Klingon opera. The nomadic chimpanzee only needs a little language, but this does not mean that they are not capable of it in principle. Like no one else Goodall knows chimpanzees and her confidence that language is very well within the range of apes like Washoe or AI is important support to the entire ape-language field.

The most important thing this book gives to PrimatePoetics is a look at the language of apes within the habitual context of the 'wilderness'. A reminder that meaning is in the performance and that language begins with theatrical display; that the meaning of a sentence like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" (the Chomskian example of a grammatically correct but meaningless piece of language) depends on the context of it being used in an actual situation.

Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man, 1971, Dell Publishing.

Chimpanzee Facial Expressions and Calls (From Goodall)

- Posted: 08.Sep.2008.

From Jane Goodall's 'In the Shadow of Man'

The Cruelty!

- Posted: 02.Sep.2008.




The cruelty science is capable of. Still moderately here.

The Pioneer Primatologist

- Posted: 02.Sep.2008.




American psychologist Henry W. Nissen has virtually no net-presence (not even a Wikipedia stub) though he deserves it. He was after all the first westerner to live with chimpanzees in the wild for a period of three months. His 1931 report appears unavailable online but his joint paper with Robert Yerkes "Pre-linguistic Sign behaviour in Chimpanzee" must be one of the first modern publications relevant to PrimatePoetics. Ala, even though it was published in 1936 it is still behind academic lock and key. Who can help me with a copy? Jane Goodall has singlehandedly kept him from slipping into total oblivion:

Although the chimpanzee has been known to science for nearly three centuries, and although, because of its striking resemblance to man, it has been used extensively as an experimental animal in medical and other fields, no attempts had been made to study this ape in its natural habitat until Dr. Henry W. Nissen made his pioneer study in French Guinea. I found his 1931 report invaluable as I prepared my own program.

Language Comes Not From Us.

- Posted: 19.Aug.2008.


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A quote from Gary Snyder's "Practise of the Wild", an anarcho-cybernetic view on language in the imagery that reminds one of the Chinese poets that Snyder has studies like no other. Image is from the Kanzi book.

Some will say, so far so good. "We are mammal primates, but we have language and the animals don't." By some definitions perhaps they don't. But they do communicate extensively, and by call systems we are just beginning to grasp.

It would be a mistake to think that human beings got 'smarter' at some point and invented language and then society. Language and culture emerge from our biological-social natural existence, animals that we were/are. Language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves. Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden. It is of a complexity that eludes our rational intellectual capacities. All attempts at scientific description of natural language have fallen short of completeness, as the descriptive linguists readily confess, yet the child learns the mother tongue early and has virtually mastered it by the age of sic.

Language is learned in the house and in the fields, not at school. Without having ever been taught formal grammar we utter syntactically correct sentences, one after another, for all the waking hours of the years of our life. Without concious device we constantly reach into the vast word-hoards in the depths of the wild unconscious. We cannot as individuals or even as a specie take credit for this power. It came from some place else: from the way clouds divide and mingle (and the arms of energy that coil first back and then forwards), from the way the many flowerlets of a composite blossom divide and redivide, from the gleaming calligraphy of the ancient riverbeds of the Yukon River streaming out the Yukon flats, from the wind in the pine-needles, from the chuckles of grouse in the ceanothus bushes.

Gorillamesh

- Posted: 19.Aug.2008.




The Nonist website is a fabulous place and I am happy that its maker has paid attention to both PrimatePoetic pamphlets. Accompanying a notice of the publication of Gilgamesh for Apes comes the above Gorillamesh and I can only say: THANK YOU!

Enkidu really is an Ape

- Posted: 19.Aug.2008.


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This passage I found after publishing Gilgamesh for Apes but it completely vindicates my wildest claim. From S. Savage-Rumbaugh, & R. Lewin; Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind. Wiley 1994.

I also began to wonder what it could have been like to be a member of a human group in which people communicated by nonverbal expressions
and gestures, but did not use language. ... [W]hat were we like before we invented language? I thought of those vague references to "dreamtime" people in aboriginal culture, and the reference in our own culture to the absence of "knowledge of good and evil" before eve consumed the proverbial apple. I also recalled those references to some African and Indian cultures in which it is said that the older brother and younger brother decided upon different paths long ago when they first became aware that it was possible to control fire. It is said that the older brother elected to remain in the forest, following the old ways and eschewing fire and language. The apes of today are descended from older brother. Younger brother went out from the forest and kept fire with him, becoming the progenitor of all humans today. Could cultural myths such as these hark back to a murky time in our distant past when we possessed human minds but no language.

The Ape over the Brink of Literature

- Posted: 19.Aug.2008.


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About Kanzi and his language. From S. Savage-Rumbaugh, & R. Lewin; Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind. Wiley 1994.

Bonobos are more vocal chimpanzees, and Kanzi is no exception. In fact, when he was still quite young, I began to notice that he was exceptionally vocal, even for a bonobo. At times he even seemed to be trying to imitate some vowel sounds. For instance, when I gave him peanuts, I would say, "Kanzi, would you like peanuts?" And Kanzi would vocalize, "e-uh", a two-step sound like "peanut," without the consonant. Similarly, with melons, he vocalized "eh-uhh," again a two-step sound, like melon. I made the same sounds back to Kanzi, to encourage him. I talked about my observations with my colleagues, documented what I heard, and tried to get them to do as I did. It proved to be a difficult exercise, partly because some people had difficulty hearing the sounds, and we all sounded rather different when we made them. In short we could make sounds that were within Kanzi's range, but we really did not know how to construct a communication system that we could all readily understand at that time.

As I was carefully studying the tapes of Kanzi and Sherman and Austin, I was impressed by the way Kanzi vocalized while communicating in other modes, such as using the keyboard and gestures. Symbols, gestures, and vocalizations seemed to be integrated as a communicative package. I decided to look more carefully at the nature of his vocalizations.

With my colleague William Hopkins, I recorded Kanzi's vocalizations and compared them with those of four bonobos at Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Lorel, Laura, Linda and Bosondjo, none of whom had been language trained. Using spectrographic sound analysis (which is simply a way to transforming the wave-form of sound into a visual picture), we were able to identify fourteen different sounds (strictly, groups of sounds) from the body of data we collected. Ten of them were common to all five chimps in the study, while four were unique to Kanzi. The four groups of vocalizations are "Ennn," "ii-angh," "WHAI," and "Unnn." Most bonobo sounds tend to slide from one syllable to the next, but some of Kanzi's unique sounds displayed clear shifts, as in the "ii-ang" group.

My impression had therefore been correct: Not only was Kanzi vocalizing more than other chimps, but he was also making novel sounds. And from our videotapes of the sound recording sessions, we could see that the novel vocalizations were nearly always a respons to a comment by a human companion, or a vocal request by Kanzi. What was he saying?

A Tanzanian Chimp Welcome Greeting

- Posted: 12.Aug.2008.




Jane Goodall is the Chimp Mother! In her 2003 TED-talk she starts with a plea for the right of indigenous people to set their integration into 'civilization' and she connects this to a passionate warning about the devastating effects of logging companies and road-builders on nature around the world. One thing is clear: knowing apes means knowing about humans in more than one way. She does a great chimp welcoming-call too.

Play that Gibbon Song to Me

- Posted: 19.Jan.2007.




Gibbon Science. The basic vocal behaviour of white-handed gibbons has been described already and, whenever possible, we used the same terminology. Individual vocal units are termed ‘notes’, of which seven different types can be distinguished: (1) ‘wa’, (2) ‘hoo’, (3) ‘leaning wa’, (4) ‘oo’, (5) ‘sharp wow’, (6) ‘waoo’, and (7) ‘other’. The ‘hoo’ was originally considered part of the ‘wa’ group, but we found that this class was consistently lower-pitched than ‘wa’, of lower amplitude, and usually covering a frequency range of less than 100 Hz. These three parameters were perceptually salient and they allowed us to reliably discriminate between ‘wa’ and ‘hoo’ notes.

The Full PrimatePoetic Spectrum

- Posted: 04.May.2009.




A handy map to the currently known points on the PrimatePoetic vortex of language. The bit in grey highlights the precursor to the human line, which, as you can see is only a tiny bit at the top.

Interview about Nim Chimpsky

- Posted: 20.Apr.2009.




The New York Magazine of 3 December 1979 brings us an interview with Herbert Terrace, trainer of Nim Chimpsky. Terrace later believed that Nim had fooled him. Consensus in ape language is rather that Terrace fooled himself with his methodology. Some excerpts:

Q: What did Nim like to talk about?
A: At first, as with a child, his world was centred on himself. He signed 'me' and asked for food and drink and to be hugged. Later he learned to sign 'you' and and the names of his teachers. Then 'tickle', 'run' and 'play' became favourite topics of conversation.

Q: Did Nim have a sense of humour?
A: Nim never told any jokes, but he smiled spontaneously, and often smiled in response to his teachers' smiles and laughs. At various times he would hide something that he knew was important to his teacher, or steal some food and display an unmistakable grin.

Q: Did Nim ever learn to express emotions?
A: Nim learned to sign 'angry' and 'bite' when he was frustrated and wanted to attack his teachers. After he made these signs, his anger appears to subside, and he would not commit any physical art of aggression. As far as I know, there is no other example of an animal substituting an arbitrary sign for an act.

Q: Did Nim invent signs?
A: He invented signs for 'hand cream' and 'play'. In order to request some hand cream, Nim would rub his hands together as if he were rubbing cream on them. In American sign language there is no standard sign for hand cream, so we accepted his invention. The standard sign for play was not part of our initial list of signs. On one occasion, Nim imitated his teachers who were sitting in a circle around him clapping their hands. After that he would clap his hands whenever he wanted to play.

Can Fly, Will Fly!

- Posted: 20.Apr.2009.

Noam Chomsky in reaction to Nim Chimpsky. The man can turn a phrase!

"Language is highly specialized human ability. It is about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human being teaching them to fly. Would a human physiologist interested in studying flight in birds study a man jumping? You may laugh at this idea, but a man jumping is closer to a chicken flying than an ape will ever come to language. At least a man jumping can flap his arms. An ape's use of symbols is in no way homologous to human language"

Bring us Together

- Posted: 20.Apr.2009.


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PrimatePoetic activism avant la lettre; from 'The Art of Protest, political posters 1965-1975'. Artist unknown.

HMMMMM theory

- Posted: 16.Apr.2009.




Steven Mithen's HMMMMM theory of language: Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic. (PDF-link) What started as non-linguistic communication became singular singsong in Neanderthals and plural language and music in humans.

Notable Utterances

- Posted: 16.Apr.2009.




The use of the word 'literature' as in non-human literature deviates from the standard convention of what literature looks/reads like: i.e. the novel and the poem. Gary Snyder followed Leonard Bloomfield in his definition of literature as 'notable utterances'; here is the full quote taken from Language (1933):

Writing is not language, but merely a way to record language by means of visible marks. In some countries, such as China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, writing was practised thousands of years ago, but to most of the languages that are spoken today it has been applied either in relatively recent times or not at all. Moreover, until the days of printing, literacy was confined to a very few people. All languages were spoken through nearly all of their history by people who did not write or write; the languages of such people are just as stable, regular, and rich as the languages of literate nations. A language is the same no matter what system of writing may be used to record it, just as a person is the same no matter how you take his picture. The Japanese have three systems of writing and are inventing a fourth. When the Turks, in 1928, adopted the Latin alphabet in place of the Arabic, they went on talking in just the same way as before. In order to study writing we must know something about language, but the reverse is not true...
Literature, whether presented in spoken form or, as is now our custom, in writing, consists of beautiful or otherwise notable utterances. The student of literature observes the utterances of certain persons (say, of a Shakespeare) and concerns himself with the content and with the unusual features of form.

* The Greatest Hits of PrimatePoetics * The First Concise Anthology of Language For, By and Between Man and Ape.

- Posted: 11.Apr.2009.




The First Anthology of Language For, By and Between Man and Ape. Your one-stop destination to the charms of PrimatePoetics.

The Greatest Hits of Primate Poetics (PDF, 415 KB)

Outtake

Even though primatologists were already convinced apes could not possibly be made to speak, some people tried nevertheless. Here is show-ape Kokomo Jr, who in 1958, after 7 months of gruesome speech therapy could pronounce the word 'mama'.

---

Another Food Conversation with Washoe

- Posted: 10.Apr.2009.

From the Creation of the Sacred but who is George?

George: What you want?
Washoe: Orange, orange.
George: No more orange, what you want?
Washoe: Orange.
George: [Angry] No more orange, what you want?
Washoe: You go car gimme orange. Hurry.

An Appreciation for the Archaic

- Posted: 06.Apr.2009.




Gary Snyder in 'The Politics of EthnoPoetics'. (PIC).

An appreciation for [the] archaic and long-maintained intelligence and alertness would have to be part of the foundations of a new humanities. This humanities would take the whole long Homo sapiens experience into account, and eventually make an effort to include our non-human kin. It would transform itself into posthuman humanism, which would defend endangered cultures and species alike.

Raised by Apes

- Posted: 25.Mar.2009.




Called Johann by the nurses of an orphanage in Burundi was found, in 1974(?) at the age of four living with a group of chimps. He was naked, 'quite hairy' (!), and mainly walked on all four. He did not speak but communicated with facial expressions and gesticulation. He has trouble using his hands properly. All according to Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.

Signing 'Listen'

- Posted: 23.Mar.2009.


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Ally and Bruno signing 'listen' as the human companion points to his watch.

From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.

The Overrepresented Premack

- Posted: 23.Mar.2009.


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The chimp language research of David Premack used a unique method but attracted little followers. What strikes me is how visible Premack was for this work. Here is another photo, never spotted anywhere before. What is nice about this one is that it shows not chimp Sarah but Chimp Elizabeth, who died early one.

From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.

Many Interesting Details on Pan/Homo Culture.

- Posted: 19.Mar.2009.

This excellent article I should have read much earlier, 'Culture Prefigures Cognition in Pan/Homo Bonobos' (PDF-link) by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, William M. Fields, Par Segerdahl and Duane Rumbaugh. Here are some relevant quotes:

Matata represents a version of wild bonobo culture as Sue represents Midwestern North American human culture. Kanzi was bi-species mothered. Panbanisha grew up with a human mother within a functional bi-species group, Nyota is growing up with two human parents within an extended bonobo family; and Maisha was mothered by Matata. Elykia was mothered by Matata, with intermittent human mothering, Nathan is being raised by Panbanisha and a human mother (Both P-Suke and Kanzi play a fatherly role with all of the children.) Bosondjo is the father of Kanzi and Panbanisha.
He was part of the initial group for several years, but was later relocated to Florida at the direction of the Yerkes Primate Center and the American Zoological Association.

These rearing differentials significantly inform the manner in which each individual learns, knows, believes, hopes, intends, and thinks, yet there are striking differences in how they learn and to the degree to which what they know can be linguistically modified. The power of language lies in our ability to employ it to attract the attention of others to our perception of reality. The degree to which language functions in this manner among the bonobos varies in association with the extent and form of exposure to human culture early in life.

When P-Suke arrived at the laboratory he was essentially silent except for nonlinguistic sounds, such as screams and laughs. Across the past eight years, he has acquired nearly the full bonobo vocal stream of communication, including emulations of English-like phrases employed by Kanzi. He is able to emulate Kanzi so well, that at times it becomes difficult to tell which one is vocalizing if they are both out of sight.

The fact that Matata and Maisha have some linguistic abilities, even though they are are not yet self-evident to Homo beings, is evidenced by the tendency of Kanzi and Panbanisha to translate for Matata when she cannot make her wishes known. Panbanisha regularly tells Sue which foods Matata wants to eat and which doors Matata is asking to have opened. Kanzi makes clear P-suke’s needs, and when Kanzi does not succeed in getting them across P-suke displays, at everyone. Nyota often speaks for Nathan and Elykia.

Sometimes Matata provides very specific information to Kanzi and Panbanisha. For example, one day when everyone was quiet Matata, who was located 200 yards away in another building, began to vocalize. Kanzi did not answer her by looked toward her direction. Sue asked “What is Matata talking about?” Kanzi answered “CHOW.” Sue thought maybe Kanzi was mistaken however she phoned the building where Matata was located to ask what was happening she was told that someone was just walking in the door with a bag of chow.

On another occasion, Matata’s vocalization from far away suddenly set Kanzi to climbing as high as could inside the building to look out of the monitors in a specific direction. When Sue sent someone to find out what was there, they found a man up in a telephone pole.

We find it difficult not to suspect that Matata came to the United States equipped with a language of some form, though it is not the same kind of language that Kanzi and Panbanisha and Nyota have acquired. Matata is able to express needs, wants and events of general interest (for example, there is a man on the telephone pole), but she does not appear to engage in self-reflection. It is a though she speaks a language lacking the personal pronouns I, he, she, it, they, we etc, and a language lacking past tense.

Kanzi and Panbanisha appear to be cognizant of this discrepancy for there are many things they will, upon our request to “Tell Matata X,” quickly translate for Matata. These include things such as “Visitors are coming, Chow is here, The gorilla is in the forest, Someone is getting in trouble, We are doing good, We are coming to see you, Kanzi did a good job, We are having bananas, Panbanisha is happy, etc.” Likewise there are many things that they understand but refuse to translate upon request. These include things like “It is raining outdoors, Sue thinks that you should tell Maisha to be good, If you go into the middle test room and let Sue shut the door, she can move Kanzi into the third cage. You need to let us lock you outdoors because the repair man is coming. This ball is red. The bottle of juice is big. Sue is taller than Liz. Liz is going to go to the childside to talk to Bill about her schedule. Holly will wash the dishes later. We saw a panther last here last week, etc.

Beliefs about Good and Bad Let us take for purposes of example, a piece of knowledge and belief about good and bad that exists in the Pan/Homo culture. Kanzi and his family have grown up with the mythical characters Bunny and Gorilla. Bunny is a kind entity who protects the bonobos. Bunny never does anything bad and always brings wonderful surprises for the bonobos. Gorilla lives on the edge of our forest and has a reputation for stealing food and prized objects. Kanzi is quite afraid of Gorilla and this invented boogieman has served us well in limiting how far Kanzi is willing to venture into the forest. Kanzi believes that if he goes too far, such as over the fence into the subdivision, Gorilla will be waiting. Bunny and Gorilla are costumes which the lab employees put on and perform the mythological moment. When Kanzi became an adult, Sue introduced Gorilla as a costume to Kanzi. She let him try on the Gorilla costume. Then Sue put on the costume. Kanzi knew Sue was in the costume, but there were limits to how far his beliefs could be modified. While Kanzi would tolerate Sue in the Gorilla costume, it was clear that in Kanzi’s mind, he was not sure to what degree the costume would affect Sue’s behavior towards him.

As long as Sue does not wear the costume too long, she will be treated as ‘Sue,’ but if she continues to wear it and to behave as the gorilla, she begins (in Kanzi’s perception) to loose her role and status as a member of the Pan/Homo culture and to become an outsider. This is dangerous to Sue for outsiders can be subject to serious attack without cause, whereas as accepted members of the culture are subject to serious attack only if they intentionally and deliberately violate cultural conventions.

Unlike Kanzi, Panbanisha believes that Sue will always be Sue regardless of the gorilla costume and she is not afraid at all. She knows that the donning of the costume is a game and she will often initiate a request for this game and specify who is to be ‘scared’. by the gorilla, how the gorilla is to go about accomplishing this action, and where to gorilla is to go. Lab employees such as the secretary enjoy participating in the game and pretend to be scared. Panbanisha is always watching them very closely to try and determine whether or not they are really frightened.

A few Hours with Chantek

- Posted: 19.Mar.2009.

Taken from 'Drawing the line' by Steven M. Wise, with small edits to remove references to the authors' children.

Lyn Miles drove through a staff entrance at Zoo Atlanta. She stopped and pointed towards an outside enclosure. One of three orangutans stirred from a hammock and shuffled to the edge of the enclosure, the way an astronaut might after an extended flight. I knew orangutans are the world’s largest arboreal animal, but I didn’t see any trees inside his enclosure. His enormous cheek pads made him appear immense.
“How much does he weigh?” I asked.
“Three hundred pounds,” Miles said.
“His head…”
“When they gain too much weight, their cheek pads balloon, he’s on a diet now.”
“YOU.” The orangutan gestured with his right hand. Miles began a simultaneous translation. “YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, LYN.”
Miles lifted her hands high above the steering wheel.
“SECRET,” she signed.
“WHERE?” asked Chantek.
“OVER THERE,” Miles signed.
Chantek moved his fingers.
“He is asking for fruit,” Miles said. “He knows he is not allowed to have fruit. I’m going to tell him about you.”
“NEW FRIEND. GOOD MAN BRING FOOD. ” She turned toward me. “He’ll like that.” She clenched her fist and placed it on her forehead. “STEVE.” She stared at Chantek. “That will be your name sign. An S on the forehead.
“STEVE,” Chantek signed. “Steve.”
Wait here while I get the food out of the trunk and bring it over,” Miles said to me.
She carried the groceries towards the enclosure. At her signal, I walked towards them, Miles was laying out grapes and oranges. As she walked, she said Chantek often sends her on errands to buy stuff, especially Naya, Canadian bottled water. Children’s puzzles were stacked beside her. She handed me latex surgical gloves.
“It’s the rules.”
She was apologetic. She gave Chantek a puzzle from “Lights, Camera, Interaction.” Each piece was cut in the shape of a motor vehicle. He dumped the pieces on the cement, then placed the puzzle board on his lap. He picked each piece up and began turning it around until it fit a hole. Miles held out an orange. He placed a clenched fist on his forehead.
“STEVE.”
“He wants you to give it to him.”
I offered it. He slowly smothered it in huge puffy fingers and withdrew it into the cage. Miles began to play “Simon Says.”
Simon says ‘clap,’” she said.
Chantek clapped.
“Simon says ‘pat head.’”
He patted his head.
“Simon says ‘pat right shoulder with left hand.’”
He did it.
Whenever Chantek made a sloppy sign, Miles said, “Sign better.”
He would try again. If the sign was still slipshod, she reminded him, “Sign better.” And he would. After an hour, Miles held up a grape.
“Steve,” Chantek signed.
Miles handed me the grape. I passed it through the bars. Chantek grasped it between one Brobdingnagian thumb and index-finger, then “accidentally” squeezed the top of my index finger. It felt like a vise (I write “accidentally” because more than one scientist familiar with orangutans suspects Chantek saw me as a mark from whom he could steal a glove to use to trade for goodies). Instinctively I jerked away. But he caught the tip of my finger.
“Let go!” Miles said Sharply. “Let go!!”
He did.

Lana Knows Things

- Posted: 19.Mar.2009.

Two lexigram conversations with Lana adapted from 'Animal bodies, human minds' By William Allen Hillix, Duane M. Rumbaugh.

[March 6, 1974, Lana sees Tim drink a Coke outside her room and starts the conversation]
Lana: Lana drink this out-of room period.
Tim: [Gives her a Coke]
[Later]
Lana: Lana drink this out-of room period.
Tim: Drink what out-of room?
Lana: Lana drink Coke out-of room.

[May 6, 1974, Lana wants a box that contains M&M's and asks for the name]
Lana: ?Time give Lana this can.
Tim: Yes [He gives her an empty can.]
Lana: ?Time give Lana this can.
Tim :[replied he had no can, it was given to her (in lexigrams? speech?)]
Lana: ?Time give Lana this bowl.
Tim: Yes [He gives her an empty bowl.]
Lana: ?Shelly [Asking for somebody else.]
Tim: No Shelly.
Lana: ?Time give Lana this bowl.
Lana: [Erasing the previous sentence.]
Lana: ?Time give Lana name of-this.
Tim: Box name of this.
Lana: Yes.
Lana: ?Time give Lana this box.
Tim: [Gives the box and the conversation repeats with a new object/word, 'cup'' .]

Lexigram Conversation Transcript

- Posted: 18.Mar.2009.




Transcription of Conversation Involving Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Russ, Bonobo Panbanisha, and Dog Mocha. It appeared as an appendix in Janni Pedersen's "Aspects of Repetition in Bonobo–Human Conversation: Creating Cohesion in a Conversation Between Species", which is behind lock and key. The important bit to quote from the abstract is: "The hypothesis is that the bonobo may exhibit even larger linguistic competency in ordinary conversation than in controlled experimental settings. Despite her limited productive means, the bonobo Panbanisha competently engages in co-constructing the conversational turns."

Luckily Language-log has a post and the full transcript which I will include here before it disappears. LanguageLog add the following note: "it is unclear how Panbanisha produces turn 67, transcribed as "Phil". It is not all caps, which it should have been if she touched or pointed to a lexigram on the keyboard. This turn is not mentioned in the text of the article -- perhaps Panbanisha signed "Phil", or perhaps the lack of capital letters is a typographical error."

The transcript conventions used:

Capitalized words signify a word spoken by pointing to the lexigram on the keyboard, which then speaks out the word aloud. Humans often accompany this by saying the word aloud themselves. In other words, in this transcript, when a word is capitalized in the speech of SSR, she points to the lexigram, while both she and the computerised keyboard speak the word aloud. Spoken proper nouns are transcribed with first letter capitalized as ordinarily.

(...) is description of behaviour carried out by the participants, deemed significant for understanding the interchange.

For the rest, I follow standard transcription:

[] are overlaps
= are latches
(0.0) are pauses, indicating the length
(.) is a short pause
? is rising intonation
. is falling intonation, as in the end of a sentence
, is continuing intonation
underlining means that the word is emphasised or spoken hard

[(myl) For clarity, Panbanisha's contributions are in red]


1. PB: CARRY YES
2. SSR: you want Russ to carry you? ((quiet laughter)) instead of the dog. (1.0)
3. Panbanisha i’m going to tell you something (4.5)
4. Russ is going to CARRY the DOG because the DOG is SCARED of
5. PANBANISHA. the dog is scared of you.
6. (1.8)
7. PB: CARRY ((Panbanisha points to the lexigram on the keyboard))
8. (0.5) ((After this first pause, the keyboard speaks out the word)) (0.5)
9. SSR: Panbanisha, we could try to (.) pad the dog and be GOOD.
10. do you wanna try to be [good] to the dog?
11. PB: [vocalises] ((short, fairly quiet peep with one pitch))
12. ((PB takes SSR by the hand and walks some steps towards the dog and Russ))
13. SSR: now hold my hand, we’ll go, no ((SSR pulls Panbanisha back towards her)
14. we have to go (.) panbanisha ((laughter)) we have to go SLOW
15. we have to go SLOW over to the DOG, we have to be GOOD. (.) okay (0.4)
16. maybe we can let the dog come over to see you.(0.1) you don’t think so?
17. you think we can come over there? (1.0)
18. ((SSR gets up and graps Panbanisha by her hands))
19. okay we’re gonna go, we’re not gonna hit the dog,
20. if you don’t go slow, you can’t go over.
21. ((they go toward the dog, SSR holding Panbanisha’s hand.
22. About 4 steps. Panbanisha acts roughly and the dog is barking))
23. Russ: be good heyh
24. ((Panbanisha is being pulled back by SSR))
25. SSR: i don’t think Panbanisha is, (0.2) i think it’s just not gonna work
26. ((laughter))
27. Russ: i think you might be right.
28. SSR: i think Panbanisha is gonna have to play with rough and tie, (.)
29. and Bondo and Smuggels.
30. Russ: started right at the door.
31. ((dog starts barking in the background and Panbanisha walks toward the dog.
32. SSR has Panbanisha in a leach and pulls her back toward her))
33. SSR: Panbanisha the dog is scared of you
34. and the dog doesn’t want to have anything to do with you (.)
35. most of the dogs have to, (0.5) (laughter)
36. Mocha just doesn’t wanna see you panbanisha (.) she wants you to (.)
37. Mocha wants you to (0.2) GO AWAY [that’s what Mocha wants you to do (.)
38. she wants you to]
39. PB: [YES CARRY]
40. ((Panbanisha points to the lexigrams right as the overlaps starts, and the
41. keyboard speaks it aloud right as the overlaps ends.))
42. SSR: NO CARRY, no Russ can’t carry you (0.2) you know what though (0.4)
43. i heard that since Russ was here (.) i heard that Pam was here too?
44. PB: vocalises = ((vocalises with a short peep,
45. one pitch and lower-pitched than the one before.))
46. Russ: = yeah
47. SSR: your friend PAM (.) look i got a name for Pam
48. PB: vocalises ((vocalisation sounds higher and more excited than before.
49. Panbanisha moves three steps toward the keyboard))
50. SSR: this is Pam (0.2) this is Pam (0.2) aha this is Pams name.
51. PB: PINKY
52. SSR: well where did we leave PINKY. I think we left pinky (.) back by the (.)
53. TRAILER maybe we better GO GET PINKY
54. PB: [HOUSE NOW]
55. SSR: [You think we better go get pinky?] you wanna go to the house? YES (.)
56. you know what ((talk not audible, can discern the words food and tv))
57. but right now i? (.) you know what i wanna to do? i wanna to GO LOOK
58. for PAM.(.) i wanna to go look for pam
59. PB: ((points to a lexigram, but cannot see or hear what it is.
60. Then she walks quickly toward the dog—the dog starts barking.
61. SSR pulls panbanisha back))
62. SSR: Panbanisha i wanna tell you something i wanna tell you something. (.)
63. you’re being BAD to the DOG you’re being bad. (0.1) the dog’s being bad and
64. you’re being bad, we got two bad ones (0.3)
65. i’m gonna say no more BAD or SUE’S GONNA GET MAD? again (.)
66. do you want me to be MAD? (0.2) i don’t think you do
67. PB: Phil
68. ((a slight delay (0.3) from pointing to the lexigram until it is spoken aloud,
69. makes a pause of (0.3)))
70. SSR: you like to go see Phil? or Karen ? because i’m getting MAD?
71. [arent i (.) you know what you]
72. PB: [MAD]
73. ((Panbanisha points to lexigram as overlap starts
74. and it is spoken aloud during the overlap))
75. SSR: yes i can get very MAD. (1.0)
76. i need you to be GOOD, to that surprise DOG that’s Mocha, that’s Mocha dog
77. and Mocha dog is SCARED of Panbanisha (.) so we’re gonna do
78. NO GRAP Mocha NO SLAP Mocha no no no no no no no no
79. PB: (points to a lexigram, but cannot see or hear what it is)
80. SSR: i didn’t see that. but you know what i wanna do
81. i wanna look for our friend Pam? Pam? you know what i think we should do ?(.)
82. i think we need to (.) ups (.) TALK on the TELEPHONE.
83. we need to talk on the telephone and try to get a hold of Pam. (0.6)
84. how about if we go to Sue’s office and talk on our TELEPHONE and get mister (.)
85. PINKY on the way (.), could we do that? (0.4)
86. could we go to SUES OFFICE and talk on the
87. PB: TELEPHONE
88. SSR: phone (.) and take mr =
89. PB: = YES TELEPHONE
90. SSR: =yes what? yes telephone [okay]=
91. PB: [CARRY]
92. ((she points to the lexigram, but not hard enough to make it speak))
93. SSR: =yes let’s go (.) ((dog barks)) bad dog can’t go.(0.1)
94. you want Russ to carry you?
95. Russ? can the dog go away and you can carry Panbanisha?
96. Russ: yeah the dog will stay away (.) if i carry Panbanisha the dog will stay away
97. SSR: okay Russ can carry you and the dog will stay away


SSR stands for Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and PB for Panbanisha.Words in all capitals are words spoken on the keyboard.

Alia and Kanzi

- Posted: 18.Mar.2009.


(Click for full size)

Toddler Alia and Bonobo Kanzi went through the same language training. In 'Tools, language, and cognition in human evolution' I have finally found pictures to go with it.

The Language Gene

- Posted: 18.Mar.2009.

Noteworthy paragraph in an article about language in Neanderthals. The obvious experiment would be a new strain of chimps with human FOXP2:

Dr. Paabo has developed mice whose FOXP2 genes have been replaced with the human version. The mice have extra neuronal connections in their brains and make an unusual sound. “There seems to be a change in vocalization — they squeak in a different way,” Dr. Paabo said. “But there are no obvious differences in behavior; in most ways they are normal mice.”

A Good Deal of Ape Language

- Posted: 18.Mar.2009.

Good science writing has a clarity and comprehension that are just awesome to behold. Here is an example of this about our favoutite subject, ape language. Taken from Robbins Burling's ‘Comprehension, production and Conventionalisation in the Origins of Language’ published in ‘The Evolutionary emergence of language’ ed Chris Knight.

If we had been clearer about the ability of human beings, both young and old, to understand more than they produce, we might not have waited so long to ask how much spoken human language non-human primates can learn to understand. Even if an ape is incapable of uttering a single spoken word, an ability to comprehend would demonstrate some genuine knowledge of a language. Anecdotal reports have suggested that captive chimps have sometimes learned to understand a good deal of spoken language even though they said nothing at all. These reports have sometimes been met with some skepticism for the same reasons that parental claims for their children’s ability to comprehend have been doubted, partly because production seems more real than passive comprehension, but also because it is so difficult to measure skill in comprehension. Like people, apes can infer a great deal from the context in which language is used. It is always difficult to know how much any listener, even an ape, depends upon context, and how much upon the language. Hayes and Nissen suggest that Viki learned to understand a considerable amount of spoken English, but they were so eager to teach her to articulate words that they did not systematically study her comprehension (1971). As a result, Viki is remembered for her failure to speak, rather than for her success at understanding.

With the help of Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues, Kanzi, the famous bonobo, has now drastically confirmed the ability of apes to learn to comprehend a significant amount of spoken language. At the age of eight, Kanzi was compared to a two-year-old human child, and their ability to understand English were remarkably similar. Kanzi, like the girl, was to respond correctly to a large number of different words and to a considerable variety of spoken sentences. Kanzi’s receptive skills give far better evidence of linguistic ability than has ever been shown by any nonhuman primate who has been trained to produce language or language-like signals, whether by articulating spoken words, signing, manipulating plastic chips or pressing buttons. Indeed, Kanzi’s ability to comprehend a human language seems sufficiently extensive that he should be credited with a degree of linguistic competence that linguists have most often presumed to be exclusively human. No one need fear that a bonobo or any other ape is about to give serious competition to human children in their speed or thoroughness of language learning, but I do not doubt that Kanzi has learned a good deal of English. The pattern is consistent. Not only humans of all ages, but apes as well, are always able to understand more than they can say.

Douglas Adams on Ape Language

- Posted: 16.Mar.2009.

In Meeting a Gorilla 1993:

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that he would be able to tell us of his life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

Conversation with Koko

- Posted: 12.Mar.2009.

The following is an argument between deaf research assistent Kathy Ransom and gorilla Koko. It has been reconstructed from Francine Patterson's prose into a stardarized conversation form. Patterson concludes "Koko has been driven to her most creative uses of language through her obstinate refusal to submit meekly to dull routine. Indeed, the most telling proof that Koko understands the language she is using is the way she adapts it to express her impatience and other feelings."

Cathy: What's this? [pointing Koko a poster picture of Koko.]
Koko: Gorilla.
Cathy: Who gorilla? [Pursuing the conversational line in typical fashion.]
Koko: Bird.
Cathy: You bird? [Not about to let Koko reduce the session to chaos.]
Koko: You. [By this age Koko was frequently using the word bird as an insult.]
Cathy: Not me, you bird.
Koko: Me gorilla.
Cathy: Who bird?
Koko: You nut. [Koko switches bird and nut from descriptive to pejorative terms by changing the position in which the sign is made from the front to the side of her face.]

[After a little more name-calling Koko gave up the battle.]

Koko: Darn me good.
Koko: Bad Bad Bad [while walking away.]

Untaught Gorilla Signs

- Posted: 11.Mar.2009.


(Click for full size)

In 'The Development of Spontaneous Gestures in Zoo-living Gorillas and Sign-taught Gorillas: From Action and Location to Object Representation' (PDF-link) by Tanner, Patterson and Byrne, we read about gorilla's Koko and Michael use of untaught signs. Untaught seems to be a mild word for 'self-invented'. Some excerpts:

Research in recent decades has shown that zoo-living apes create gestures other than the obviously species-typical, and signing apes regularly employ signs that they have themselves created, in addition to taught signs. We explore the relationship of spontaneous gestures by zoo-living gorillas to those created by a sign language-taught gorilla. In this paper we will use the word “sign” for human sign language taught to apes, and also for gestural inventions by signing apes. “Gesture” refers to inventions by zoo gorillas.

Only two gorillas have been extensively taught a human sign language: Koko (a zoo-born female lowland gorilla) and Michael (a wild-born male lowland gorilla, now deceased). Koko resides at the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, California. Koko was born at the San Francisco Zoo on July 4th, 1971, and is the full sister of Kubie, a principal subject of the first author’s zoo observations. Koko’s exposure to American Sign Language (ASL) and constant interaction with human companions began at the age of one year under the tutelage of the second author, Francine Patterson, who was at the time a graduate student at Stanford University. Koko was simultaneously exposed to a variant of American Sign Language and human (English) speech.

In summarizing the first ten years of Koko’s vocabulary development, Patterson and Cohn (1990) list Koko’s entire vocabulary during these ten years and indicate which of those signs were not taught, but used spontaneously by the gorilla. These spontaneous creations were not a result of deliberate human reinforcement of chance novelty; untaught signs were often not initially comprehended by Koko’s human companions and were ignored or misunderstood until repeated context made the meaning clear. Thus Koko’s untaught signs can be expected to be free from human influence in choice of referents. In some cases, the inventions were for actions, objects, or concepts for which Koko had not been taught a sign; others were for actions, objects, or concepts for which she had been taught a sign but for which she strongly seemed to prefer her own usage. Once acknowledged by humans as part of her vocabulary, untaught signs were neither discouraged nor encouraged, but simply accepted as part of Koko’s repertoire of signs. (It is, of course, possible that humans have failed to understand and interpret some of Koko’s signs. Also, because iconic signs are easier for us to attempt to translate, they might be over-represented in summarizing Koko’s vocabulary.)

Referents of Koko’s Untaught Signs (First 10 Years)

Total invented signs 50

Signs for objects 27 - 54%
Signs for actions 17 - 34%
Other signs 6 (2 for qualities, 2 for states of 12% attention, 2 deictic [pointing])

102 Gorilla Signals

- Posted: 11.Mar.2009.

The paper itself is not readily available but new research by Richard W. Byrne and Joanne Tanner suggests that gorillas have an innate repetoire of 102 hand gestures. I wonder if this is argument for or against language in apes. Also, journalistic simplification notwithstanding, it seems a bit strange for an animal to know so much signals by instinct.

The largest scientific study of the great apes revealed they had a repertoire of 102 different signals - more than any other mammal.

Many of these such as 'disco arm shake' and 'tapping other' were common in all the gorillas studied despite being in different continents. The great apes can communicate with more than 100 hand gestures. The researchers from St Andrews University also found each gesture was carried out with close attention to their audience: silent signals were only given when other apes could see them.

Lead author Professor Byrne said: 'As we added more populations to the study, most gestures that had seemed specific to one individual or one site almost always turned up elsewhere. 'Any two populations are likely to differ a lot in the repertoire of gestures shown, but all are drawn from a very large, species-wide ‘pool’ of possible gestural signals.'

The team concluded that the gestures do not need to be learnt, because they are already part of the natural gorilla communicative repertoire.

'So we think that, just as in the case of communicative gestures, the fact that apes have a huge repertoire of actions can explain how they imitate human demonstrations and why their copies are usually inexact: they are ‘re-using’ actions from their own repertoire, not learning new ones.'

Top 20 Favorite Chimp Words

- Posted: 10.Mar.2009.




Top 20 Favourite Chimp Words (as signed by the apes cared for by Roger Fouts). The picture shows Fouts and Moja. The chimp is on the left.

1. chase
2. hug
3. tickle
4. gum
5. good
6. black
7. food
8. drink
9. go
10. flower
11. masks
12. shoe
13. dirty
14. smell
15. hurry
16. come
17. clothes
18. person
19. this/that
20. peekaboo

Moja Draws Signs

- Posted: 10.Mar.2009.




Moja, a chimp under linguistic care of Roger Fouts, is believed to draw representationally. Her drawings, which are unique for their control and emptiness, are believed to renderings of the moves required to make the ASL signs.


From Thierry Lenain's Monkey Painting.

Birute Galdikas on Ape Language

- Posted: 09.Mar.2009.




Birute Galdikas, the third of Leakey's angels, has worked most of her life with the orang-outangs of Borneo. The following fragment, from a piece by Claudio Dreifus, published in the March 21, 2000, edition of the New York Times, contains further evidence for the central argument of PrimatePoetics that the language this really important is not the one thought to apes, but the one that emergences all by itself between man and ape during prolonged interaction. The image is of Shapiro teaching sign language to Rinnie.

Q. Based on what you've seen, do you believe that orangutans can learn language?
A. I think orangutans can learn how to use language at the level of a 3-year-old child. I had a student in 1978, Gary Shapiro, who came to Camp Leakey and he taught an adult female, Rinnie, sign language. He could not believe how fast she learned it. Rinnie took the tutoring personally. One day, Rinnie took Gary by the hand and tried to seduce him. Gary pushed her away. She thereafter lost all interest in signing. Interestingly, my son, Binti, who was then 2, picked up signing from watching Gary and Rinnie together -- though Binti thought that you could communicate with all orangutans through signs. For a while, he went around and signed with all the animals, even those who'd never been taught sign language.
Q. Did Binti speak orangutan?
A. He could interpret what they meant. He moved it and he felt it. His whole body posture would be like an orangutan.
Q. Did Binti identify as an orangutan?
A. It was heading in that direction.....

Conversation with Chantek

- Posted: 09.Mar.2009.




In the Orion Magazine of March/April 2005 we find a report about a meeting by poet Susanne Antonetta with signing Orang-outang Chantek. I like this for the details, notice how Antonetta makes mention of the almost inhuman simplicity of Chantek's language while Chantek seems to be perfectly aware of what she is saying, who is listening, and to whom she does and not want to talk. The source for the picture of Chantek and Lyn Miles quotes Miles as "(Chantek) can talk about places he doesn’t see. He can talk about things that aren’t present. I can ask him to sign better and he will."

When our van pulls up to Chantek’s habitat he swings out onto one of its inside branches and asks for bottled water, which he calls “car water,” since Lyn usually has some in her car. He’s particular about bottled waters, preferring Naya. Chantek appears as harmlessly shaggy as a Sesame Street figure, the color of a November pumpkin, the size of an enormous easy chair. Because of his strength, though, we’re not allowed into his habitat, so he kisses and strokes Lyn through the bars.

I know very little sign, so Lyn asks Chantek to teach me some. Chantek has an active vocabulary of about three hundred words and a passive vocabulary of a thousand or more, which he can comprehend either by speech or by sign. We start with the basics.

Teach her apple, says Lyn.

Chantek shows me apple, brushing his cheek. I mimic him, and Good, he signs, then asks Lyn what’s wrong with her hand, which has a scratch on the knuckle.

I did it cleaning, she tells him, and he makes a grimace of sympathy, then asks to touch and kiss it.

Lyn introduces me as Writer—which becomes my sign name—the friend of Dawn You Made A Necklace For. Chantek has had surgery recently on his laryngeal flap, the long black fold under the chin that makes orangs look like some kind of colonial barrister, and she asks him how he’s feeling, if the suture’s healing okay. Yes, says Chantek, he’s fine. He has missed Lyn and wants to play ball. Oh, and there’s poop on the other side of the habitat, presumably left there by his companion, Sibu; it’s dirty and he’d like it removed.

Lyn and Chantek speak head to head; her disorderly reddish hair makes them look for a second like mother and son, a repetitious mother, a leaning son anxious not to misunderstand. I stand there like anyone hanging around two family members who chat familiarly, neither of whom you know very well; you try to find ways to interject yourself into the conversation. Mine turns out to be no more mysterious than a bag of yellow raisins, which Chantek loves and my five-year-old son Jin, who flew here with me, got tired of. In other words, with one part of my mind I’m aware of the fact that I’m doing this slightly unreal thing, talking with an orangutan. With another, I’m just a socially awkward person in a group, hoping I don’t say anything stupid, and that I can perhaps say or do something a little memorable.

“Sad,” Chantek says when we, or more precisely, Lyn, leaves.

CHANTEK USES WORDS plus gestures to speak: He might tell Lyn “I you talk,” indicating the other side of the cage, when he wants privacy from me—from my keen and almost predatory listening—as he does several times when I’m there. (He insists on privacy to discuss the poop situation.) His inability or unwillingness to use complicated syntax puts him at a child’s linguistic level, as do other behaviors. In some ways, his resemblance to Jin and every other human child in the world cracks me up. When we give him an apple and ask him to share it with his habitat-mate Sibu, he carefully pulls off a crumb of apple-flesh and hands it to her, the way Jin will share a bit of cookie. “Really share or you can’t have any more,” Lyn scolds orally, and he resignedly breaks off half. He signs over and over—begs—for ice cream and cheeseburgers. Other things I see show a sophistication a child wouldn’t have. Chantek, as always, dabs his mouth clean after eating but surprises both Lyn and me by folding the napkin to a fresh side and sponging out the sutured part of his laryngeal flap, which tends to catch food crumbs. He has never cleaned this area in the past and seems to realize the suture needs special attention. Sibu, an orang who has never had human acculturation, grabs a napkin and begins wiping her own mouth as she watches his slow and deliberate swipes. It’s not quite the apes throwing bones in the air in front of a monolith from the film 2001, but Sibu has clearly, at that moment, absorbed a piece of culture.

Comfortable Hole Byebye

- Posted: 09.Mar.2009.

Second degree information about the language of Koko the ASL signing Gorilla, his word for death is:

'comfortable hole byebye'.

??

Pliny and the Apes

- Posted: 06.Mar.2009.




The Roman history writer Pliny the Elder (23-79) has the following to say about apes in his Natural History, A Selection (Trand J. Healy, Penguin books 1991). From our position Pliny is comical the translator however has clearly not up to scratch with biology because whatever ape Pliny was talking about in the original it most certainly was not an orang-utan. The picture is from the New York Times and the article shows that we still do not know the ape.

The types of ape that are closest to humans in shape are distinguished from one another by their tails. Apes are extraordinarily cunning characters. People say they smear themselves with bird droppings and in imitation of hunters put on nooses, set to catch them, as if they were shoes. Mucianus says that apes with tails have played draughts and can distinguish real nuts from imitations made from wax. They are sad when the moon wanes and worship the new moon with great glee. Other quadrupeds also are afraid of eclipses.

Apes are notably fond of their young. Domesticated monkeys carry their new-born young about. They show them off to everyone and are pleased to have them fussed over, and look like persons who understand they are being congratulated. So in many cases they smother their young by hugging them. The baboon is naturally fiercer, just as an orang-utan is very gentle. Ethiopian apes are almost completely different; they are bearded and have a tail that is wide and flat at its base. The animal is said to be unable to live in any other climate but that of Ethiopia, its birthplace.

How To Learn a Language.

- Posted: 05.Mar.2009.




Just ask by 'singing' it back. (PDF-link).

Are those admirable characters not written by the hands of a man?

- Posted: 14.Feb.2009.


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From 'The Story of the King's Son'. Thank you Craig.

Those merchants that believed they could write well enough to aspire to this high dignity wrote one after another what they thought fit. After they had done, I advanced, and took the roll out of the gentleman's hand; but all the people, especially the merchants, cried out, 'He will tear it, or throw it into the sea,' till they saw how properly I held the roll, and made a sign that I would write in my turn; then they were of another opinion, and their fear turned into admiration. However, since they had never seen an ape that could write, nor could be persuaded that I was more ingenious than other apes, they tried to snatch the roll out of my hand; but the captain took my part once more. 'Let him alone,' said he; 'suffer him to write. If he only scribbles the paper, I promise you that I will punish him on the spot. If, on the contrary, he writes well, as I hope he will, because I never saw an ape so clever and ingenious and so quick of apprehension, I do declare that I will own him as my son; I had one that had not half the wit that he has.' Perceiving that nobody opposed my design, I took the pen and wrote six sorts of hands used among the Arabians, and each specimen contained an extemporary verse or poem in praise of the sultan. My writing did not only excel that of the merchants, but, I venture to say, they had not before seen any such fair writing in that country. When I had done, the officers took the roll, and carried it to the sultan.

The sultan took little notice of any of the other writings, but he carefully considered mine, which was so much to his liking that he said to the officers, 'Take the finest horse in my stable, with the richest harness, and a robe of the most sumptuous brocade to put upon that person who wrote the six hands, and bring him hither to me.' At this command the officers could not forbear laughing. The sultan grew angry at their boldness, and was ready to punish them, till they told him, 'Sir, we humbly beg your majesty's pardon; these hands were not written by a man, but by an ape.'

'What do you say?' said the sultan. 'Those admirable characters, are they not written by the hands of a man?'

'No, sir,' replied the officers; 'we do assure your majesty that it was an ape, who wrote them in our presence.'

The sultan was too much surprised at this not to desire a sight of me, and therefore said, 'Bring me speedily that wonderful ape.'

The Ape People

- Posted: 07.Feb.2009.




The Ape People, Published in 1971, is a mixed bag. The author Geoffrey H. Bourne was director of the Yerkes Primate Centre and has known many famous apes and ape-keepers and researchers. When Bourne talks from personal experience he is very entertaining, (and from our PrimatePoetics perspective useful), but when he discusses subjects like the evolutionary relation between ape and human his science is, to put it mildly, outdated. The title is great.

Bobby the Typing Ape

- Posted: 26.Jan.2009.




Bobby the chimp was partly home-raised by Elizabeth Mann-Borgese, the youngest daughter of Thomas Mann. Mann-Borgese first taught an english setter and an elephant (!) to type dictated words and when this proved a success she wanted to try with a chimp. Bobby could type words like: Bob, Arli, banana, grape, etc. She was sponsored in her work by Olivetti who provided an enormous electric typewriter. When the chimp got older he was moved to the Yerkes Center where his typing stopped. Her book about is is called 'The Language Barrier: Man and Beast' published in 1968. That is also the best I can do for now.

Sarah with Tokens

- Posted: 18.Jan.2009.


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Chimp Sarah with the Premack tokens just visible behind her.

Taking the PrimatePoetic Piss

- Posted: 18.Jan.2009.




Aya Katz runs her own DIY ape-language research project: she is raising the now 6 year old chimpanzee Bow in her own home, teaching Bow to communicate in a lexigram system of her own design. Her lexigrams are actually words in English and Hebrew. Katz kept finding that when Bow gave the wrong lexigram the incorrect lexigram was very similar to the correct lexigram and this led her to believe that Bow knew how to spell!! To verify the lexigrams were replaced with letters (again both in English and Hebrew) and low and behold Bow could not just spell in one but in two languages!!! Interestingly Bow's English often lacked vowels, just like the Hebrew, surely suggesting that Hebrew is the native human tongue, Yes? However when you watch the video you can clearly see Katz guiding the hand of Bow. Given the fact that chimps are endangered I am amazed she can actually own a chimp.

However, no matter how, at best, self-deceptive this may be, it is still part of the PrimatePoetic spectrum.

BOW: Bow wants
AYA: What? What does Bow want?
BOW: 2
AYA: Two what?
Bow: Bananas. (feminine plural).
AYA: What color are they?
BOW: Yellow. (feminine plural),
Aya: What other color are they?
BOW: and black. (feminine plural.)

Ape Language Bulletin

- Posted: 18.Jan.2009.




Science in the making: this 1971 Neurosciences Research Program Bulletin deals entirely with the meaning of the ape language projects of Premack (chimp Sarah) and the Gardner's (chimp Washoe). The Gardner's could not be there but Premack could. Of historic interest, just as the 2nd hand book dealer I bought it from announced.

Nim Signs

- Posted: 04.Jan.2010.

Individual utterances by Nim from http://www.anthrophoto.com


Signing 'black'


Signing 'box'


Signing 'red'


Signing 'smell'


Signing 'thirsthy'

Fundamentally varied

- Posted: 09.Dec.2009.

From a paper (PDF-link) by Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson that argues that the bewildering variety to be found in the world's languages is at odds with the idea that their are universal constants in all of them. Could the following qoute be interpreted as saying that apes have language but are less good at it??

We are the only known species whose communication system varies fundamentally in both form and content. Speculations about the evolution of language that do not take this properly into account thus overlook the criterial feature distinctive of the species. The diversity of language points to the general importance of cultural and technological adaptation in our species: language is a biocultural hybrid, a product of the intensive gene:culture coevolution over perhaps the last 2-300,000 years.

Boom Boom Krak-oo Krak-oo

- Posted: 09.Dec.2009.




Human language has evolved on a biological substrate with phylogenetic roots deep in the primate lineage.

So, what about the vocializations of the Campbell's monkeys of the Ivory Coast?

A first study found (available online) out that they are able to add affixiations to specify or generalize the meaning of a call:

We found that, in all study groups, the adult males consistently produced six different loud alarm call types, "hok" , "hok-oo", "krak", "krak-oo", "wak-oo", and "boom", all of which were perceptually distinct to a human observer.

Some calls were given to a broad, others to a narrow range of events. Crucially, "krak" calls were exclusively given after detecting a leopard, suggesting that it functioned as a leopard alarm call, whereas the "krak-oo" was given to almost any disturbance, suggesting it functioned as a general alert call. Similarly, "hok" calls were almost exclusively associated with the presence of a crowned eagle (either a real eagle attack or in response to another monkey's eagle alarm calls), while "hok-oo" calls were given to a range of disturbances within the canopy, including the presence of an eagle or a neighbouring group (whose presence could sometimes be inferred by the vocal behaviour of the females). On a few occasions, "hok" and "hok-oo" calls were produced in response to a flying squirrel, whose silhouette somewhat resembles a flying eagle, but never to any other large bird.

Already a major break in comparision to earlier studies but a follow-up paper, behind the white-coat firewall but covered here and here reports that Campbell's monkeys can combine these calls into longer sequences which different, constructed meanings according to strict rules.

For example, male monkeys called “boom boom” to gather other monkeys to them, but “boom boom krak-oo krak-oo” meant that a tree or branch was about to fall. Adding a “hak-oo” to that sequence turned it into a territorial warning against stray monkeys from neigboring groups. Multiple “krak-oo” calls added to an original “krak” meant not only that a leopard was in the area, but that it posed an immediate threat.

We want more examples!

The Book of Viki

- Posted: 29.Oct.2009.




It is too bad that I found a Dutch translation of Cathy Hayes' "The Ape in Our House" instead of an English copy because the book is a great read and there would be much to quote. Hayes home-raised chimp Viki and the broad pattern of such projects are now well known but her style is fresh just as the subject itself at that moment. Viki's language skill never went very far but she was nevertheless a friendly and playful ape that was loved and gave love in return and Hayes gives many examples of the cunning ways a chimp toddler is able to sabotage all restrictions put in her way.

What is Nature? The Long View.

- Posted: 28.Oct.2009.




In this longish quote Murray Bookchin starts out by saying that nature and evolution are the same thing (?) before moving into the foothills of PrimatePoetics.

If we look with some care into nonhuman nature as more than a scenic view, we begin to sense that it is basically an evolving phenomenon, a richly fecund, even dramatic development that is forever changing. I mean to define nonhuman nature precisely as an evolving process, as the totality, in fact of its evolution. This encompasses the development from the inorganic into the organic, from the less differentiated and relatively limited world of unicellular organisms into that of multicellular ones equipped with simple, later complex, and presently fairly intelligent neural apparatuses that allow them to make innovative choices. Finally, the acquisition of warm-bloodedness gives to organisms the astonishing flexibility to exist in the most demanding climatic environments.

This vast drama of nonhuman nature is in every respect stunningly wondrous. It is marked by increasing subjectivity and flexibility and by increasing differentiation that makes an organism more adaptable to new environmental challenges and opportunities and renders a living being more equipped to alter its environment to meet its own needs. One may speculate that the potentiality of matter itself-the ceaseless interactivity of atoms in forming new chemical combinations to produce ever more complex molecules, amino acids, proteins, and, under suitable conditions, elementary life-forms-is inherent in inorganic nature. Or one may decide, quite matter-of-factly, that the "struggle for existence" or the "survival of the fittest" (to use popular Darwinian terms) explains why increasingly subjective and more flexible beings are capable of dealing with environmental changes more effectively than are less subjective and flexible beings. But the fact remains that the kind of evolutionary drama I have described did occur, and is carved in stone in the fossil record. That nature is this record, this history, this developmental or evolutionary process, is a very sobering fact.

Conceiving nonhuman nature as its own evolution rather than as a mere vista has profound implications-ethical as well as biological-for ecologically minded people. Human beings embody, at least potentially, attributes of nonhuman development that place them squarely within organic evolution. They are not "natural aliens," to use Neil Evernden's phrase, strange "exotics," phylogenetic "deformities" that, owing to their tool-making capacities, "cannot evolve with an ecosystem anywhere."2 Nor are they "intelligent fleas," to use the language of Gaian theorists who believe that the earth ("Gaia") is one living organism. These untenable disjunctions between humanity and the evolutionary process are as superficial as they are potentially misanthropic. Humans are highly intelligent, indeed, very self-conscious primates, which is to say that they have emerged“not diverged“from a long evolution of vertebrate life-forms into mammalian, and finally, primate life-forms. They are a product of a significant evolutionary trend toward intellectuality, self-awareness, will, intentionality, and expressiveness, be it in oral or body language.

The Ticking Watch

- Posted: 12.Oct.2009.




Viki (sometimes called Vicky but Viki appears to be her real name) was the first ape to be homereared in an ape-language research project. Here she is, listening to a watch, a favourite activity, and listening to a watch in a picture in a magazine. It shows apes 'understand' printed pictures, but, in Viki's case, magically.

Poetry is an Ancient Technology

- Posted: 08.Oct.2009.

Thinking about the art of verse, I have concluded that poetry is an ancient technology, using the primate grunts of vowels and consonants in the service of memory. The medium of poetry, I have concluded, is the human body: specifically, the column of air inside a single human body, shaped into meaning sounds within the voice-box and the mouth. - Robert Pinsky

Primates are actually very bad at producing vocal sounds but, yes, when they do grunt it is with all their strenght.

Ardi: The Newest PrimatePoetic Pioneer

- Posted: 02.Oct.2009.


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Ardipithecus ramidus, aka Ardi, is a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. It is on 'our' line rather than on the chimp line and what we will want to know is it's talent for language.

ASL Conversation Foto Strip

- Posted: 27.Sep.2009.




Fouts and Washoe in Feb 1972, Time Magazine.

Unlearn all Native Language!

- Posted: 25.Sep.2009.

Thus wrote Giambattista Vico somewhere in the early 18th century to the delight of PrimatePoetics centuries later:

The whole art of poetry reduces itself to this, that anyone who wishes to excel as a poet must unlearn all his native language, and return to the pristine beggary of words; by this necessity he will express the feelings of his mind by means of the most obvious and easily perceived aspect of things; he will, by the aid of the senses and the imagination, point the most striking and lovely images of things, manners and feelings; and just as anyone who wishes to be a philosopher must first purge himself of the prejudice of children and common people, so anyone who would write a poem must feel and think entirely according to the childlike and common views of the world. In this way he will become really imaginative, and will compose at once sublimely and in accordance with the popular understanding.

Quoted from Surrealism, edited by Herbert Read, 1971.

The Innermost Alchemy of the Word

- Posted: 08.Sep.2009.

"With these sound poems we should renounce language, devastated and made impossible by journalism. We should withdraw into the innermost alchemy of the word, and even surrender the word, thus conserving for poetry its most sacred domain. We should refuse to make poems second-hand; we should stop taking over words (not to mention sentences) which we did not invent entirely anew for our own use. We should no longer be content to achieve poetic effects which, in the final analysis, are but echoes of inspiration." - Hugo Ball

Shock Heads

- Posted: 03.Sep.2009.

Three qoutes, about ape, neanderthal, evolution and the origin of art and narrative.

"the hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits ...carried hidden in his nature something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters" - Matthew Arnold

"Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him. We can estimate the dangers incurred when we think of the career of Scheherazade in somewhat later times. Scheherazade avoided her fate because she knew how to wield the weapon of suspense -- the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages. - E.M. Forster (Aspects of the Novel, 1954)

"before that, like birds or baboons, with the fall of darkness we sought our perch. Our daytime lives were pragmatic, absorbed with the echoes of survival. The leisure of the evening was for the human being a new ecological niche. There was the security of the shelter or cave, and the social focus of the fire that fascinates us yet today. Here talk became a pleasure, not a necessity. The day’s adventure of the hunt could be told and retold, while children listened and learned. Memories were enhanced, myths began to take form." - Louis Leakey

Nim Language Chart

- Posted: 29.Aug.2009.


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Nice mapping of Nim Chimpsky's language acquisition over time. From Hess's book.

PrimatePoetic Parody

- Posted: 26.Aug.2009.


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Give me a break.

Here Come the Ex-Brutes; the Neanderthal Chapter of PrimatePoetics

- Posted: 16.Apr.2009.




The Neanderthal chapter of PrimatePoetics has now been added to the Grand Grimoire of PrimatePoetics! It is an unfinished chapter but hey! What would you expect?

The *NEW* PrimatePoetics Website is HERE!

- Posted: 17.Aug.2009.

After many incarnations the PrimatePoetics material has again be re-vamped, re-edited and re-charged into a small website. It includes the manifesto, the ape language anthology, the common reader, a fine piece of oral history with Mary E. Wambach and much more.... Go On! You know it will be the most important event in your life!!!









Come Hug and Play.

Orang Lexigrams

- Posted: 19.Aug.2009.




The majority of the 70 symbols (PDF-file) used in the language trainings of the urang-utans at the Great Ape Trusts

Nim Biography

- Posted: 14.Aug.2009.




At first I was afraid Elizabeth Hess' biography of Nim Chimpsky would be a total corker but once your have passed the first chapter, a poor attempt at explaining the science, the story kicks into action and many new things about the informal aspects of ape language research are here recorded for the first time. Nim is a good subject to tell the story of ape language research because it starts at the Chimp Farm in Norman, Oklahamo, moves to New York when Herbert Terrace take Nim under his wing (and the way this was done is a revealing insight into the messy business of day-to-day science), then it moves back to Norman where Nim meets Roger Fouts. Hess's account of Fouts and the Norman far is very important if only because it adds background to the story as Fouts tells it in Next of Kin, a book that Hess shows to be highly selective. Next Nim moves to a primate lab and afterwards to a sanctuary and at each location the people taking care for Nim change in person if not in colourfulness. The final book on ape language research has not been written but this biography is an important landmark.

Kanzi and the Mask

- Posted: 13.Aug.2009.


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To quote Paul Shepard: "Unlike many others animals, primates are preoccupied with faces. In faces the whole world of feelings, intentions, actions, and powers is revealed." Here Kanzi is playing a practical joke. From: Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Stuart Shanker, Talbot J. Taylor, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind, 1998.

Kanzi and the Mask 2

- Posted: 13.Aug.2009.


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From: Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Stuart Shanker, Talbot J. Taylor, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind, 1998.

The Leaf-Playing Urang

- Posted: 12.Aug.2009.




You bacisally just have to go out and actually look at a wild ape to learn something new to science. The researcher making the discovery is from the local uni.

Pre-Poetic Chart

- Posted: 06.Aug.2009.




"Sample of Prior Context Analysis of Nim's utterances" ; From 'Teaching sign language to chimpanzees' by R. Allen Gardner, Beatrix T. Gardner, Thomas E. Van Cantfort.

The Boring Tests

- Posted: 14.Jul.2010.


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LanguageLog reports on a study that would show that "a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences". The chavs are falling behind but as commentator DM writes:

"But I think the boring nature of the test is far more likely to be at play here."

This. This and the fact that test-taking norms are cultural. The successful test-taker must be willing to "mentally sneer," as another poster put it, at dogs in baskets that look more like hamsters in bowls yet obediently answer the question straightforwardly, and proceed through several pages or hours' worth of similar inanities while suppressing the urge to defenestrate. Not everyone is willing to conform to this test-taking norm, or has any incentive to do so. The subjects who are "high achievers" got that way by proving not only their ability to answer the questions but also their willingness to conform to the test-taking norm, despite the fact that taking such a test is like experiencing a brief period of psychosis.

Creative Bonobo Language

- Posted: 02.Jun.2010.

From A Voluble Visit with Two Talking Apes:

Panbanisha once used the symbol for "monster" when referring to a visitor who misbehaved. Bill Fields, a researcher at the Great Ape Trust and a close friend of Kanzi, recalls another time when Kanzi used language creatively. Fields says it was during a visit by a Swedish scientist named Par Segerdahl. Kanzi knew that Segerdahl was bringing bread. But Kanzi's keyboard had no symbol for Segerdahl the scientist. So he got the attention of Savage-Rumbaugh's sister, Liz, and began pointing to the symbols for "bread" and "pear," the fruit.
"Liz got it immediately," Fields says. "She says, 'What do you mean Kanzi? Are you talking about Par or pears to eat?' And he pointed over to Par."

Put the Monster Mask on Your Head

- Posted: 02.Jun.2010.

Kanzi and Alia (a human child age two) were asked the same absurd (novel) questions and scored for their response. Here are some examples, read between the brackets, the bonobo is not thinking like a human, the selection is haphazard but include a lot of examples in which it is suggested that kanzi was trying to speak, sometimes Apish, sometimes English:

288. (C) Put the monster mask on your head. (Kanzi drops the orange that he is eating into the monster mask and then puts the mask on his head.) [C is scored as it assumed that Kanzi wants to continue eating the orange while he has the mask on, not that he misunderstands the request.]
288A. (C) Put the monster mask on your head. (Alia does so.)

289. (C) Go scare Matata. (The monster mask is on his head when this is said. Kanzi goes to the colony room door with the mask on his head but takes it off while waiting for Rose to open the door. The mask is quite hot and makes breathing difficult. Rose tells Kanzi to put it back on if he wants her to open the door. Once in the colony room, Kanzi walks by Matata’s cage with the mask and vocalizes. Kanzi then begins to tease the orangs with the mask, and Rose tells him not to do so because the orangs will grab it. Kanzi takes the mask back from the orangs, puts it on again, and parades up and down in front of Matata’s cage. Matata looks somewhat nervous and stares at Kanzi.) [C is scored because Kanzi goes to the correct area and, when Matata sees him, she appears scared. Kanzi teases the orangs momentarily after scaring Matata but indicates again in a few seconds, without a further reminder, that he knows what he was asked to do. Since Kanzi has never paraded up and down in front of his mother with a mask on before, it is assumed that he understood the intent of the sentence.]
289A. (C) Go scare Nathaniel. (Alia has the monster mask on top of her head from the previous trial. Nathaniel is inside the dinosaur tent. Alia goes to the doorway of the tent and looks at Nathaniel for a moment as she still has the monster mask on top of her head. Nathaniel leaves the tent, and Alia returns to E and says, “I scared Nathaniel.”)

290. (C) Put your collar in the refrigerator. (Kanzi goes to the refrigerator with his collar but is hesitant to open the refrigerator on his own as Rose has not followed him and is not there to open it for him. Kanzi drops his collar on the ground right in front of the refrigerator. Kanzi calls vocally to Rose and gestures to indicate that he wants her to come and open the refrigerator.) [Kanzi is generally not allowed to open the refrigerator on his own. C is scored as it is assumed that Kanzi does not reliably differentiate between in, on, and next to and the intent of the sentence is not to test his understanding of these preposi tions.]
290A. (C) Put your watch in the refrigerator. (Alia picks up her watch and takes it to the refrigerator.) E opens the refrigerator for Alia. (Alia puts the watch in the refrigerator.)

293. (C) Get the monster mask and go scare Panbanisha, and Panzee. (Kanzi makes a sound like “whuh,” which is his sound for scare, and looks at the array, but there is no mask in the array.) E says, “Get your mask and go scare Panban and Panzee.” (Kanzi says, “Whuh,” while he looks around and fiddles with his ball.) E says, “Look for your mask, I know you can’t see it.” [The mask is about 10 feet away.] E says, “Look for it.” (Kanzi gestures to E as a request for E to open the door.) E says, “It’s not back here,” referring to the mask. “It’s out there, go look for it.” (Kanzi finds the mask and goes back to the tool room with it to scare Panbanisha and Panzee, then wants to go into the middle room to scare them also; they are, however, in the tool room. Kanzi is allowed to go past E into the middle room, where he does try to scare Panbanisha and Panzee.) [This is scored as C rather than as C3 because E is not rephrasing the test sentence but is instead trying to tell Kanzi to look for the needed object elsewhere than in the array in front of him. The mask had been moved out of the array, and E did not elect to return it prior to giving the sentence.]
293A. (C) Get your mask and go scare Lisa. (Alia frowns and says, “I don’t want to.” Alia remains in her chair for a moment, then says, “Mommy, I can’t put that on it,” and goes to E behind the mirror. She then asks E, “Will you put that on it?” and gestures toward the array of objects.) E says, “You go get it.” (Alia says, “OK,” then gets the monster mask from the array of objects and carries it to E behind the mirror. E then puts the mask on top of Alia’s head. Alia then goes back into the living room and walks toward Lisa. She stops in front of Katie, turns toward Katie, and giggles as she holds the mask on her head with her hands. Alia then continues to Lisa, who, when Alia approaches, gives an appropriate scared response. Alia then turns away from Lisa and runs back to the testing area.)

309. (C) Give the carrot to Matata. (Kanzi does so.)
309A. (C) Give the carrot to Joshua. (Alia does so.)

310. (C) Give a banana to Kelly. (Kanzi does so, appearing to make a sound like “Kelly” as he hands her the banana.)
310A. (C) Give the banana to Nathaniel. (Alia does so.)


322. (C) Give Sue the umbrella. (Kanzi makes a sound like “uh umm.”) Give me the umbrella. (Kanzi does so.)
322A. (C) Give Mommy the box. (Alia does so.)

326. (C) Take the keys and open the play yard. (Kanzi makes a sound like “whuh” and does so.)
326A. (PC) Take the keys and open the bathroom. (Alia takes the keys and goes over to the table. She stands there and plays with the keys while watching the television screen.)

344. (C) Eat the raisins. (Kanzi attempts to makes a sound like “eat,” then one like “raisins,” then picks up the raisins, makes food barks, and puts them in his mouth.)
344A. (PC) Eat the raisins. (Alia picks up the raisins and wanders over to the couch. She stops. She then goes into the kitchen and comes up behind E.) E laughs and says, “What are you doing?” The trial is terminated since E is no longer in the blind situation as Alia has approached her.

345. (C) Groom the doggie. (Kanzi makes a sound like “groom” as he picks up the doggie, then briefly grooms the doggie with his lips.)
345A. (C) Brush the doggie. (Alia does so.)

388. (PC) Show Rose your lip, your hurt mouth. Show her the hurt on your mouth. (Kanzi looks down at his mouth and protrudes his lip just a bit, then glances at Rose.) [PC is scored because Kanzi does not orient toward Rose or make it reasonably possible for her to note the hurt on his lip, although he does look at her. His lip is protruded too briefly, although Kanzi probably believes that he has carried out the request appropriately and that Rose does not want to look. Showing people cuts that he has received is a common thing for Kanzi to do.]

401. (C) Put the monster mask . . . (Kanzi interrupts) . . . in the refrigerator. Put it in the refrigerator. (Kanzi does so.)
401A. (PC) Put the monster mask in the refrigerator. (Alia gets up, picks up the monster mask, and stops to look at it. Alia sits down and puts her hand in the monster mask’s mouth. She continues to play with the monster mask. Then she turns away.)

The Stuff Those Humans Make You Go Through

- Posted: 02.Jun.2010.


(Click for full size)

Kanzi was asked novel questions (PDF-link) to find out if he was 'parsing' them to understand what was being said or if he was cued or conditioned. The result is a list of questions to which Kanzi's only proper reaction could be "Why on earth do you want me to do that?". All these were asked twice, the first time he responded correct to 29 questions, the second time he responded correct to 31 of them. The above is a stone-flake made by Kanzi.

1. Can you put the apple in the hat?
2. Put the ball in the oil
3. Put the ball on the potty
4. Hide the ball
5. Give your ball a shot
6. Take the ball to the T-room
7. Take the ball to the bedroom
8. Make the doggie bite the ball
9. Put the ball in the bowl
10. Give the doggie some carrots
11. Put the clay on the vacuum
12. Take your collar outdoors
13. Go to the colony room and get the orange
14. Put the ball on the doggie
15. Give the doggie the pine needles
16. Hide the gorilla
17. Take the keys and open the T-room
18. Throw the ball to Liz
19. Put the milk in the water
20. Put the mushrooms in the cabinet
21. Put the oil in the backpack
22. Take the potato to the bedroom
23. Take the rock outdoors
24. Take the doggie outdoors
25. Take the sparklers outdoors
26. Put the rubber bands in the plastic bag
27. Put the sparklers on the TV
28. Eat the raisins
29. Put the pine needles on the TV
30. Put the telephone on the TV
31. Put your ball on the rock
32. Put some paint on the dog
33. Can you put the soap in the umbrella?
34. Put the melon in the tomatoes
35. Put the doggie on the vacuum
36. Knife your ball
37. Take the umbrella to the T-room
38. Can you put the blanket on the doggie?

The Neanderthaler as Ogre

- Posted: 27.May.2010.




HG Wells writes about the Neanderthal in "The Outline of History" (1920), the image with the soft eyes of an aged librarian-ape is from the same book.

We know nothing of the appearance of the Neanderthal man, but this absence of intermixture seems to suggest an extreme hairiness, an ugliness, or a repulsive strangeness in his appearance over and above his low forehead, his beetle brows, his ape neck, and his inferior stature. Or he and she may have been too fierce to tame. Says Sir Harry Johnston, in a survey of the rise of modern man in his Views and Reviews: "The dim racial remembrance of such gorilla-like monsters, with cunning brains, shambling gait, hairy bodies, strong teeth, and possibly cannibalistic tendencies, may he the germ of the ogre in folklore."

We know also that they were right-handed like modern men, because the left side of the brain (which serves the right side of the body) is bigger than the right. But while the back parts of the brain -which deal with sight and touch and. the energy of the body are, well developed, the front parts, which are connected with thought and speech, are comparatively small. It was as big a brain as ours, but different. This species of Homo had certainly a very different mentality from ours; its individuals were not merely simpler and lower than we are, they were on another line. It may be they did not speak at all, or very sparingly. They had nothing that we should call a language.

Before Adam

- Posted: 21.May.2010.

Before Adam is a novel by Jack London, serialized in 1906 and 1907 in Everybody's Magazine. It is the story of a boy who dreams he lives the life of an early hominid Australopithecine (!); What about their language, from chapter 4:

There is one puzzling thing about these prehistoric memories of mine. It is the vagueness of the time element. I lo not always know the order of events;--or can I tell, between some events, whether one, two, or four or five years have elapsed. I can only roughly tell the passage of time by judging the changes in the appearance and pursuits of my fellows.

Also, I can apply the logic of events to the various happenings. For instance, there is no doubt whatever that my mother and I were treed by the wild pigs and fled and fell in the days before I made the acquaintance of Lop-Ear, who became what I may call my boyhood chum. And it is just as conclusive that between these two periods I must have left my mother.

I have no memory of my father than the one I have given. Never, in the years that followed, did he reappear. And from my knowledge of the times, the only explanation possible lies in that he perished shortly after the adventure with the wild pigs. That it must have been an untimely end, there is no discussion. He was in full vigor, and only sudden and violent death could have taken him off. But I know not the manner of his going--whether he was drowned in the river, or was swallowed by a snake, or went into the stomach of old Saber-Tooth, the tiger, is beyond my knowledge.

For know that I remember only the things I saw myself, with my own eyes, in those prehistoric days. If my mother knew my father's end, she never told me. For that matter I doubt if she had a vocabulary adequate to convey such information. Perhaps, all told, the Folk in that day had a vocabulary of thirty or forty sounds.

I call them SOUNDS, rather than WORDS, because sounds they were primarily. They had no fixed values, to be altered by adjectives and adverbs. These latter were tools of speech not yet invented. Instead of qualifying nouns or verbs by the use of adjectives and adverbs, we qualified sounds by intonation, by changes in quantity and pitch, by retarding and by accelerating. The length of time employed in the utterance of a particular sound shaded its meaning.

We had no conjugation. One judged the tense by the context. We talked only concrete things because we thought only concrete things. Also, we depended largely on pantomime. The simplest abstraction was practically beyond our thinking; and when one did happen to think one, he was hard put to communicate it to his fellows. There were no sounds for it. He was pressing beyond the limits of his vocabulary. If he invented sounds for it, his fellows did not understand the sounds. Then it was that he fell back on pantomime, illustrating the thought wherever possible and at the same time repeating the new sound over and over again.

Thus language grew. By the few sounds we possessed we were enabled to think a short distance beyond those sounds; then came the need for new sounds wherewith to express the new thought. Sometimes, however, we thought too long a distance in advance of our sounds, managed to achieve abstractions (dim ones I grant), which we failed utterly to make known to other folk. After all, language did not grow fast in that day.

Oh, believe me, we were amazingly simple. But we did know a lot that is not known to-day. We could twitch our ears, prick them up and flatten them down at will. And we could scratch between our shoulders with ease. We could throw stones with our feet. I have done it many a time. And for that matter, I could keep my knees straight, bend forward from the hips, and touch, not the tips of my fingers, but the points of my elbows, to the ground. And as for bird-nesting--well, I only wish the twentieth-century boy could see us. But we made no collections of eggs. We ate them.

'Uncivilised Writing' and PrimatePoetics

- Posted: 08.May.2010.

The 'post-environmentalist' Dark-Mountain Manifesto contains at its heart an appeal for 'uncivilised writing'; to quote the crucial two paragraphs:

“Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy—to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or destroy their fellow creatures.

Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective—we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed—but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves. “

Writing of course is often seen as the very token of civilization, as the great measuring stick to separate the savage from the human. To argue for voluntary illiteracy to crash ourselves back to the stone-age, as primitivist thinkers like John Zerzan have done, seems a bit drastic, but it is surely true that literature does not need writing. Oral traditions have been able to preserve literatures worth thousands of pages through the centuries. The imagination, intelligence and wit contained in oral traditions, like for instance in the Watunna, a creation cycle from the Orinoco, is of undisputed richness and unarguably created by civilized and ordered minds.

There really is no excuse for the manifesto's howler that calls humans “highly evolved apes”. It is a biological orthodoxy that only creationists will want to argue with that all creatures are equally evolved. We humans are not on a higher plane of evolution than apes, or birds or bacteria. It is difficult, from our perspective as humans, to not think of ourselves as in some ways special. We do not know if animals are of this opinion too, but as Gary Snyder's startling inside goes: “All animals love us”, so maybe they do.

But the central point raised by the Dark-Mountain Manifesto is important; it is time to look outside the bubble, to consider our writing as an outgrowth of literature, as an outgrowth of language, as an outgrowth of communication as an outgrowth of awareness and mind from an angle that incorporates the bigger picture. We have the knowledge to do so and I like to offer my own work on PrimatePoetics as one aspect of what a near-future 'uncivilized writing' might encompass.

All beasts signal, most beasts communicate and some beasts have language. The line between communication, that uses inflexible symbols of some kind, and language, that is flexible and can be refined and redefined at will, is a difficult one. Some will argue that the distinction is hard, that it depends on the availability of grammar and that so far only humans have been proven to be able to acquire language. Others will argue that language is a continuum and that the communication of apes, parrots, whales, dolphins, coyotes and other animals has been shown to fulfil at least some criteria of language. Language does not imply spoken language, the medium is unimportant. Human sign-language are languages in their own right and possibly older than spoken language.

If non-humans have language do they have a literature as well? What are the chances? Let us not get mixed up in funny har-har about the chimpanzee novelist writing the first great-primate-novel and begin with a suitable definition of literature. The modern concept of the novel is not useful in this context. Following Gary Snyder, I like to use the definition proposed by pre-Chomsky linguist Leonard Bloomfield who said in 1933 that “Literature, whether presented in spoken form or, as is now our custom, in writing, consists of beautiful or otherwise notable utterances. “ Literature starts, with other words, with something that is worthy enough to be repeated by someone else. A nice implication of this definition is that a novel or poem unnoticed is not part of literature.

Apes are unwilling to learn a human language, but they will, if they find themselves in a situation that is free and pleasant, to make an effort to try to understand what a human is trying to say to them. And they will also, with patience and deliberation, try to make the human understand what they would like it to know. The open secret of Great Ape Language Research is that these projects are successful only when they are structured in such a way that a pidgin language of ape language can crystallize mutual understanding between the species. These under-reported pidgins are a mixture of human language, ape language spoken by humans, human language used and also perhaps uttered by apes, and artificial language created by humans. For instance, consider this quote from a paper by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi is a bonobo:

Just before we reached the Treehouse, I felt Kanzi’s body began to stiffen, and I noticed that the hair on his legs, which was all I could see of him when he was astride my shoulders, was beginning to come erect. Kanzi made a soft ‘Whuh” sound and gestured to the side of the trail. There, a short distance from my foot, was coiled a very large snake. I screamed and jumped back several feet, almost falling as Kanzi grabbed hold of my head to hang on. Kanzi’s keen eyes had enabled him to give a last-minute warning that had just come in time. I returned Kanzi to Jeannine, found a very long, sturdy stick, and proceeded to prod the snake with the stick, Kanzi produced extremely loud “Waaa” calls, as though to warn me that what I was about to do was dangerous. Each time I actually struck the snake with the stick, Kanzi felt it necessary to “Waaa” yet again. Pretty soon Jeannine and I were “Waaaing” ourselves. “Waaa” seemed to be a pretty good word for “snake”, and when it was uttered with the gusto that Kanzi mustered, the ferocity of the sound itself was almost effective enough to scare the snake away. I soon became so accustomed to giving “Waaa” barks to alert Kanzi whenever I saw a snake in the woods that I began to find myself “Waaaing” even when I was walking home alone and came across a snake.

It shows that ape-language words, if that is what they are, can enter human language. The reverse has been show to be possible too many times. The ape and human language bubbles can exchange items. The Neanderthal and human bubbles might have mixed in the past and remnants of Neanderthalese could be buried in human language. A movement of uncivilized writers might include in its program the attempt to make non-human language enter in human language and vice-versa.

Do apes at current have what it takes to be literati? Have they produced notable utterances? They certainly like stories and they do tell their own. I invite you to explore the collection of PrimatePoetics to make up your own mind. It includes, to my knowledge, the only compendium of ape-language.

The crux of PrimatePoetics is that we ourselves our apes, the third chimpanzee according to Jared Diamond. In looking at the language of the other apes we are also looking at our own language from a distance. PrimatePoetics is not just appending a new chapter, a new language, a new mind, to existing literature, it is completely upstaging the way we have organized language and literature around our Ozymandian selves. In the PrimatePoetic order human language is no longer the immobile centre of language, but just another threshold of language, another example of language amidst the countless number of languages that dot the 15-million-year-long periphery of primate language. PrimatePoetics in other words looks at language as a primate heritage, in comparison to the greater aims of 'uncivilized writing' that is still a modest proposal.

Uncivilised Writing

- Posted: 01.May.2010.

From the Dark-Mountain project (PDF-link to manifesto) come these lines on 'uncivilised writing'. There are many good points but also a few howlers, ("highly evolved apes" as opposed to what? where the the lowly evolved apes??)

Uncivilised writing is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. Apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of their own importance with which to sustain their civilising project. Apes whose project has been to tame, to control, to subdue or to destroy—to civilise the forests, the deserts, the wild lands and the seas, to impose bonds on the minds of their own in order that they might feel nothing when they exploit or destroy their fellow creatures.

Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective—we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed—but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unblinking look at the forces among which we find ourselves.

It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own—a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare—might recognise as something approaching a truth. It sets out to tug our attention away from ourselves and turn it outwards; to uncentre our minds. It is writing, in short, which puts civilisation—and us—into perspective. Writing that comes not, as most writing still does, from the self-absorbed and self-congratulatory metropolitan centres of civilisation but from somewhere on its wilder fringes. Somewhere woody and weedy and largely avoided, from where insistent, uncomfortable truths about ourselves drift in; truths which we’re not keen on hearing. Writing which unflinchingly stares us down, however uncomfortable this
may prove.

It might perhaps be just as useful to explain what Uncivilised writing is not. It is not environmental writing, for there is much of that about already, and most of it fails to jump the barrier which marks the limit of our collective human ego; much of it, indeed, ends up shoring-up that ego, and helping us to persist in our civilisational delusions. It is not nature writing, for there is no such thing as nature as distinct from people, and to suggest otherwise is to perpetuate the attitude which has brought us here.

And it is not political writing, with which the world is already flooded, for politics is a human confection, complicit in ecocide and decaying from within. Uncivilised writing is more rooted than any of these. Above all, it is determined to shift our worldview, not to feed into it. It is writing for outsiders.

If you want to be loved, it might be best not to get involved, for the world, at least for a time, will resolutely refuse to listen.

Kanzi

- Posted: 23.Feb.2010.




Another picture of Kanzi surfaced online.

Mantra and Bird Song

- Posted: 31.Jan.2010.




Are mantras older than language? Are these the oldest notable utterances in current use?? Is ritual the origin of syntax??? Are mantras related (or equivalent?) to bird song???? The ideas are from Frits Staal, the connections and files were delivered by Twitter contacts Fadareu and Tripzilch.

[I]t is not obvious that language is the defining characteristic of man. It is equally consistent with the scanty evidence on man's early activities that language is a relatively recent acquisition in man's biological evolution. In either case, if mantras are prior to language, it should be possible to find them in earlier stages of evolution, either in early man or elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Since the sounds of early man are no longer audible and our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates, have not developed much in the way of vocalization, it may be necessary to look further afield. This is not uncommon in the study of biological evolution. To find parallels to certain features of social organization in man, for example, one may have to turn to insects, who represent a phase of biological evolution entirely different from the mammalian phase to which we ourselves belong. Similarly, to find parallels to human music, one should study whales, frogs, insects, and especially birds. And so it may be rewarding to consider birds and bird songs if one searches for parallels to mantras.

PrimatePoetic Tableaux

- Posted: 07.May.2008.


(Click for full size)

PrimatePoetic Mugshots

- Posted: 05.May.2008.

PrimatePoetic Bribe

- Posted: 28.Apr.2008.




Another brillian quote from RL Garner's Speech of Monkeys. At last something teaching apes something different than English:

It had never been any part of my purpose to teach a monkey to talk; but after I became familiar with the qualities and range of the voice of Moses, I determined to see if he might not be taught to speak a few simple words of human speech. To effect this in the easiest way and shortest time, I carefully observed the movements of his lips and vocal organs in order to select such words for him to try as were best adapted to his ability.

I selected the word mamma, which may be considered almost a universal word of human speech; the French word feu, fire; the German word wie, how; and the native Nkami word nkgwe, mother. Every day I took him on my lap and tried to induce him to say one or more of these words. For a long time he made no effort to learn them; but after some weeks of persistent labor and a bribe of corned beef, he began to see dimly what I wanted him to do. The native word quoted is very similar to one of the sounds of his own speech, which means "good'' or "satisfaction." The vowel element differs in them, and he was not able in the time he was under tuition to change them; but he distinguished them from other words.

In his attempt to say mamma he worked his lips without making any sound, although he really tried to do so. I believe that in the course of time he would have succeeded. He observed the movement of my lips and tried to imitate it, but he seemed to think that the lips alone produced the sound. With feu he succeeded fairly well, except that the consonant element, as he uttered it, resembled "v" more than "f," so that the sound was more like vu, making the ''u" short as in "nut." It was quite as nearly perfect as most people of other tongues ever learn to speak the same word in French, and, if it had been uttered in a sentence, any one knowing that language would recognize it as meaning fire. In his efforts to pronounce wie he always gave the vowel element like German "u" with the umlaut, but the "w" element was more like the English than the German sound of that letter.

Taking into consideration the fact that he was only a little more than a year old, and was in training less than three months, his progress was all that could have been desired, and vastly more than had been hoped for. It is my belief that, had he lived until this time, he would have mastered these and other words of human speech to the satisfaction of the most exacting linguist. If he had only learned one word in a whole lifetime, he would have shown at least that the race is capable of being improved and elevated in some degree.

No, Panbanisha!

- Posted: 28.Apr.2008.

A bonono talks to caretaker Liz Pugh. An ape is always looking for a deal.

Panbanisha: Milk, sugar.
Liz: No, Panbanisha, I'd get in a lot of trouble if I'd gave you tea with sugar.
Panbanisha: Give milk, sugar.
Liz: No, Panbanisha, I'd get in a lot of trouble.
Panbanisha: Want milk, sugar.
Liz: No, Panbanisha, I'd get in so much trouble. Here's some milk.
Panbanisha: Milk, sugar. Secret.

The Speech of Monkeys

- Posted: 23.Apr.2008.




We have encountered Richard Lynch Garner before. In 1892 he published another Primatepoetic classic: 'Speech of Monkeys'.

One has to admire Garner's common sense. Some long quotes.

The records that I made of various specimens of the simian rce I repeated to myself over and over until I became familiar with them and learned to imitate a few of them, mostly by the use of mechanical devices. After having accomplished this, I returned to Chicago, and went at once to visit a small Capuchin monkey whose record had been my chief study. Standing ear his cage I imitated a sound which I had translated " milk;" but from many tests I concluded it meant "food," which opinion has been somewhat mdified by many later experiments that lead me to believe that he uses it in a still wider sense. It is difficult to find any formula of human speech equivalent to it. While the Capuchin uses it relating tofood and sometimes to drink, I was unable to detect any difference in the sounds. He also seemed to connect the same sound to every kindly office done him and to use it as a kind of " Shibboleth." More recently, however, I have detected in the sound slight changes of inflection under different conditions, until I am now led to believe that the meaning of the word depends somewhat, if not wholly, on its modulation. The phonetic effect is rich and rather flute-like, and the word resembles somewhat the word "who." Its dominant is a pure vocal "u," sounded like "oo" in "too," which has a faint initial "wh," both elements of which are sounded, and the word ends with a vanishing "w." The literal formula by which I would represent it is "wh-oo-w." The word which I have translated "drink" begins with a faint guttural "ch," glides through a sound resembling the French diphthong "eu," and ends with a slight "y" sound, as in "ye."

So far I have found no trace of the English vowels " a, " " i, " or " o, " unless it be in the sound emitted under stress of great alarm or in case of assault, in which I find a close resemblance to the vowel "i" short, as in "it,"

ONE of the most intelligent of all the brown Capuchins that I have ever seen was Nellie, who belonged to a dealer in Washington. When she arrived there I was invited to call and see her. I introduced myself in my usual way, by giving her the sound for food, to which she promptly replied. She was rather informal, and we were soon engaged in a chat on that subject the one above all others that would interest a monkey. On my second visit she was like an old acquaintance, and we had a fine time. On my third visit she allowed me to put my hands into her cage and handle her with impunity. On my next visit I took her out of the cage and we had a real romp. This continued for some days, during which time she would answer me on all occasions when I used the word for food or drink. She had grown quite fond of me, and always recognized me as I entered the door.

...

The uniform expression of the emotions of man and simian is such as to suggest that if thought was developed from emotion and speech was developed from thought, the expressions of emotion were the rudiments from which speech is developed.

A striking point of resemblance between human speech and that of the simian is found in a word which Nellie used to warn me of approaching danger. It is not that sound which I have elsewhere described as the alarm-sound, and which is used only in case of imminent and awful danger, but a sound used in case of remote danger or in announcing something unusual. As nearly as I can represent the sound by letters it would be u e-c-g-k," and with this word I have been warned by these little friends many times since I first heard it from Nellie.

This is only one of a great many points in which the speech of simians coincides with that of man. It is true we have no letters in our alphabet with which to represent the sounds of their speech, nor have we the phonetic equivalence of their speech in our language ; but it is also true that our alphabet does not fully represent or correctly express the entire phonetic range of our own speech ; but the fact that our speech is not founded upon the same phonetic basis, or built up into the same phonetic structures, is no reason that their speech is not as truly speech as our own. That there are no letters in any alphabet which represent the phonetic elements of simian speech is doubtless due to the fact that there has never been any demand for such; but the same genius that invented an alphabet for human speech, actuated by the same motives and led by the same incentives, could as easily invent an alphabet for simian speech. It is not only true that the phonetic elements of our language are not represented by the characters of our alphabet, but the same is true to some extent of our words which do not quite keep pace with human thought. In the higher types of human speech there are thousands of words and ideas which cannot be translated into or expressed by any savage tongue, because no savage ever had use for them and no savage tongue contains their equivalence. The growth of speech is always measured by the growth of mind. They are not always of the same extent, but always bear a common ratio. It is a mental product, and must be equal to the task of coining thoughts into words. It is essential to all social order, and no community could long survive as such without it. It is as much the product of mind and matter as salt is the product of chlorine and sodium.

Comparative Neuroimaging

- Posted: 21.Apr.2008.




The emergence of language required major modifications in how the brain is wired. Here we see compared the structure of arcuate fasciculus, a large white matter tract, in humans, chimpanzees and macaques. The connections between frontal and temporal lobes in the chimp and macaque are much weaker than in humans, which means less connection with brain areas related to speech. What it suggests is that language is not an organ.

I wanted to Learn but Could not Understand

- Posted: 21.Apr.2008.




All Great PrimatePoetic quote from Apes, Language, and the Human Mind

Matata clearly possessed the idea of purposeful communication, and I could not escape the impression that she often vocalized to attempt to tell me things - things I did not understand. I know that I certainly vocalized to tell her things that she did not understand. Thus, each of us remained locked into communication systems that worked with our own species but did not work at all between us. I wanted to learn more about her communication system, but she did not know how to teach me. Likewise, she wanted to learn more about my communication system, but I did not know how to teach her. To overcome these barriers between us, I and other scientists endeavored to employ a visual communication system with apes. By pointing to visual symbols, we could avoid the problems inherent in asking apes to produce sounds.

I Want to Hold

- Posted: 18.Apr.2008.


(Click for full size)

Probably Nim in PrimatePoetic action.

A Diabolical Caricature of Ourselves

- Posted: 18.Apr.2008.




Konrad Lorenz on us and the chimpanzee. (pic)

An inexorable law of perception prevents us from seeing in the ape, particularly in the chimpanzee, an animal like other animals, and makes us see in its face the human physiognomy. From this point of view, measured by human standards, the chimpanzee of course appears as something horrible, a diabolical caricature of ourselves. In looking at the gorilla or the orang-utan, which are less closely related to us, our judgement is correspondingly less distorted. The heads of the old males may look to us like bizarre devils' masks, impressive and even aesthetically appealing. However, we cannot feel like this about the chimpanzee: he is irresistibly funny and at the same time as common, as vulgar, as no other animal but a debased human being can ever be. This subjective impression is not altogether wrong: there are reasons for supposing that the common ancestor of man and the chimpanzee stood not lower but considerably higher than the chimpanzee does today. Absurd though the contemptuous attitude of man to the chimpanzee may be in itself, its strong emotional content has nevertheless misled several scientists into building up entirely unfounded theories about the origin of man: his evolution from animals is not disputed, but his close relationship to the repulsive chimpanzee is either passed over in a few logical skips or circumvented by sophistic detours.

The chimpanzee, however, is irresistibly funny just because he is so similar to us. What is worse is that in the narrow confinement of zoological gardens, adult chimpanzees degenerate much in the same way as human beings would under comparable circumstances, and give an impression of real dissoluteness and depravity. Even the normal chimp observed in perfect health gives the impression not of an extremely highly evolved animal but rather of a desperate and debased human being.

Ghost of Chance (Deep Ecology with William Burroughs)

- Posted: 15.Apr.2008.




I have always had a soft spot for Burroughs' 'Ghost of Chance', a novelette about Captain Mission and the Lemur. On rereading it, it struck me what a good primer this book is to the work of the later Burroughs. Very concise and clear, with good examples of Burroughs scant humor and intelligence. If this is not for you: do not bother to read the rest. What also had my attention is Burroughs use here of Julian Jaynes's theory of the Bicameral mind. But Burroughs takes it in the opposite direction with a metaphor only Burroughs could come up with:

Man sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance. And to make sure he doesn't get out of line, these invaders keep an occupying garrison in his non-dominant brain hemisphere. How else to explain anythinga s biologically disadvantageous as a weak hand? They gave with one hand and took back with the other. Fifty-fifty. What could be fairer than that? Almost anything.

So it seems that the distinguishing factors, language and weak hand, are related. It seems unlikely that language was designed solely to convey information.

A rift is built into the human organism, the rift or cleft between two hemispheres, so any attempt at synthesis must remain unrealizable in human terms. I draw a parallel between this rift separating the two sides of the human body and the rift that divided Madagascar from the mainland of Africa. One side of teh rift drifted into enchanted timeless innocence. The other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war, exploitation, and slavery.

It seems that merging the two is not viable, and one is tempted to say, as Brion Gysin did, 'Rub out the Word'.

Chimpanzees have Dialects

- Posted: 08.Apr.2008.




Old news (1994), an article by Meredith Small at NewScientist about dialects in the calls of male Chimpanzees and its deeply social function to establish group identity. Dialects are not genetic but reinforced (learned?) over time. The piece concludes with an overview of the changing view on animal language:

Until the 1970s, scientists assumed that animals - unlike humans - only produced noise in response to some sort of inter-nal emotional state. For example, alarm calls were supposedly a product of high anxiety and fear. It followed that animals were ruled vocally by the more primitive, reflex centres of the brain, while human vocalisations were controlled by the 'higher', rational centres of the brain found in the cerebral cortex.

Mitani's discovery of chimpanzee accents is the latest in a long line of research challenging these assumptions. In 1967, field observations from East Africa showed that the small, green-grey monkeys called vervets have a complex system of alarm calls, one for each major predator: leopard, eagle and large snake. Much more recently, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, now of the University of Pennsylvania, proved that vervet monkeys could use their alarm calls referentially. When vervets heard the recording of a particular type of alarm call, they reacted appropriately without any visual sightings of the predator. To a vervet, the leopard alarm call isn't just an uncontrolled scream let out in fear; the sound also carries with it specific information that represents, and warns against, the leopard.

In the 1980s it also became clear that the sounds made by monkeys carry important social information. Harold and Sarah Gouzoules observed a group of rhesus macaques on Cayo Santiago island off the coast of Puerto Rico to determine whether the monkeys actually 'know' what they hear. The Gouzouleses recorded the screams of juvenile animals in trouble with various opponents, and then played those screams back to their mothers. By carefully monitoring the mothers' responses the researchers could show that the screams denoted the opponent's rank, blood relationship to the screamer, and the quality of the aggressive interaction. When the opponent eliciting the scream was high-ranking and not a relative the mother ran towards the tape speaker.

It Is Not Sacrosanct!

- Posted: 07.Apr.2008.




How the definition of language is changed to keep animals out of the door. From Richard Byrne’s The Thinking Ape.

… the determination to believe in may ‘unique’ traits of humans is rather pervasive, and definitions of the traits get changed to rule new facts out of court. Language, for instance, used to be defined as a communication system with arbitrary relations between concept and signal pattern; until the deciphering of the dances of bees forced a re-think. Bees encode the distance and compass the direction of a source of honey in their waggle dances, performed in the dark inside the hive. The bearing of the flowers to the sun is encoded in the angle at which the bee dances to the vertical, and the distance is away if measured by the waggle rate, both awkwardly arbitrary relations. So, language became the ability to learn and bestow new relationships, which bees can’t do. But this has been challenged by experiments with captive chimpanzees (challenged, that is, if the idea that language is uniquely human must be sacrosanct). Now ‘real’ language has become equated with syntax, with which chimpanzees have trouble. No doubt this will persist until some animal turns out to use syntax to structure its communication. It looks very much as if preserving human uniqueness has become a goal of its own.

KoKo The Corker

- Posted: 26.Mar.2008.




In the field of PrimatePoetics Gorilla Koko is the odd one out: reared in isolation and her skills hyped by her trainer Debbie Bultitude which has led to much media exposure (like this Flickr-Pool ) but little sense. But what a sad background story Koko has.

Daniel Dennet on Vervetese

- Posted: 26.Mar.2008.

In june 1983 Daniel Dennet visited Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney and their colony of vervet monkeys in Amboseli National Park, in Kenya. Vervets the best studied monkeys when it comes to language and in 'Out of the Armchair and Into the Field' (to be found in his book Brain Children) Dennet describes the science, the language and tells us what the vervets taught him about minds and about the social conditions needed to allow language to bloom. For our purposes the approach he offers to 'translating' vervetese to human is most intriguing:

A vocalization that Robert and Dorothy are currently studying has been dubbed the Moving Into the Open (or MIO) grunt. Shortly before a monkey in a bush moves out into the open, it often gives a MIO grunt. Other monkeys in the bush will often repeat it--spectrographic analysis has not (yet) revealed a clear mark of difference between the initial grunt and this response. If no such echo is made, the original grunter will often stay in the bush for five or ten minutes and then repeat the MIO. Often, when the MIO is echoed by one or more other monkeys, the original grunter will thereupon move cautiously into the open.

But what does the MIO grunt mean? I suggested to Robert and Dorothy that we sit down and make a list of possible translations and see which we could eliminate or support on the basis of evidence already at hand. I started with what seemed to be the most straightforward and obvious possibility:

"I'm going"

"I read you. You're going."

But what would be the use of saying this? Vervets are in fact a taciturn lot, who keep silent most of the time, and are not given to anything that looks like passing the time of day by making obvious remarks. Like E.F. Hutton, when a vervet talks, others listen. "Well, then," I asked, "could it be a request for permission to leave?"

"May I go, please?"

"Yes, you have my permission to go."

This hypothesis could be knocked out if higher ranking vervets ever originated the MIO in the presence of their subordinates. In fact, higher-ranking vervets do tend to move into the open first, so it doesn't seem that MIO is a request for permission. Could it be a command, then?

"Follow me!"

"Aye, Aye, Cap'n."

Not very plausible, Dorothy thought. "Why waste words with such an order when it would seem to go without saying in vervet society that low-ranking animals follow the lead of their superiors? For instance, you would think that there would be a vocalization meaning 'May I?' to be said by a monkey when approaching a dominant in hopes of grooming it. And you'd expect there to be two responses: 'You may' and 'You may not' but there is no sign of any such vocalization. Apparently such interchanges would not be useful enough to be worth the effort. There are gestures and facial expressions which may serve this purpose, but no audible signals."

Perhaps, Dorothy thought, the MIO grunt served simply to acknowledge and share the fear:

"I'm really scared."

"Yes. Me too."

Another interesting possibility was that the grunt helped with coordination of the group's movements:

"Ready for me to go?"

"Ready whenever you are."

A monkey that gives the echo is apt to be the next to leave. Or perhaps even better:

"Coast clear?"

"Coast is clear. We're covering you."

The behavior so far observed is compatible with this reading, which would give the MIO grunt a robust purpose, orienting the monkeys to a task of cooperative vigilance. The responding monkeys do watch the leave-taker and look in the right directions to be keeping an eye out.

"Suppose then, that this is our best candidate hypothesis," I said. "Can we think of anything to look for that would particularly shed light on it?" Among males, competition overshadows cooperation more than among females. Would a male bother giving the MIO if its only company in a bush was another male? Robert had a better idea: suppose a male originated the MIO grunt; would a rival male be devious enough to give a dangerously misleading MIO response when he saw that the originator was about to step into trouble? The likelihood of ever getting any good evidence of this is minuscule, for you would have to observe a case in which Originator didn't see and Responder did see a nearby predator and Responder saw that Originator didn't see the predator. (Otherwise Responder would just waste his credibility and incur the wrath and mistrust of Originator for no gain.) Such a coincidence of conditions must be extremely rare.

The Vervet Monkey Dictionary

- Posted: 24.Mar.2008.




Vervet Monkey calls are the best studied of all language-like vocalizations in apes. Much finely detailed information can be transmitted throughout a colony, but the interesting part perhaps is that the frequency, nature and act of using this language depends largely on social dynamics (male v female, high-ranking v low-ranking). Vervet's have been observed to 'lie'. The number of lemma's in this dictionary shows how complex this system is. The picture is of a monkey calling but I am not sure it is a vervet.

chutter: This is a low-pitched, monotonal and staccato vocalization. The mouth is closed and the teeth are covered, and this call is emitted by adult females and juveniles. This call is used to express aggressive threat and also is used to solicit support from other group members.

bark: This call is low-pitched and gruff in sound. This call is emitted by adult and subadult males. This call is given towards other vervet monkeys who are fighting, it is emitted to stop the fighting.

intergroup grunt: This call consists of nasal grunts that have a short range. This call is emitted by males in response to seeing members from another group while on patrol of a territory.

squeals and screams: These calls are high-pitched and tend to be piercing. The mouth position varies for these calls and the teeth may be covered or not. These calls are emitted by females and juveniles that are seeking help from threats by an aggressor.

woof-woof: This call is non-tonal, deep, and has a guttural sound. The mouth is closed or slightly opened. This call is emitted by subordinate males to show submission.

wa: This call is a continuous tonal exhalation that occurs with a grimace. This call is emitted by subordinate males to show submission.

woof-wa: This call is a combination of the woof-woof and the wa. This call is emitted by subordinate males to show submission.

long aar: For this vocalization the mouth is slightly open and puckered and the teeth are covered. This call is emitted by females and juveniles in response to trespassing by non-members of the group. This call brings other group members to the area.

rraugh: For this call the mouth is closed or partially opened and the teeth are covered. This call is emitted by yearlings when they approach older members of the group, and is a signal of nonaggression.

teeth-chattering: For this sound the teeth chatter, and is given by adult and subadult males. This is usually given when grooming and sometimes as a response to red-white-and-blue.

progression calls: This call consists of nasal grunts that have a short range, and they are emitted by group members to no specific receiver when the group starts to move. The calls are emitted by all group members over the age of 4.5 months, and the calls tend also to communicate who is giving the call because there some individual variation amongst callers.

purring: This call is very quiet and is given by juveniles when they are play-wrestling.

uh: This call functions as a response to minor predators and is emitted by all group members except infants. This call is low-intensity in nature.

nyow: This call is given in response to the sudden appearance of minor predators and is given by all group members except the juveniles; this call is moderate in intensity.

chirp: This call is low in frequency, and is short and sharp; the mouth is wide open and the teeth are exposed. This call carries for a long distance and is emitted by females and juveniles in response to a major mammalian predator.

rraup: This call is short and rough and not repeated. The call is given by females and juveniles in response to avian predators, and group members respond by leaving the tree tops and/or running into thickets.

threat-alarm bark: This call is like the rraup, but is given repeatedly. This call is emitted by adult and subadult males and serves to communicate an aggressive threat.

rrr: This call is emitted by infants and juveniles to communicate distress to their mothers and/or other group members.

eh, eh: This call is given by infants and juveniles upon a reunion with their mothers. This call is quiet, short, and non-tonal in nature.

Dwarf v Monkey

- Posted: 18.Mar.2008.




Italian Culture at it's peak; a quote from a 1544 sports event adds a biblical touch to our PrimatePoetics theme:

There was a bit of entertainment in the form of a combat between the dwarf and a really good monkey that belongs to the Provveditore.The dwarf had two injuries, one in the shoulder and the other in the arm, while the monkey was left with his legs crippled. The monkey eventually gave up and begged the dwarf for mercy. The dwarf, however, didn’t understand the monkey’s language and having seized the monkey by the legs from behind, kept beating his head on the ground. If My Lord the Duke [Cosimo I de’ Medici] hadn’t stepped in, the dwarf would have gone on to kill him. The dwarf fought naked, having nothing to protect him except a pair of undershorts that covered his private parts. Suffice it to say that the dwarf was the victor and he won ten scudi in gold, which had been secured by pledging the ring of the Bishop of Forlě.

Commentary about the perceived monkey language states:

Since the Renaissance monkey was eponymous with "apeing", or thoughtless imitation, it is noteworthy that he is here credited with having a "language" as such, especially one which the dwarf could not understand. If animals were granted any form of semiotic capability, it was generally the use of simple, unmediated and primitive signs, directly expressing their animal needs, rather than any rational utterance. The reference to the monkey's "language" might thus tell us more about the semiotic limitations of the dwarf, and the wisdom of the Granduke, than an epistemic shift in comparative semiotics. The ability to understand unknown languages, even gestural codes, was considered a sign of wisdom, having its locus classicus in the biblical meeting of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, since these two did not have a spoken language in common.

Bonobo V Chimp V Long Perished Homonoid

- Posted: 14.Mar.2008.




Differences in vocalization between chimpanzees and bonobos and the likeness between bonobo and Australopithecus.

The earliest study comparing bonobos and chimpanzees was carried out in the 1930s at Germany's Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich. The three bonobos used in the study, incidentally, were so terrified by Allied bombardment of the city during the war, they died of heart failure.

Among the differences noted: The more vocal bonobos are sensitive, lively and nervous, while chimps are coarse and hot-tempered; bonobos defend themselves by kicking with their feet, while chimps pull attackers close and bite; a bonobo's voice contains "a" and "e" vowels, but chimps use more "u" and "o" vowels; and although physical violence is rare among bonobos, with chimps it's common.

The Lost Monkey Dictionary

- Posted: 12.Mar.2008.

This is a quote from a quote from a quote of unknown origin. Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821 – 1890) was an explorer and monkey language decipherer. The fact that his dictionary is lost only adds to the appeal.

“His language studies continued unabated and his interest in the science of the spoken word led him to conduct an interesting experiment with some pet monkeys. Curious as to whether primates used some form of speech to communicate, he gathered together forty monkeys of various ages and species and installed them in his house in an attempt to compile a vocabulary of monkey language. He learned to imitate their sounds, repeating them over and over. And he believed they understood some of them. Each monkey had a name, Isabel, his wife, explained. He had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and one tiny one, very pretty, small and silky looking monkey he used to call his wife and put pearls in her ears. His great amusement was to keep a kind of refectory for them where they all sat down on chairs at mealtimes and the servants waited on them and each had its bowl and plate with the food and drink proper for them. He sat at the head of the table and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a baby’s high chair… He had a list of about sixty words before the experiment was concluded, but unfortunately the results were lost in a fire in 1860 in which almost all his early papers perished.”

These Sounds are Literally Inhuman

- Posted: 12.Mar.2008.




Babel's Dawn has a post on Gibbon songs.

Serious musical interactions are not arias but duets or more. Apart from ourselves, the best examples in the primate world that Masataka comments on come from gibbons, Asian apes... These sounds are literally inhuman. They contain no syllables and they are "biphasic," meaning they are made by both inhaling and exhaling. Yet something recognizable is going on. These two sad animals imprisoned in a small zoo cage are plainly engaged in some sort of vocal interaction. Careful study of many such interactions has established a stereotypical, repetitive quality that seems to rule out meaningful exchanges. So they are not discussing the weather, but they are doing something together, something that seems unrelated to food, sex, or territory. In the wild, however, their duets may be more functional. Gibbons are unusual in that they are monogamous and need to be able to forge and maintain strong pair bonds.

Does this not sound like a description of a Dada soiree by a small-minded art-lover?

The DaDa Genes of the Gibbons

- Posted: 12.Mar.2008.




Thomas Geissmann's 'Gibbon Song and Human Music from an Evolutionary Perspective' (PDF-link) opens with a quote from 1600 year old Chinese song and you know: this is Crystalpunk material.

Sad the calls of the gibbons at the three gorges of Pa-tung;
After three calls in the night, tears wet the [traveler's] dress.

to continue with:

Of the gibbons or lesser apes, Owen (1868) wrote: “... they alone, of brute Mammals, may be said to sing.” Although a few other mammals are known to produce songlike vocalizations, gibbons are among the few mammals whose vocalizations elicit an emotional response from human listeners, as documented in the epigraph.

There are 12 species of gibbons in in four subgenera, and the subgenera are apparently more different from one another genetically than humans are from chimps. Gibbon duets are specie-specific and are genetically programmed. A Gibbon of one (sub-)specie will always sing its own song even when it was raised without ever hearing it being sung by others and while living together with species of other singing gibbon. But Gibbons in zoos often cross-breed and the hybrid gibbon offspring produce hybrid songs, which are a predictable amalgam of the songs of the parents' species.

It is unclear what purpose the songs have, let alone what they 'mean':

Apparently, most songs are produced either without any recognisable external stimulus or in response to songs of neighboring groups. Only occasionally are they produced in response to alarming situations (I repeatedly observed Hainan crested gibbons directing great calls to me).

Functions most frequently suggested for duet songs include territorial advertisement and strengthening of pair bonds. The latter in particular is a matter of debate and “has not yet been demonstrated in any animal species that sings”. According to Brockelman, “this function of duetting is poorly understood, for it is not clear how exactly duets would do this, or what kind of evidence would support the idea. In short, there is no explicit paradigm for analysing such communicative behavior.”

Gibbon songs might be nonsense sound poems with no other logic to them than the fun of performing them. This gives a clue to the evolutionary origins of DaDa.

The Binary Putty-Nosed Monkey

- Posted: 11.Mar.2008.




Nigerian putty-nosed monkeys only have two calls "hack" and "pyow", but like in binary code, they combine these to form sentences.

* hack: eagle.

* pyow-pyow: leopard.

* hack-hack-hack-hack: "There's an eagle over there!"

* Pyow-hack-hack-pyow-pyow-pyow: "I've seen a leopard, let's move away!"

* Hack-hack-hack-pyow-hack-hack-hack-hack-hack "There's an eagle over there, let's move away!"

The fact that lowly monkeys master such a skill shows that the principles behind the I Ching (and therefore the computer) have an evolutionary past older than man.

Language Log has the savage angle of the white coats.

Picture.(not a Putty-Nosed Monkey)

So Much Like a man in Most Things

- Posted: 03.Mar.2008.




In august 1666 Samuel Pepys was to first to speculate that apes are able to learn langauge:

[W]e are called to Sir W. Batten's to see the strange creature that Captain Holmes hath brought with him from Guiny; it is a great baboon, but so much like a man in most things, that though they say there is a species of them, yet I cannot believe but that it is a monster got of a man and she- baboon. I do believe that it already understands much English, and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs.

The Speech of Chimpanzees

- Posted: 03.Mar.2008.




Richard Lynch Garner's 'Gorillas & Chimpanzees' (1896) was written in a time science was still a gentlemanly pursuit. In polite slow-paced but self-confident prose the author gives us probably the first serious discussion of language in apes. The following is a long string of quotes, the claims made are extraordinary and the offered transscription method for calls are a great moment in PrimatePoetics.

The speech of chimpanzees is limited to a few sounds, and these are confined chiefly to their natural wants. The entire vocabulary of their language embraces perhaps not more than twenty words, and many of them are vague or ambiguous, but they express the concept of the ape with as much precision as it is defined to his mind, and quite distinctly enough for his purpose. In my researches I have learned about ten words of his speech, so that I can understand them, and make myself understood by them. Most of these sounds are within the compass of the human voice, in tone, pitch, and modulation ; but two of them are much greater in volume than it is possible for the human lungs to reach, and one of them rises to a pitch more than an octave higher than any human voice. These two sounds are audible at a great distance, but they do not fall within the true limits of speech. The vocal organs of this ape resemble those of man as closely as any other character has been shown to resemble.

Although the sounds made by the chimpanzee can be imitated by the human voice, they cannot be expressed or represented by any system of phonetic symbols in use among men. All alphabets have been deduced from pictographs, and the symbol that represents any given sound has no reference to the organs that produced it. The few rigid lines that have survived to form the alphabets are conventional, and within themselves meaningless, but they have been so long used to represent these sounds of speech that it would be difficult to supplant them with others, even if such were desired.

As no literal formula can be made to represent the phonetic elements of the speech of chimpanzees, I have taken a new step in the art of writing by framing a system of my own, which is rational in plan and simple in device.

[D]eaf mutes are able to distinguish the sounds of speech and reproduce them, although they do not hear them. By close study and long practice they learn to distinguish the most delicate shades of sound. In this plain fact lies the clue to the method I have used. It is, as yet, only in the infant state, but it is possible to be made, with a very few symbols, to represent the whole range of vocal sounds made by man or other animals. The chief symbols I employ are the parentheses used in common print. The two curved lines placed with the convex sides opposite, thus, ( ), represent the open glottis, in which position the voice will utter the deep sound of "O." The glottis about half closed utters the sound of " U," as in the German, and to represent this sound a period is inserted between the two curved lines, thus, (.). When the aperture is contracted still more it produces the sound of " A " broad, and to represent this a colon is placed between the lines, thus, (:). When the aperture is restricted to a still smaller compass the sound of " U " short is uttered, and to represent this an apostrophe is placed between the lines, thus, ('). When the vocal cords are brought to a greater tension, and the aperture is almost closed, it utters the short sound of " E." To represent this sound a hyphen is inserted between the lines, thus, (-). These are the main vowel sounds of all animals, although in man they are sometimes modified, and to them is added the sound of " E " long, while in the ape the long sounds of " O " and " E " are rarely, if ever, heard.

From this vowel basis all other sounds may be deduced, and by the use of diacritics to indicate the movement of the organs of speech, the consonant elements may be easily expressed. A single parenthesis, with the concave side to the left, will represent the initial sound of " W," which seldom, but sometimes, occurs in the sounds of animals. When used, it is placed on the left side of the leading symbol, thus, )(), and this symbol, as it stands, should be pronounced nearly like " U-O," but with the first letter suppressed, and almost inaudible. Turning the concave side to the right, and placing it on the right side of the symbol, it represents the vanishing sound of " W," thus, ()(. This symbol reads "O-U," with the "O" long, and the "W " depressed into the short sound of " U." The apostrophe placed before or after the symbol will represent " F " or " V." The grave accent, thus, ('), represents the breathing sound of " H," whether placed before or after the symbol, and the acute accent, thus, ('), will represent the aspirate sound of that letter in the same way. When the symbol is written with a numeral exponent, it indicates the degree of loudness. If there is no figure, the sound is such as would be made by the human voice in ordinary speech. The letter "X" will indicate a repetition of the sound, and the numeral placed after it will show the number of times repeated, instead of the degree of loudness. For example, we will write the sound (.), which is equivalent to long " U," made in a normal tone, the same symbol written thus (.)2 indicates the sound, made with greater energy, and about twice as loud. To write it thus, (.)X2, indicates that the sound was repeated, and so on. One peculiar sound made by these animals, which is described in connection with the gorilla, appears to be the result of inhalation, but I know of no other animal that makes a sound in this manner. As an example of the use of this method, we will write the French word " feu," which Moses mastered, thus, '('), which is equivalent to " vu" with the " U " sounded short, the other word "wie," in German, thus, )('), which is pronounced almost like "wu," giving " u " the short sound again.

I shall not lead the reader through the long and painful task by giving the entire system as far as I have gone, but what has been given will convey an idea of a system, by means of which it will be possible to represent the sounds of all animals, so that the student of phonetics will recognise at once the character of the sound, even if he cannot reproduce it by natural means. It would be tedious and of no avail to the casual reader to reduce to writing here the sounds made by the chimpanzee ; but it may be of interest to mention and describe the character and use of some of them. Perhaps the most frequent sound made by all animals, appears to be that referring to food, and therefore it may claim the first place in our attention. This word in the language of the chimpanzee begins with the short sound of the vowel " u " which blends into a strong breathing sound of "h," the lips are compressed at the sides, and the aperture of the mouth is nearly round. It is not difficult to imitate, and the ape readily understands it even when poorly made.

Another sound of frequent use among them is that used for calling. The vowel element is nearly the same, though slightly sharpened, and merges into a distinct vanishing " w." The food sound is often repeated two or three times in succession, but the call is rarely ever repeated, except at long intervals. One sound is particularly soft and musical, the vowel element is that of long " u " as in the German. This blends into a "w," followed by the slightest suggestion of the short sound of " a." It appears to express affection or love. This sound is also the
first of the series of sounds attributed to the gorilla.

The most complex sound made by them is the one elsewhere described as meaning "good." They often use it in a sense very much the same as mankind uses the word "thanks," but it is not probable that they use it as a polite term, yet the same idea is present.

There are other sounds which are easily identified but difficult to describe, such as that used to signify "cold" or "discomfort"; another for "drink"; another referring to " illness," and still another which I have good reason to believe means "dead" or "death." There are perhaps a dozen more that I can distinguish, but have not yet been able to determine their meaning. I have an opinion as to some of them which I have not yet verified. The chimpanzee makes use of a few signs which seem to be fixed factors of expression. He makes a negative sign by moving the head from side to side, but the gesture is not frequent or pronounced. Another negative sign, which is more common, is a motion of the hand from the body towards the person or thing addressed. This sign is sometimes made with great emphasis, and there can be no question as to what it means.

In conclusion, I will say that the sounds uttered by these apes have all the characteristics of true speech. The speaker is conscious of the meaning of the sound used, and uses it with the definite purpose of conveying an idea to the one addressed ; the sound is always addressed to some definite one, and the speaker usually looks at the one addressed ; he regulates the pitch and volume of the voice to suit the condition under which it is used ; he knows the value of sound as a medium of thought. These and many other facts show that they are truly speech.

Natural Communication of Apes and the Origin of Language

- Posted: 29.Feb.2008.




Apes frequently gesture with limbs and hands, a mode of communication thought to have been the starting point of human language evolution. In line with the gestural hypothesis of human language origins, which is further supported by differential growth of the brain and vocal apparatuses, as seen in paleoarchaeological remains, the appearance of gestural communication in human infants before speech, and the right-hand (hence left-brain) bias of both ape and human gestures. The ape homologue of Broca's area (i.e., Brodmann's area 44) is enlarged in the left hemisphere. In monkeys, this area is activated during both the production and perception of gestures but not vocalizations. It has been speculated, therefore, that the neural structures underlying manual movements in the great apes, perhaps also including tool use, are homologous with the lateralized language areas in the human brain.

Gesture remains very much alive in human communication. Recent research demonstrates the universal importance of gesture to human cognitive functioning, such as enhanced information transfer, lexical retrieval, and even the provision of a supplemental cognitive arena for thought. Gesture production in humans is so automatic that it is relatively immune to audience effects: blind subjects gesture at equal rates as sighted subjects to a known blind audience.

Read all about in "Ape gestures and language evolution" by Amy S. Pollick and Frans B. M. de Waal.

Michael's Dictionairy

- Posted: 17.Feb.2008.


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We have met Gorilla Michael before as a painter but here we can see him signing.

From Thinking Ape by Richard Byrne, Oxford University press.

A Brief Word From Our Chimp

- Posted: 25.Jun.2008.


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Kokomo Jr was a TV-chimp that was taught to speak with little succes. He does not feature in our PrimatePoetic who-is-who which is an oversight we will correct in due time.

"It took four months to get him to make a sound with his vocal cords. That was the hardest," says Corrado. "Then another three months to make him shape his lips, mouth and jaws. I found he couldn't make the 'm' sound without overlapping his upper lip with his lower lip by about half an inch."

The view that Apes are Capable of Language is Atheistic

- Posted: 25.Jun.2008.


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On Language and Bipedalism by Justin E. H. Smith is a great discussions of some quarks in the work of Edward Tyler. Bipedalism is one of two things we use to seperate us from the beasts. Language is the other. Tyler showed that apes were bipedalists but the language problem was something of a dillema.

But can they speak? This would be something more than a proprium quarto modo -- a property universally shared by the members of a species that nonetheless does not serve to constitute their essence. Tyson explicitly sees the view that apes are capable of language as atheistic, and as a 'romance of antiquity'. As Richard Serjeantson notes of the early modern period, "An unsuitable anatomy… was one of the principal reasons for denying animals the capacity for articulate speech. They were widely taken to lack the right equipment of palate, larynx, tongue, lips… For this reason… the miraculous constitution of the human speech organs served as a powerful proof in natural theology".

Tyson shares in the majority view of animal language in the early modern period, yet, as we shall see, his own account of ape anatomy in the region of the mouth and throat poses a serious explanatory problem for him. No one in the 17th century is on record as defending the view that animals were capable of the sort of rich and flexible, referential vocal utterances that we today attribute to a grasp of syntax in human beings. Much more common was the view that animals were equipped to communicate to one another whatever they might have the need to communicate within the context of their animal lives, whether by calls or by visual signals, and that there was no reason in principle to consider this sort of communication inferior to human speech. This latter view is associated with certain radical deniers of human uniqueness among creatures, such as Girolamo Rorario with his 16th-century treatise That Animals Make Better Use of Reason than Humans, as also with those figures who hoped to set the art of physiognomic divination on a proper scientific footing, such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre and John Bulwer.

Tyson for his part is very clearly worried about the particular physiological likeness of apes and humans in the region responsible, at least in humans, for the production of speech: "As to the Larynx in our Pygmie," he writes, "I found the whole Structure of this Part exactly as 'tis in Man ... And if there was any further advantage for the forming of Speech, I can't but think our Pygmie had it. But upon the best Enquiry, I was never informed, that it attempted any thing that way. Tho' Birds have been taught to imitate Humane Voice, and to pronounce Words and Sentences, yet Quadrupeds never; neither has this Quadru-manous Species of Animals, that so nearly approaches the Structure of Mankind, abating the Romances of Antiquity concerning them."

Here, then, Tyson explicitly accounts for all reported instances of teaching animals to speak as mere imitation, and not as indicative of any conscious activity. He goes on to write of the larynx that "Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Galen have thought [it] to be the Organ which Nature has given to Man, as to the wisest of all Animals; for want perhaps of this Reflection: For the Ape is found provided by Nature of all those marvellous Organs of Speech with so much exactness ... that there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto; for, according to these Philosophers, Apes should speak, seeing that they have the Instruments necessary for Speech."

Well then, why aren't they speaking? Tyson repeats his conviction that the only explanation lies in the fact that anatomy is not, to borrow a phrase, destiny, that one cannot infer from the organs a creature has what it will be able to do: "From what is generally received, viz. That the Brain is reputed the more immediate Seat of the Soul it self; one would be apt to think, that since there is so great a disparity between the Soul of a Man, and a Brute, the Organ likewise in which 'tis placed should be very different too. Yet by comparing the Brain of our Pygmie with that of a Man; and with the greatest exactness, observing each Part in both; it was very surprising to me to find so great a resemblance of the one to the other, that nothing could be more ... Since therefore in all respects the Brain of our Pygmie does so exactly resemble a Man's, I might here make the same Reflection the Parisians did upon the Organs of Speech, That there is no reason to think, that Agents do perform such and such Actions, because they are found with Organs proper thereunto: for then our Pygmie might be really a Man."

But this is an odd sort of reasoning, particularly in view of the fact that, as concerns bipedalism, Tyson is perfectly willing to reason that the ape is capable of this simply in view of the fact that "'tis sufficiently provided in all respects to walk erect." Why does sufficient provision translate into a capability in the one case but not in the other?

By the late 18th century, we find Lord Monboddo offering a different account of Tyson's findings regarding the presence of speech organs in apes, but the absence of speech. For him, the great apes are "a barbarous nation, which has not yet learned the use of speech." He argues that since, as Tyson has shown, they possess the organs necessary to speak, what prevents them is only that they have never been educated, just as "men, living as the Orang Outangs do, upon the natural fruits of the earth, with few or no arts, are not in a situation that is proper for the invention of language."

The Anatomy of a Pygmie

- Posted: 25.Jun.2008.







Edward Tyler (1650-1708) is regarded as the founder of comparative anatomy. In 1698, he dissected a chimpanzee and the result was the book Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. The Pygmie was a core interest of Tyson as is shown by the title of another book: A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients. It transpires that in the dark past people often mismatched the little people with the apes.

"I take him to be wholly a Brute, tho' in the formation of the Body, and in the Sensitive or Brutal Soul, it may be, more resembling a Man, than any other Animal; so that in this Chain of the Creation, as an intermediate Link between an Ape and a Man, I would place our Pygmie."

Apentaal

- Posted: 24.Jun.2008.




Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829-1884) was a German zoologist whose works are publicly available only in Dutch. Therefore a quote about Ape language in that lovely pre-war Dutch I love so much. Rough translation of the first two sentences: "So far as we can speak of an ape language, we can call her rich: each ape has available widely differing sounds for different conditions. Humans can easily learn the meaning of these sounds."

Voor zoover er van een apentaal sprake kan zijn, mag men haar rijk noemen: iedere Aap heeft althans zeer afwisselende geluiden voor verschillende aandoeningen tot zijne beschikking. Ook de mensch leert weldra de beteekenis van deze geluiden kennen. Vooral het geschreeuw dat ontsteltenis beteekent, en altijd een aansporing tot vluchten inhoudt, is zeer eigenaardig. Hoewel het zeer moeilijk te beschrijven, en nog minder gemakkelijk na te bootsen is, kan men er toch dit van zeggen: het bestaat uit een aantal opeenvolgende, kort afgebrokene, als ’t ware trillende en wanluidende klanken, welker waarde de Aap door gezichtsverdraaiingen nog sterker doet uitkomen. Zoodra dit waarschuwend signaal gehoord wordt, slaat de bende zoo schielijk mogelijk op de vlucht. De moeders roepen hare kinderen tot zich, die in een oogwenk aan haar lichaam hangen, en begeven zich met deze dierbare vracht ten spoedigste naar den naastbijgelegen boom of rots. Eerst als de apenhoofdman tot bedaren is gekomen, voegen de leden van de bende zich weer bijeen, om na korten tijd van beraad naar het zoo even verlaten oord terug te keeren, en de gestoorde plundering te hervatten.

How Chimps Entered the West [Via Holland]

- Posted: 24.Jun.2008.


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Texts from the early days of evolution are strange time-pieces in which zoology and ethnography are one and the same. What follows are some quotes from a piece by by Carter Blake, first published in Edinburgh Review in April 1863. It describes how the west learned of the ape/monkey. Also check this and this the pic shows two preserved chimps.

The Homo sapiens of Linnćus, which the learned Swede defined to be in its wild aboriginal state, fourfooted, mute, and hairy, and which, brought under the more civilized influences of clothing and social habits, expanded into the American, European, Arabic, African races–besides the monstrous varieties comprising the cretin of the Alps, the giant of Patagonia, the Hottentot; the short and pyramidal-skulled Chinese, and the flatheaded Indian of Canada,–represented the idea which our ancestors formed of the human animal a hundred years ago. Linnćus, however, admitted a second species of man, as he deemed the Homo nocturnes, or Troglodytes. He considered this animal to be white, always erect, the hands reaching the knees, concealing itself during the daytimes virtually blind, and accustomed to wander forth in the night for plunder. Although its language was an unintelligible hiss, the attributes of thought and reason are predicated by Linnćus of his Homo nocturnus, in which there is reason to believe that the characters of the chimpanzee and those of the white negro, or Blaford, were confusedly intermingled. The Swedish naturalist, however, while he thus misconceived the zoological character of the great ape from West Africa, appreciated in its true signification the systematic value of the other equally gigantic form of ape, which exists in the Indian archipelago, his Simia satyrus; and although he erroneously applied to this ape the term "chimpanzee," we recognise under this description the oran-ůtan of later writers.

If the zoologist attempts to find in the feeble and vague sketches of the manlike apes which were given by the elder naturalists, anything approaching to the accuracy of definition now essential to the systematic idea of species, he will be grievously disappointed. The work of Tyson, 'A philosophical Essay concerning the Pigmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs and Sphinges of the Ancients, wherein it will appear that they were all either Apes or Monkeys, and not Men, as formerly pretended,' furnishes an example of those speculations by which our forefathers sought to identify the traditions of mythology with the forms of zoological life. We shall entirely pass over, therefore, the controversy, not capable of any practical demonstration, whether the animals which Hanno and his companions flayed and deposited in the Punic temples, and termed [gorillai], being of the feminine gender, were actually the same ape which is now germed 'n'gina,' or 'n'guyla,' (unde derivavit, fide Burton 'gorilla') on the banks of the Gaboon. Some confusion seems to have arisen in the minds of zoologists respecting the precise import and meaning to be attached to the word 'n'tscheleigo' or 'engeco,' applied to the chimpanzee. It has been alleged that this word is of native origin. Philological researches, however, cast doubt on this deduction. We think the conjecture very probable, that the early Spanish voyagers, who, under the Portuguese flag, visited the Gaboon in the 15th and 16th centuries, were eye-witnesses to the existence of two species of anthropoid apes. The larger was the n'gina or gorilla; the smaller one, the species which we now name 'chimpanzee,' the Spanish sailor would term el chico, 'the little one.' The transition of the negro mouth from the diminutive el chico to engeco, or n'scheigo, is obvious. However this may be, we have the undisputed fact that in the year 1652, at the time of Battell, the distinction of the two apes into gorilla and chimpanzee was as marked as in the present day.

It is highly creditable to the state of English knowledge that such a work as that of Tyson should have been published at the end of the 17th century; and the honour of the first monograph on the subject is due to this writer. Sixty years afterwards, our Swedish neighbours, who had followed in the steps of Tulpius, Bontius, and Aldrovandus revived the absurd statements of their predecessors, and produced illustrative proofs, in which (for example, the Lucifer Aldrovandi) was represented with the finely-turned calves and graceful ankles peculiar to the human species. The same artistic laxity which gave to all the representations of the negro races of Senegal and Congo the physiognomy of Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Spaniards, equably prevailed in the figures presented of the anthropoid apes.

The first living specimen, however, of a true anthropoid, whose aspect should have led the continental naturalists to consider the absurdity of the representations which they continued to publish for a century afterwards, was that which Tulpius portrays in 1641, from a specimen sent to Holland as a; present to Frederick Henry Prince of Orange. Afterwards, in the time of Buffon, the progress of discoverers under the auspices of the French Government enabled that great naturalist to study a living specimen of the chimpanzee, and about the same time an adult specimen of the gibbon (Hylobates lar) was described by him. The progress of our knowledge of these great forms of life since that period has been vast, and numerous specimens enrich the museums of Europe. The Dutch naturalists, Camper and Vosmaer, produced valuable memoirs on the oran-ůtan in 1778-9. Baron von Wurmb was the first traveller who published accurate observations on the oran-ůtan in its adult state, which he termed pongo, adopting the name used previously for the African form, and derived from the nation (the Mpongwé) in whose vicinity the great black ape was first observed. Erroneous observations led some French zoologists to erect the pongo of Borneo into a genus distinct from the oran-ůtan. Later and more correct facts, ascertained by Owen, demonstrated the complete identify of Wurmb's pongo with the adult oran-ůtan, and revealed to us the existence of a smaller Bornean form; while the progress of commercial and missionary enterprise in equatorial Africa had led to the discovery of those remarkable forms–the gorilla, the baldheaded ape, the kooloocamba, which have recently, through the labours of Dr. Savage and Du Chaillu, become even popularly familiar to us.

The Urang-Utang Theory

- Posted: 06.Jun.2008.




Those silly Christians. The primitive as the jaded ones. From: 'On the Study of Words' by Richard C Trench. Shown is Azy, a slow learner of human language, but what l u s h eyes!

It might, I think, be sufficient to object to this explanation, that language would then be an _accident_ of human nature; and, this being the case, that we certainly should somewhere encounter tribes sunken so low as not to possess it; even as there is almost no human art or invention so obvious, and as it seems to us so indispensable, but there are those who have fallen below its knowledge and its exercise. But with language it is not so. There have never yet been found human beings, not the most degraded horde of South African bushmen, or Papuan cannibals, who did not employ this means of intercourse with one another. But the more decisive objection to this view of the matter is, that it hangs together with, and is indeed an essential part of, that theory of society, which is contradicted alike by every page of Genesis, and every notice of our actual experience--the 'urang-utang theory,' as it has been so happily termed--that, I mean, according to which the primitive condition of man was the savage one, and the savage himself the seed out of which in due time the civilized man was unfolded; whereas, in fact, so far from being this living seed, he might more justly be considered as a dead withered leaf, torn violently away from the great trunk of humanity, and with no more power to produce anything nobler than himself out of himself, than that dead withered leaf to unfold itself into the oak of the forest. So far from being the child with the latent capabilities of manhood, he is himself rather the man prematurely aged, and decrepit, and outworn.

Child or Pet

- Posted: 17.Jun.2008.




There has just been published a new biography of PrimatePoet Nim Chimpsky, written by Elizabeth Hess. If this means more articles like this will follow we can only be happy.
In the mean time research into language in wild chimpanzees continues to be exciting, pant-hoots wav's included.

If Terrace had initially assumed that he would have some control over Nim's life, he was wrong. Nim clung to Stephanie wherever she went. His formal instruction began when he was just three months old. The LaFarges began with the word 'drink', taking Nim's hands and moulding them into the sign. After two weeks, without prompting, he signed 'drink' to Stephanie and demanded some juice. It was a landmark moment. Within two months he added, 'give', 'up', 'sweet' and 'more' to his vocabulary. Project Nim had begun.

Beguiling photos of the bright, adorable chimp popped up in the press. The 'talking' chimp was invited on late-night talk shows, where he might crawl all over the host and request a drink. A New York magazine cover turned Nim into a celebrity; people followed the progress of Project Nim word by word. 'Nim's early mastery of signs was very encouraging,' declared Terrace as he pulled together a team of graduate students to design a more efficient experiment, where the chimp would build his vocabulary faster.

Indoors, Nim would wash dishes, often over and over, and help prepare dinner. He loved pranks. While Laura-Ann Petitto, another handler, was busy cooking, he would steal her favourite spoon and hide it. When Petitto found it, she and Nim would have a good laugh together. The LaFarges, however, rarely came to visit, and Nim suffered terrible homesickness. Staff came and went and Nim began biting his caretakers. Still, his vocabulary grew, and the funds flowed.

After four years, Terrace argued that the chimp had a vocabulary of more than 100 words; the students had documented Nim signing 20,000 combinations of words. Nevertheless, after one of Nim's teachers was badly bitten in the face, Terrace decided to end Project Nim. He had the data and no longer needed the chimp. Arrangements were made to send Nim back to IPS, where Lemmon would teach him how to be a chimp again. No more toys, clothes or pizzas, his favourite meal.

Nim had never been in a cage or met another chimpanzee, and the transition would be traumatic. He was eager to communicate with people, and after a few months of terrible anxiety and fights with his cellmates, a keeper began to work closely with him, teaching him how to read the gestures of other chimps and stay alive. Nim began coming forward in his cage, signing 'out' to passing students. One, Bob Ingersoll, became Nim's best friend, if not saviour. Each day, for several years, Ingersoll took Nim out to climb trees and pick mulberries.

The Gibbon in Chinese Art

- Posted: 13.Jun.2008.


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The Gibbon Conservation Alliance recently published #4 of their Gibbon Journal and to our great surprise it starts with the lengthy 'Gibbon paintings in China, Japan, and Korea' written by Thomas Geissmann. Geissmann has surveyed 818 Gibbon paintings and gives some clues to their special symbolical status in ancient China. A must read.

Chinese paintings depicted gibbons in a large number of functions and contexts, for instance as symbols of Daoist and Buddhist origin. In Japan, however, the genre was introduced by Zen (=Chan) monks, and the large majority of Japanese gibbon paintings depict the old Buddhist theme “Gibbons grasping for the reflection of the moon in the water”.

From the Han dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) onward, references to gibbons in all literary forms are plentiful. The gibbon was characterized as more aloof and mystical in its solitary lifestyle, whereas the macaque was identified as being fickle, vulgar, and known to create a nuisance (Harper, 2001). The difference was even more accentuated in later periods. Liu Zongyuan’s (= Liu Tsung-yüan) “Zeng wangsun wen” (“Essay on the hateful monkey breed”) portrays the macaque as the “bad monkey” in contrast to the gibbon as the “good monkey”.

the gibbon was considered an “expert” in since more than 2,000 years, becoming “a symbol of inhaling the qi, “thereby acquiring occult powers, the unworldly ideals of the poet and the philosopher, including the ability to assume human shape, and to and of the mysterious link between man and nature”, prolong their life to several hundred years”. In addition, gibbons (and cranes) are famous for their melodious calls and their graceful movements. Like the crane, gibbons were kept as pets by the literati.

Funky Gibbon

- Posted: 08.Jun.2008.




Funky Gibbon was a 1975 smash hits by The Goodies. Too bad they are aping the wrong creature. Would make a nice addition to PrimatePoetics is Here though.

Come on everybody
It's gibbon time

We're the Goodies
How do you do?
We've just been down to the zoo
We saw a monkey in a cage
Doing a dance
That could be the rage
It's not hard
So let's all do the funky gibbon
Ooo, ooo, ooo

Do, do, do the funky gibbon
(The funky gibbon)
We are here to show you how
Ooo, ooo, ooo
Ooo, ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
He's just like you
So come on and do
The funky gibbon now

Dogs are always howlin'
Cats are always yowlin'
But gibbons only
Like to sing and dance
Oop, oop, sh boop

You'll be like that monkey
Get a little funky
And in a while
Start to smile
Gibbon half a chance

Do, do, do the funky gibbon
(The funky gibbon)
Log on to kill this message.
We are here to show you how
Ooo, ooo, ooo
Ooo, ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
(The funky gibbon)
He's just like you
So come on and do
The funky gibbon now

Ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
Ooo, ooo, ooo the funky gibbon

Gee, the world would be good
I ?????
Me, with just a little gibbon tea
Sha, la, la

We slap that gibbon
Oh, feel the rhythm
And you'll groove
And dance up to the planet of apes

Do, do, do the funky gibbon
We are here to show you how
Ooo, ooo, ooo
Ooo, ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
(The funky gibbon)
He's just like you
So come on and do
The funky gibbon now

Ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
Ooo, ooo, ooo the funky gibbon

Ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
Ooo, ooo, ooo the funky gibbon

Now everybody get ready
To do the funky gibbon
Drop one arms down by your knees
And the other arm
Reach up to the trees

Let your wrist go limp
Like a bent baboon
Get ready to sing
This gibbon's tune

Will you give me an ooo
(Ooo)
Will you give me another ooo
(Ooo)
And will you give me an ooo
(Ooo)
Now put 'em together
What've you got
(Ooo, ooo, ooo)

Do, do, do the funky gibbon
We are here to show you how
Ooo, ooo, ooo
Ooo, ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
(The funky gibbon)
He's just like you
So come on and do
The funky gibbon now

Ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
Ooo, ooo, ooo the funky gibbon

Ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
Ooo, ooo, ooo the funky gibbon

He promised to buy me
A bunch of blue gibbons
To tie up my bonny brown

Ooo, ooo, the funky gibbon
The funky gibbon

To Imagine a Form of Language is to Imagine a Form of Life

- Posted: 08.Jun.2008.




"To Imagine a Form of Language is to Imagine a Form of Life" - Cy Twombly

Straight to my PrimatePoetic and BacterioPoetic and EthnoPoetic heart this one, found at the excellent 83Russel

Everything About PrimatePoetics You Always Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask.

- Posted: 16.May.2008.




Can you explain PrimatePoetics in one sentence?

Great apes using human language are creating a new literature.

Which ape novels can you recommend?

That is the typical dumbwitted misapprehension we are hoping to combat. There is the stock image of a barbaric horde of chimps banging away at random on typewriters in some library basement. And there is the stock image of the learned gorilla discussing prosody with his peers. Reality, as always, is to be found in the space between these two ridiculous images. The fact is: all great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orang-utans) can be taught some derivative form of non-verbal human language; be it sign language, the Yerkish system of word-lexigrams or some other system. It has taken a few decades before researchers learned how to teach apes, but now they know how to do it the results have been spectacular. Those who are still saying that apes can't have language should get up to speed with recent developments. For us the crucial point is this: our language once passed on to a different kind of mind becomes a new language. And a new language obviously means the start of a new literature.

Is PrimatePoetics real? Or is it a prank? Or are you just extremely gullible?

We are not gullible: science knows that all apes have language, even dialects, in the wild, and that the great apes have more of it. The biological features that enable us to be creatures of language pre-date our species. One implication of this is that in discovering the language of the great apes as a literature of interest in its own right, we are actually rediscovering a long lost undercurrent part of our own literature.

Your experience of this language is indirect and second-hand. What do you hope to contribute to this field what the scientists with the intimate knowledge of real apes cannot?

It is true that we are far removed from the fire and must rely on the documentation provided by the various scientists running these projects. What we can add is a different, freer perspective. Our viewpoint will make us see things others can't. But PrimatePoetics also traces the impact ape language will have on human language. The many inventive names given to new objects by gorilla Koko are all perfect material for t-shirts and band names. PrimatePoetics also includes material written by humans for apes.

You are aware of the fact that many people, from religious zealots to ground breaking scientists have severe doubts about all efforts wasted on teaching language to apes? Language after all is what separates us from the beasts.

Language is not a yes-or-no proposition, language is a continuum. It is better to see a little than to be blind. Human language, and the human capacity for language, is probably more sophisticated than what we find elsewhere in nature. Every experiment compares the language ability of apes with that of a human toddler. But you must keep in mind that we are setting the standard for the animal to live up to. This is unfair to the ape. It is unfair to us as well as it prevents us from seeing what could be done and what might still happen. A teacher without confidence is his or her pupil will teach nothing.

Is literature not a too big a word to describe what your apes are producing?

All literature starts with the first known examples of its use, and this means that the inane dialogues about M&M's and faeces we have included in our “PrimatePoetics is here” pamphlet are to be regarded as part of primate literature. We do expect language-apes to move forward but it will take time.

Are you saying that for the moment everything these apes are saying is poetry?

We are using the term poetry in a special sense. Poetry is a state of language in which we can't be sure to recognize it if we see it. Notice that our definition rejects as poetry most of the stuff written in broken lines which passes for poetry today. The very fact that there is still furious debate about the very existence of ape language shows that the language is still in its poetic phase. Once everybody agrees that what Kanzi, Washoe and Panbanisha are producing can only be language, the PrimatePoetic ceases to be.

You argue that PrimatePoetics is the greatest event in literature in 4000 years. How do you substantiate this mad claim?

The mythical date given for the discovery of written Chinese in the patterns of is 2000 BC. As Chinese is the oldest written language in use this seemed a good starting point. All radical poetic theories are theories about where a new mind, a new intelligence, a new sentience can be found where before there was thought to be only chaos. Never before PrimatePoetics has a non-human literature been established and this is why this work is revolutionary enough to warrant such a bold claim.

What about the gibbon? Are you including them in your studies or not.

We mention the gibbon sing-song to suggest an alternative approach to what language can be. Our first assumption is to take language as a means to share information, but language without information can still be meaningful. What appears trivial or nonsensical on the cognitive level can be extremely meaningful on the emotional level. The special status of poetry is partly based on the poem being half music and half word. Poetry is meant to be read as much as it is meant to be experienced and performed. The songs of the gibbon are locked into poetry, the poetry of the great apes has the potential to outgrow poetry.

Your first publication, a small booklet called "PrimatePoetics is Here", maps the subject. What's next?

PrimatePoetics was born out of a real fondness for the outsider charm of their language and this we wanted to share. At the moment we are still amused spectators but having surveyed the territory we now know what to move forward. We will work with the lexigrams, we will seek out the apes and the people who have met them or even worked with them. We will translate from human literature into Yerkish. We are encouraging all budding PrimatePoetic enthusiasts to get in touch.

The Muddy Affair Between Man and Chimp

- Posted: 26.May.2008.




Separation/speciation between humans and chimps was a long, drawn-out process even allowing for the possibility of hybridization.

The Other PrimatePoetic System

- Posted: 15.May.2008.




Premack's language system consisted of a series of colored plastic tokens, which the chimpanzees could manipulate and stick to a magnetic board. Each token stood for a word which was never spoken in the chimpanzee's presence.

List of tokens

Nouns

Sarah
Mary (Mary Morgan, Sarah's favorite trainer)
pail
dish
chocolate
apple
banana
apricot
raisin

Verbs

is
give
take
insert
wash

Concepts/Conditionals

same
different
no-not
name-of
color-of
"?"
if-then

Colors (tokens were not colored with the corresponding colors)

red
yellow
brown
green

Talking to Lana

- Posted: 11.Jan.2009.




From The Best of Creative Computing Volume 2 (published 1977).

Lucy Picture Set

- Posted: 09.Jan.2009.


(Click for full size)

Dr. Roger Fouts attempting to teach Lucy the chimpanzee American sign language. 1972. Time.

Viki Picture Set

- Posted: 09.Jan.2009.




Viki the chimpanzee "talking" to Dr. Keith J. Hayes. 1951. From Life.

Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare

- Posted: 09.Jan.2009.




In 2002 Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare was produced by Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan, all Sulawesi Crested Macaques living at the Paignton Zoo Environmental Park (UK). In response to the familiar idea that if an infinite number of monkeys are given typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. It was translated to a computer environment, producing live updates published on the web, alongside a webcam view of the production scene showing the creative activity in its fuller context. The book that was published if available online.

Nim in Conversation

- Posted: 09.Jan.2009.

An exchange between Nim Chimpsky and Mary Wambach. Wambach lost her hearing at age 13 and was therefore an experienced ASL signer. This is important because Nim's conversation were often over-interpreted:

Nim: [Looking at a magazine] Toothbrush there, me toothbrush.
Mary: Later brush teeth.
Nim: Sleep toothbrush.
Mary: Later ... now sit relax
Nim: [Seeing a picture of a tomato]. There eat. Red me eat.
Mary: There more eat! What that?
Nim: Berry, give me, eat Berry.
Mary: Good eat. You have berry in house.
Nim: Come ... There.
Mary: What there? [Leads me into the house]
Nim: Give eat there, Mary, Me eat. [At refrigerator]
Mary: What eat?
Nim: Give me berry.

Beastly Pointing

- Posted: 08.Jan.2009.




Pointing has been characterized as a species-specific human gesture. Or in other humans typically human, something that seperates us from the beasts. "Intentional Communication by Chimpanzees: A Cross-Sectional Study of the Use of Referential Gestures" (PDF-link) by David A. Leavens and William D. Hopkins takes a look at 115 chimpanzees and conclude "Thus, communicative pointing is commonly used by laboratory chimpanzees, without explicit training to point, language training, or home rearing." Which means, I think, that all captive apes communicate by pointing. Pfff... What a revelation!!

The Chimpanzee as a Drawing Board

- Posted: 08.Jan.2009.


(Click for full size)

The wonderful task of inventing a langauge system for apes from "A Functional Analysis of Language (PDF-link) by David Premack.

Physical Basis of Language: Plastic Words The physical basis of the language used with the chimp is plastic varying in shape, size, texture, and color. Each word is a metal-backed piece of plastic that adheres to a magnetized slate (see above). The sentences are written on the vertical, an ancient form of writing once used by certain human groups, but adopted here simply because in the beginning it appeared to be the chimp's preferred style. The two sentences shown in Fig. 1 (above) can be paraphrased in English as follows: "Sarah take honey-bread," and "no Sarah take jam-cracker," respectively. Since the language is written rather than spoken or gestured, words are permanent not evanescent, and sentences are displaced in space not time. This has overwhelming advantages for shortterm memory. Once written on the board, the sentence can remain indefinitely, giving the chimp time to pick its bizarre profile and think the matter through before responding. The permanence of the sentence not only makes it possible to study language without a memory problem, but to study memory in the context of language by regulating the duration for which the sentence remains on the board.

In addition, because the experimenter makes the words-the chimp merely uses them - he can control their supply. The words available to the chimp at any moment in time can be varied in number, kind, type/token ratio, etc. as the experimenter chooses. The adult animal, or one proficient in the language, can be given an unlimited supply of words along with the opportunity to produce sentences at will. Then the physical organization of its vocabulary can be observed; whether, and if so how, it lays the words out in piles to enhance their availability for sentence construction, or the degree to which it can be trained to adopt favorable organizations. But the main advantages are to the training of the naive animal; since the number of alternatives can be controlled, so can the difficulty of the problem.

The Chimp a Machine

- Posted: 06.Jan.2009.

Apes and Language from Man a Machine by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, 1748.

Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence, and yet cannot learn music. What is the reason for this, except some defect in the organs of speech? But is this defect so essential to the structure that it could never be remedied? In a word, would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so.

I should choose a large ape in preference to any other, until by some good fortune another kind should be discovered, more like us, for nothing prevents there being such a one in regions unknown to us. The ape resembles us so strongly that naturalists have called it "wild man" or "man of the woods." I should take it in the condition of the pupils of Amman, that is to say, I should not want it to be too young or too old; for apes that are brought to Europe are usually too old. I would choose the one with the most intelligent face, and the one which, in a thousand little ways, best lived up to its look of intelligence. Finally not considering myself worthy to be his master, I should put him in the school of that excellent teacher whom I have just named, or with another teacher equally skillful, if there is one.

Next of Kin

- Posted: 06.Jan.2009.




The first part of this book might well be my favourite chapters about animal language research. Roger Fouts worked with Washoe, Bruno, Booee, Loulis amongst others and he knows more about signing chimps then anyone else in the world. The science of this book is presented with such a clarity that nearly obscures the subtlety of its arguments. This book consists of three parts. Fouts as a young scientist, Fouts as a matured scientist becoming an alcoholic because he can't stand the scientific disregard for the welfare of apes and Fouts as the managing director of his own ape resort and scientific outlaw/crusader. What I do not like about this book is the confessional bit in the middle about his drinking and the preachery way the book continues to make moral points.

Poem for an Orang-utan

- Posted: 03.Jan.2009.

Out of the distance getting louder:
bruuuhhp bruuuhuup [10x] (throatscrape)

voice 1:
whiiiiiiiiiiihiiiiiihiiiiiii (soft hoot/whimper)

Voice 2:
whhuuu hu whuuuu huoo (whine)
wwuwuwuhhiiiiiII wwuwuwuhhiiiiiII (frustration scream)
whhuuu hu whuuuu huoo (whine)

voice 1:
whiiiiiiiiiiihiiiiiihiiiiiii

Voice 2:
whhuuu hu whuuuu huoo
wafh wafh wafh (bark)
whhuuu hu whuuuu huoo

Voice 3:
he he he he che (nestsmacks)

Voice 1:
whiiiiiiiiiiihiiiiiihiiiiiii (soft hoot/whimper)

Voice 2:
whhuuu hu whuuuu huoo
pfiiiii hum hum hum humm (gorkum)
whhuuu hu whuuuu huoo
chiuckkkk qqquuuuu (kiss squeak)

Voice 3:
he he he he che

Voice 1 & Voice 2:
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh (long call)
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh

Voice 1:
Chi! Chi! (Rolling Call)

Voice 3:
wooouuuuh woouuuh woooouhhhhh woowwooooo uh uh (lork call)

Voice 1:
woohoho wooohoho woohoho (play ooh)
woohoho wooohoho woohoho

Voice 2:
rooooaaarrrrr (roar)

Voice 1:
woohoho wooohoho woohoho
woohoho wooohoho woohoho

Voice 2 & Voice 3:
rooooaaarrrrr

Voice 1:
woohoho wooohoho woohoho
woohoho wooohoho woohoho

Voice 1 & Voice 2 & Voice 3:
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh
wOh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wooh Wouoh Wooooh Wouuh

PS: This 'Poem for an Orang-utan' makes use only of calls produced by orang-utans in the wild and it is meant to be performed by humans for an audience of orang-utans. By giving back these wise men of the forest our rendering of their own sounds this poem hopes to kindle in the orang-utan a new appreciation for, and an awareness of, its own language. All this as part of the PrimatePoetic project to bring the languages of the great and lesser apes closer together. The transcription of each call is my own, to allow verification with field recordings the scientific nomenclature for each call is given between brackets.

Wax Chimpatic Addendum

- Posted: 29.Dec.2008.




"Visual apecall poem for socialfiction.wmv". Stumbled on this by accident: asemic video of an ape-call as a late contribution to Wax Chimpatic (?). Cheers who ever you are!

Lucy Temerlin ASL

- Posted: 29.Dec.2008.




From "Apes, men and Language" by Eugene Linden (1974). Word order is important to apes.

About Washoe

- Posted: 10.Sep.2008.




"Apes, men and Language" by Eugene Linden (1974) (not a very good book) gives the day-to-day details of the training of Washoe that never made it into the scientific reports. For instance: the irony of humans teaching a language to an ape that they themselves only superficially know.

Some innovations indicated Washoe possessed unexpected abilities that the Gardners were not prepared to evaluate. They referred to these unexpected bonuses as 'lagniappe,' a creole expression that refers to an extra measure of goods a shopkeeper gives to a customer. Examples of lagniappe occured when Washoe would invent signs. On occasion the Gardners themselves were forced to adapt Ameslan (ASL) signs for objects for which they did not know the proper gesture. 'Bib' was one of these objects, for which the Gardners used the Ameslan sign 'wiper,' made by touching the mouth with five fingers in a wip[ing motion. One day Washoe was asked to identify her bib and, unable to remember the 'wiper' gesture, drew the outline of a bib on her chest. The Gardners acknowledged that Washoe's sign was just as good as theirs, but they noted that the purpose of the project was not to learn a language devised by an infant chimpanzee but to teach Washoe a human language, and they insisted she use the 'wiper' gesture. Later they discovered that Washoe's 'bib' sign was, after all, the correct gesture in Ameslan.

The (non) Speaking Orangutan

- Posted: 27.Dec.2008.

In William Furness' 1916 "Observations on the Mentality of Chimpanzees and Orangutans" we are reported about efforts to teach human language to orangutangs. The following is a substantial excerpt that also touches on the reasoning and drawing capabilities of orangutangs. This is also the first time I hear of any attempt to teach the alphabet to apes. Notice that the Ape remains nameless.

In teaching articulate speech I found the first difficulty to be overcome in both the orang and the chimpanzee is their lack of use of lips or tongue in making their natural emotional cries. These natural cries are almost entirely, I think I may say, head tones — shrieks, squeals, or grunts, made for the greater part on inspiration. They unquestionably have, however, distinctly different sounds to indicate their simple emotions of fear, anger and joy. The orang in one respect does use the lips, to make a sound indicating warning or apprehension; this sound is made with the lips pursed up and the air sucked through them — an exaggerated and prolonged kissing sound, followed by a grunting expiration and inspiration. Strange to say, the chimpanzee seems to appreciate on hearing this sound that danger is near, although it never makes this sound itself. When uttering this warning, the hair of the head and shoulders bristles up, but there is no showing of teeth or other signs of aggression. My oldest orang would make this sound on command (I had merely to say "What is the funny sound you make when you are frightened?")- Their expression of pleasure, as I have heard it, is several high-pitched squeaks made with the lips closed. Their exclamation of anger is a deep toned guttural grunt or bark much like that of an angry hog ; I have heard this from the young orang-utan and from the full-grown just recently captured. The chimpanzee indication of fear is a quick, high-pitched shriek and a bark very like a dog. The exclamation of joy is really much like laughter. The mouth is opened wide and the sound made is a long drawn ah-a-a, with a rising inflection, this is followed by three or four short, quick Ahs. A sound of greeting and friendliness is a series of 00s made by rapid expiration and inspiration, and with lips protruded, merely for the projection of the sound. My chimpanzee when greeting friends at a distance amplifies this sound into more or less of a shout of long-drawn high-pitched notes, which when once started, apparently, must be kept up to a logical conclusion ; I have been impelled on many occasions to put my hand over her mouth to subdue the noise but the shout will still continue forced through my fingers while she looks up at me compassionately as one having no ear for melody. Contentment over food seems to be expressed by grunts very much like a young pig.

If these animals have a language it is restricted to a very few sounds of a general emotional signification. Articulate speech they have none and communication with one another is accomplished by vocal sounds to no greater extent than it is by dogs, with a growl, a whine, or a bark. They are, however, capable to a surprising degree of acquiring an understanding of human speech. In the case of the orang-utan it took at least six months of daily training to teach her to say "Papa." This word was selected not only because it is a very primitive sound, but also because it combined two elements of vocalization to which orang-utans and chimpanzees are, as I have said, unaccustomed, namely: the use of lips and an expired vowel sound. The training consisted of a repetition of the soimds (?) for minutes at a time, while the ape's lips were brought together and opened in imitation of the movements of my lips. I also went through these same manoeuvre's facing a mirror with her face close to mine that she might see what her lips were to do as well as feel the movement of them. At the end of about six months, one day of her own accord, out of lesson time, she said "Papa" quite distinctly and repeated it on command. Of course, I praised and petted her enthusiastically; she never forgot it after that and finally recognized it as my name. When asked "Where is Papa?" she would at once point to me or pat me on the shoulder. One warm summer's day I carried her in my arms into a swimming pool; she was alarmed at first but when the water came up to her legs she was panic stricken; she clung with her arms about my neck; kissed me again and again and kept saying "Papa ! Papa ! Papa !" Of course, I went no further after that pathetic appeal.

The next word I attempted to teach her to say was "cup." (Let me say that by this time she understood almost everything that it was necessary for me to say such as "Open your mouth," "Stick out your tongue," "Do this," etc., and she was perfectly gentle and occasionally seemed quite interested.) The first move in teaching her to say cup was to push her tongue back in her throat as if she were to make the sound "ka." This was done by means of a bone spatula with which I pressed lightly on the center of her tongue. When I saw that she had taken a full breath I placed my finger over her nose to make her try to breathe through her mouth. The spatula was then quickly withdrawn and inevitably she made the sound "ka." All the while facing her I held my mouth open with my tongue in the same position as hers so that her observation, curiosity, and powers of imitation might aid her, and I said ka with her emphatically as I released her tongue. After several lessons of, perhaps, fifteen minutes of this sort of training each day she would draw back her tongue to the position even before the spatula had touched it, but she would not say ka unless I placed my finger over her nose. The next advance was that she herself placed my finger over her nose and then said ka without any use of the spatula ; then she found that in default of my finger her own would answer the purpose and I could get her to make this sound any time I asked her to. It was comparatively very easy from this to teach her to say "kap " by means of closing her lips with my fingers the instant she said ka. At the same time I showed her the cup that she drank out of and I repeated the word several times as I touched it to her lips. After a few lessons when I showed her the cup and asked "What is this ? " she would say cup very plainly. Once when ill at night she leaned out of her hammock and said "cup, cup, cup," which I naturally understood to mean that she was thirsty and which proved to be the case. I think this showed fairly conclusively that there was a glimmering idea of the connection of the word with the object and with her desire.

By getting her to stick out her tongue and then by holding the tip of it up against her teeth and at the same time forcing her to breathe through her mouth I finally got her to make the sound Th. This was preliminary to teaching the words : the, this, that. All this was encouraging I will admit but then — "I never nursed a dear gazelle . . . ," etc.; the poor little animal died four or five months after this first tiny inkling of language. I have tried persistently for five years to teach my surviving chimpanzee pupil to say "mama" ; she says it, but very poorly. I think I must honestly say it is a failure. Again and again I have tried by the same method that I used with the orang-utan to teach her to say "cup", but to no avail. On the whole I should say that the orang holds out more promise as a conversationalist than does the chimpanzee; it is more patient, less excitable, and seems to take instruction more kindly.

As to a comprehension of the connection of spoken words with objects and actions both the orang-utan and chimpanzee, I think, exceed any of our domestic animals ; both of my anthropoids have been able to understand what is said to them, more intelligently than any professionally trained animals I have ever seen. In their education the enticement of food has never been used as an incentive to actions, and praise and petting have been the only rewards. In other words my object has been to endeavour to make them show signs of thought rather than a perfunctory performance of tricks. The very hardest thing that I have had to contend with is inattention and lack of persistence. The slightest sound is enough to divert their minds entirely unless they are deeply interested.

...

After an absence of six months I have found that my apes have forgotten nothing that I have taught them, although during my absence their course of instruction ceased entirely and they refused to do for others what I had taught them. Both the orang-utan and the chimpanzee have been able to learn the letters of the alphabet in order up to M. This is merely a demonstration of memory for different shapes in a certain sequence ; the letters which I used are cut out of wood 54 inch thick by four inches square. The chimpanzee recollects quite accurately just the sequence of these shapes in the series. By name she does not distinguish them as well, except where the letter sound is very distinct : B, F, H, L, M, seem to be easy for her to recognize whereas A, K, E, D, C, G, are confusing. When asked for the letter I she is apt to mistake it for her eye to which she points. When the letters are drawn the same size and width with chalk on a blackboard or printed in black on white cards she fails to recognize them. To test her ability to compare shape and size I have used an ordinary form-board consisting of ten differently shaped blocks about half an inch thick and a board wherein are cut ten hollows corresponding in size and shape to the blocks. The hollows are about (?) inch deep and to make them more easily seen are painted black inside. The trial consists of placing quickly all the blocks in their corresponding hollows. The actual time required by an adult human being is about twenty seconds. It is strange that with so quick a memory for the shapes of the letters and the keys she should find so much difficulty in mastering the form-board. After hundreds of trials she is never certain to get all ten blocks in place without considerable hesitation and one or two misfits. The more elaborate they are in shape the easier it appears to be for her to place them ; the five point star is almost always her first selection from the pile and seldom does she hesitate over it ; the equilateral cross is likewise readily placed, but the simple square, the oblong and the lozenge are invariably shifted from one hole to another all over the board. The shortest time in which she has placed them all correctly, so far, is 35 seconds; and the very next trial may have taken 2^/2 minutes.

I do not wish to generalize, but from my experience with a very bright chimpanzee and an exceptionally receptive orang-utan I should say that the ability to recognize the significance of graphic representation is as lacking in the anthropoid mind as is the inclination to speak. The crudest scrawls of the cave dwellers are hundreds of centuries ahead of the simian thought. I have spent hours trying to get my anthropoids to draw two crossed lines on a blackboard. If the board be placed lying flat on the floor in front of them they will draw horizontal lines with the swing of the arm, if the board be placed upright they draw nearly perpendicular lines merely as the weight of the arm carries the chalk down. With pencil and paper they make nothing but scrawling zig-zags with no method in their madness, and no amount of copy set or guiding of their hands will induce them to do otherwise. They have, however, a decided sense of color. Both of them have been taught to know red, blue and yellow by name and the chimpanzee can select and place in separate piles blocks colored violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red.

Washoe the Originator

- Posted: 18.Dec.2008.


(Click for full size)

Washoe with the Gardners, photo probably taken somewhere in 60ties.

About Gorkum and Grinding

- Posted: 18.Dec.2008.




Orangutan call repertoires, sound examples and descriptions included, pic is Indah during Lexigram training:

Ahh Vocalisation
Ahoor Call
Bared-teeth scream
Bark
Chomps
Complex calls
Contact uff
Crying and Screaming
Fast Long Call
Fear squeak
Frustration scream
Gorkum
Grinding
Grumble
Grumph
Grunt
Kiss squeak
Long call
Lork call
Mating squeals
Nestsmacks
Play ooh
Raspberry
Roar
Rolling Call
Soft hoot/whimper
Squeak
Throatscrape
Whine

Bonnie, The Whistling Orangutan

- Posted: 18.Dec.2008.




Bonnie, a 30 year old Orangutan who lives at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. started whistling when hearing a human keeper do so. Whistling is not something they do in the wild. Notice that Bonnie in turn taught Indah, a fellow Orang to whistle:

"This is important because it provides a mechanism to explain documented between-population variation in sounds for wild orangutans," Wich said. "In addition, it counters a long-held assumption that non-human primates have fairly fixed sound repertoires that are not under voluntary control. Being able to learn new sounds and use these voluntarily are also two important aspects of human speech and these findings open up new avenues to study certain aspects of human speech evolution in our closest relatives."

Previous studies have indicated that orangutans and chimpanzees are capable of species-atypical sounds and vocalizations, but only under the strong influence of human training. Bonnie, however, was not explicitly trained to whistle, according to Wich and his co-authors – Great Ape Trust scientists Dr. Karyl Swartz and Dr. Rob Shumaker; Madeleine E. Hardus and Adriano R. Lameira, doctoral candidates at the Utrecht University in The Netherlands assigned to the Ketambe Research Center in Sumatra, where Wich is research co-manager; and Erin Stromberg, an animal caretaker at the National Zoo.

Scientists have long known that orangutans copy physical movements of humans, but Bonnie's whistling indicates that the learning capacities of orangutans and other great apes in the auditory domain might be more flexible than previously believed, Wich said. The behavior goes against the argument that orangutans have no control over their vocalizations and the sounds are purely emotional – that is, an involuntary response to stimuli such as predators.

Bonnie appears to whistle for the sake of making a sound rather than to receive a food reward or some other incentive. If asked to whistle, she is likely to oblige, another indication to scientists that she makes the sound voluntarily.

In their paper, Wich and his colleagues also shared anecdotal information about Indah, a female orangutan who lived with Bonnie at the National Zoo before moving to Great Ape Trust in 2004. Indah also began to whistle some years after Bonnie was first observed making the sound in the late 1980s, but Indah died before recordings could be made of her whistles. Scientists believe that Indah's whistling was a vocalization learned from Bonnie.

God, Translation, Indians, Apes

- Posted: 14.Dec.2008.




Daniel Everett's missionary group operates on the principle that all savages will become christians when they can read the bible in their own language. Everett's reason for learning the Pirahă language was in fact to translate the bible into it. But with little success, or in their own words:

"The Pirahăs know that you left your family and your own land to come here and live with us. We know that you do this to tell us about Jesus. You want us to live like Americans. But the Pirahăs do not want to live like Americans. We like to drink. We like more than one woman. We don't want Jesus. But we like you. You can stay with us. But we don't want to hear any more about Jesus. OK?"

I am sad to say that my own Gilgamesh for Apes has provoked the idea that the bible should be translated for apes as well. To quote: "The question for me is - when will the Bible be translated into Ape? Can Christians continue to overlook the salvation of apes in their anthropocentric Bible translations? Apes need Jesus too." Needless to say I think this is a bad idea. Apes do not need god and neither do humans, but in this respect I think apes will turn out to be smarter than us.

The Gibbon in China

- Posted: 24.Nov.2008.




The going rate for Robert van Gulik's 'The Gibbon in China: An Essay in Chinese Animal Lore' is 250 Euro but I do accept presents. Robert Van Gulik was a polymath with various worldly and academic distinctions. He was also a lover of gibbons! In fact he was mad about them: he had a few in his garden for which he took great care, presumably as pets, and he even spoke to them. His book is rare and comes with 45RPM record of the gibbons singing their morning songs. Wow! The calligraphy is his own.

The Enkidu Complex: Who Named the Chimp and what After?

- Posted: 12.Nov.2008.

The scientific name for the Common Chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes. The name was invented by German skull-measurer Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840). The discovery of the Chimp went hand-in-hand with confusion, savage darwinism and the search for the missing link and racism and this reflects in the choice for 'troglodyte' which is the name given by the ancient Greeks to various races of 'low civilization' and who were said, surprise surprise, not to possess the power of speech. The figurative meaning is also telling: "One who lives in seclusion; one unacquainted with the affairs of the world". Which also describes Enkidu before his fall.

The Gorilla Cries Plaintive

- Posted: 27.Oct.2008.

From William Winwood Reade's (1838-1875) 'Savage Africa; being the narrative of a tour in equatorial, southwestern, and northwestern Africa; with notes on the habits of the gorilla; on the existence of unicorns and tailed men; on the slave trade; on the origin, character, and capabilities of the negro, and on the future civilization of western Africa' (1864) some remarks about the cry of the gorilla:

The ordinary cry of the gorilla is of a plaintive character, but in rage it is a sharp, hoarse bark, not unlike the roar of a tiger. Owing to the negro propensity for exaggeration, I at first heard some very remarkable stories about the ferocity of the gorilla ; but when I questioned the real hunters, I found them, as far as I could judge, like most courageous men, modest and rather taciturn than garrulous. Their account of the ape's ferocity scarcely bears out those afforded by Drs. Savage and Ford. They deny that the gorilla ever attacks man without provocation. " Leave njina
alone," they say, "and njina leave you alone."

Ape Call by Nervous Norvus

- Posted: 27.Oct.2008.

Ape Call by Nervous Norvus (Jimmy Drake) is a 1956 novelty song only of interest to us for its use ape calls, even though 'zoom' sound not like any ape I ever heard:

Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom
ze-ze-ze-zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.

Back in history before time began
All the real cool cats had a solid plan
When they dug a nervous chick they all, to a man, went
Aaaaah - eee - yaaah!

Ape call, doodly - ah - bah
You wanna be cool man? Go ape!

The almighty Joe swingin' through the trees
Was the king of everything that roosted in the leaves
But when he saw a girl ape, a-hangin' in the breeze, he went
Aaaaah - eee - yaaah!

Ape call, doodly - ah - bah
You like to be hip boy? Go ape!

A big dinosaur was a long, tall lizard
He drift through the jungle like a slow blizzard
But when he got a double take at a lady lizard, he did
Aaaaah - eee - yaaah!

Ape call, doodly - ah - bah
You wanna be sharp cat? Go ape

A pterodactyl was a flyin' fool
Just a... - I thought I'd break
in and tell you what a pterodactyl was. Well, it was sort of a stork lookin bat with sharp teeth that cruised around lookin' for... say, we haven't changed a bit, have we cats?

A pterodactyl was a flyin' fool
Just a breeze flappin daddy of the old school
But a mama dactyl could sure make him drool
Aaaaah - eee - yaaah!

Ape call, doodly - ah - bah
Dont be square Joe. Go ape!

Now old papa tiger was the boss of the Nile
Just a sport model cat with a solid style
He was old King Cool 'til a girl tiger smiled
Aaaaah - eee - yaaah!

Ape call, doodly - ah - bah
Bees warts daddio, go ape!

Adam was the first boy in the land
A big malaroony daddy with an iron hand
But when little Eva said, Hiya, Man
Aaaaah - eee - yaaah!

Ape call, doodly - ah - bah
Dont be a cube, rube. Go ape!

So remember to Ape
Call today .... yeah!
Aaaaah - eee - yaaah!
()

The Enkidu Complex: Apes are the Devil

- Posted: 27.Oct.2008.




Oh My

Apes are called simie in Latin because the similarity between their mentality and that of humans is felt to be great. Apes are keenly aware of the elements; they rejoice when the moon is new and are sad when it wanes. A characteristic of the ape is that when a mother bears twins, she loves one and despises the other. If it ever happens that she is pursued by hunters, she carries the one she loves before her in her arms and the one she detests on her shoulders. But when she is tired of going upright, she deliberately drops the one she loves and reluctantly carries the one she hates. The ape does not have a tail. The Devil has the form of an ape, with a head but no tail. Although every part of the ape is foul, its rear parts are disgusting and horrid enough. The Devil began as an angel in heaven. But inside he was a hypocrite and a deceiver, and he lost his tail, because he will perish totally at the end, just as the apostle says: 'The Lord shall consume him with the spirit of his mouth.' (2 Thessalonians, 2:8) The name symia is Greek, meaning, 'flattened nostrils'. Hence we call the ape symia because they have compressed nostrils and a hideous face, its creases foully expanding and contracting like a bellows; although she-goats also have a flattened nose. The apes called circopetici have tails. This alone distinguishes them from the apes mentioned earlier. Cenophali are numbered among the apes. They occur in great numbers in parts of Ethiopia. They leap wildly and...

The Enkidu Complex: The Tower of Babel and The Ape

- Posted: 27.Oct.2008.

No comment, italics mine:

Six hundred thousand men were engaged for forty-three years in building the Tower. The Tower had reached such a height that it took a whole year to hoist up necessary building-material to the top; in consequence, materials became so valuable that they cried when a brick fell and broke, while they remained indifferent when a man fell and was killed. They behaved also very heartlessly toward the weak and sick who could not assist to any great extent in the building; they would not even allow a woman in travail to leave the work. God at first permitted the people to continue with their work, waiting to see whether they would not desist from their sinful undertaking, and when they still continued, He endeavored to induce them to repent, but all in vain. The confounding of the languages—before that they all had spoken Hebrew—then compelled them to give up the work, many also perishing on the occasion; for if any one received stones instead of mortar through the misunderstanding of his fellow-workers, he grew angry and threw the stones upon the one who had given them. A part of the builders were changed into apes, evil spirits, demons, and ghosts walking by night, and the rest were scattered over the whole earth. The mighty Tower was blown down by winds according to the opinion of others, one-third of the building was consumed by fire, one-third sank into the earth, and one-third remained standing. In order to convey an idea of the height of the Tower, it is said that to any one who even now stands upon the ruins, tall palmtrees below him appear like grasshoppers.

Gibbons: The One-Hit Jabberwockies of the Rainforest

- Posted: 27.Oct.2008.

PrimatePoetics infiltrating the overground: a small piece about the Gibbon in the Brooklyn Rail.

Hanuman [The Monkey God]

- Posted: 29.Sep.2008.




Hanuman is one of the most important personalities in the Hindu epic the Ramayana. He is most famous for leading a monkey army to fight the demon King Ravana.

From the PrimatePoetic point of view it is interesting to see how certain human qualities are described as atavistic primate traits. The Ramayana text is dated to 400BC but probably existed as an oral tradition and it could well be that the animals of this story is based on a real remembered events in deep-history. There are only monkeys in India but just as Gilgamesh remembers the ape in the form of Enkidu, Hanuman remembers that we once were apes. I can explain all this be going into the Sanskrit etymology of the word monkey but I will leave this for a later date.

As an image Hanuman also shows that the absence of primate in Europe has led to a poorness of memory and an inability to define certain aspects of the human conditions. The following image of contemplative restlessness has no counter image in European literature:

The monkey symbolism of Lord Hanuman is related to the notion that a human being's mind is ever active and never restful, hence the depiction of a human being with the face of a monkey. Furthermore, Lord Hanuman symbolically stands for pure devotion, complete surrender and absence of ego or the lower self. Here we explain Hanuman as the mental body in a human being.

The mind, being ever fickle, jumps from place to place, obtaining everything in its path and engaging in numerous activities that brings no peace to the surroundings. The mind can travel to any place and fly anywhere and cross to other parts of the world such is the power of the mind.

The mind can also expand or contract, and if it remains under the control of animal passions and sensory activities, it will become unstable and devious. Hence, the mind of Hanuman is always under this fluctuation.

However, once surrendering occurs to the inner self and the mind becomes devoted unconditionally, the mind can obtain miraculous powers and perform stupendous feats like that of Lord Hanuman.

We do not see

- Posted: 19.Sep.2008.

We do not see things as they are,
we see them as we are.

Anais Nin

Nim Smokes the Reefer

- Posted: 03.Aug.2009.


(Click for full size)

It is clear from Elizabeth Hess' biography of Nim Chimpsky that the chimp was surrounded all his life by potheads (the alternative history of ape-language research as part of hippy counter-culture still needs to be written). Nim would ask for a spliff by signing "stone", "Smoke" and "now". The above picture shows Nim smoking a hash-pipe with Tom Martin and was originally published in High-Life with a caption that described Nim as a "Monkey Linguist" who had "invented a special signal - one forefinger to lower lip - meaning 'hit me with the ganja, you Babylonian sodomite'"

The History of the Narrative

- Posted: 16.Jul.2009.

Michelle Scalise Sugiyama's "Food, foragers, and folklore: The role of narrative in human subsistence" (PDF-link) begins with a clear exposition of narrative as a midway station between language and literature:

Narrative is a cross-cultural phenomenon crying out for explanation. Literate or not, all societies practice some form of storytelling. Moreover, the capacity for narrative is found universally across individuals within cultures. Although narrative skill varies from person to person, the ability to generate and process narrative is not limited to the exceptionally intelligent, nor is any formal instruction necessary for the acquisition of this faculty. Studies of Western children indicate that storytelling ability is reliably developing: the ability to tell stories emerges between 2-1/2 and 3, and children as young as 30 months can distinguish between narrative and non narrative uses of language. If narrative was a cultural invention, one would expect to find evidence of its having spread by contact and of its being extremely elaborated in some cultures and absent in others. This is not the case. Although subject matter is often borrowed from other cultures, the practice of storytelling itself emerges independently among even the most isolated peoples. Additionally, narrative is highly elaborated across all human cultures – including the most technological simple societies – as would be expected if it were “an ancient and central part of human life.”

She then goes on to date the storytelling capacity, you would hope this to be way too conservative:

While it is impossible to pinpoint the birth of narrative, a number of lines of evidence indicate that it emerged in the Pleistocene, which would make narrative a sufficiently ancient phenomenon to have developed through the process of natural selection. Most scholars situate the emergence of language – an obvious prerequisite for oral narrative – between 50.000 and 250.000 years ago. Perhaps the most reasonable estimate is offered by Miller who observed that, given its universality and complexity, language most likely emerged by 100.000 years ago, when Home sapiens began spreading out of Africa. Although the oldest known written narrative (the Epic of Gilgamesh) dates back only 5000 years, the written literary traditions of many ancient cultures are known to be rooted in long-standing oral traditions. It is thus reasonable to assume that oral narratives preceded written narrative and that the human capacity for narrative did not suddenly spring into being with the development of writing. The fact that many foraging peoples have rich and complex oral traditions suggests that storytelling predates the emergence of agriculture. Other forms of symbolic expression, such as the cave-paintings, Venus figurines, and engraved bones and antlers that have been found at various sites throughout Europe, date back approximately 30.000 years and rock paintings in Australia might date back even farther. Moreover, it appears increasingly certain that red ochre was being used in Africa (possibly for body ornamentation) as long as 10.000 years ago. Since humans were physiologically capable of speech at the time they began producing these artifacts, it is highly plausible that storytelling is at least as ancient as these other representational forms. Based on these converging lines of evidence, then, we can reasonably situate the emergence of narrative between 30.000 and 100.000 years before the present.

The Mouse and the Neanderthaler

- Posted: 15.Jul.2009.




In adition to the previous post about the interview with Svante Pääbo, his publication list sports the original papers for both the mouse with the human articulation gene Foxp2, see picture, (PDF-link) and the similarity between this Foxp2 gene of Neanderthals and humans (PDF-link) From the latter it worth qouting that:

[T]he current results show that the Neandertals carried a FOXP2 protein that was identical to that of present-day humans in the only two positions that differ between human and chimpanzee. Leaving out the unlikely scenario of gene flow, this establishes that these changes were present in the common ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals. The date of the emergence of these genetic changes therefore must be older than that estimated with only extant human diversity data, thus demonstrating the utility of direct evidence from Neandertal DNA sequences for understanding recent modern human evolution. Whatever function the two amino acid substitutions might have for human language ability, it was present not only in modern humans but also in late Neandertals. Ongoing in vivo and in vitro experiments should help to delineate these functions.

The Neanderthal and Us

- Posted: 14.Jul.2009.




Svante Pääbo cracked the Neanderthal genome and experimented with chatter-mouses, (see previous) From an interview we learn about the differences between us and them. About Neanderthal language Pääbo says:

One big dream is to address questions about things that are specific to humans relative to other life forms. Such as language. So it was extremely exciting a couple of years ago the when the FOXP2 gene was identified. A mutation in that gene in humans resulted in a specific speech problem. And it seems to be a speech problem that has to do with articulation. The primary problem concerns muscle control in the oral thorax — a millisecond of control you need of what your vocal chords, your tongue, your lips do to produce articulate speech.

We studied the evolution of that gene. The protein that's made from it is a protein whose function is to turn on and turn off the activity of other genes in the body. And the protein carries two amino acid substitutions that are unique to humans, that are seen in no other primates and that happened on the human lineage.

There are also patterns of variation in the FOXP2 gene among humans today that suggest that there had been positive selection acting on it and that only one variant spread rapidly to all humans on the planet today. It was very tantalizing to speculate that those variants were those amino acid changes, and that they had an impact on our ability to produce articulate speech.

There are two things we are exploring since we addressed the variation question and showed a singular positive selection. One is to look at the Neanderthals and to resolve, what were the Neanderthals like? Did they have these amino changes or not? And it turns out that they do share these amino acid changes with us — which I found surprising. To the extent that these changes in amino acids have something to do with articulate speech, we share with the Neanderthals. This is of course one gene out of many others that are still unknown having to do with language and speech. There could have been some difference, but from the little we know there is no reason to assume a difference.

The other thing we are trying to address is whether these amino acid differences are of importance. That's a difficult thing to address. What we have done is construct a laboratory mouse that makes not the mouse version of this protein, but the human version of the protein from its endogenous FOXP2 gene (because mice like every other vertebrate have a FOXP2 gene).

We've analyzed that mouse extensively over the last two years and run all kinds of tests. We and our collaborators have looked at over 300 different traits in this mouse, always comparing the knock-in mice that are changed — the humanized mice — to litter mates born together of the same mother that are wild-type, producing the mouse protein. We always compare them directly to each other, so they have had the same birth experience, the same environment. There are only two of over 300 traits that we've looked at where the humanized mice differ significantly from the wild-type mice.

One thing I don't understand is that the humanized mice are slightly more cautious in a new environment than the wild mice. If they are, for example, in a social group and entered an open area that they are to explore, the humanized mice stay along the walls for the first few minutes, whereas the wild-type mice are more bold and enter the open area where a mouse feels more exposed and vulnerable. But that's a difference initially, for the first four or five minutes, and then there is no difference. I don't know what to think about that.

The other mystery is tantalizing and shocked me: the mice vocalize differently. We measure that by taking the pups away from their mother when they're two weeks old, and they peep so that the mother comes and brings them back into the nest. We can record that in the ultrasound area. We work with people who are experts in analyzing sonograms of vocalizations, and there is a clear — subtle, but clear — difference in vocalization. This supports my belief that these changes have something to do with muscle control in the oropharynx or so, probably something to do with articulation in humans. But that's an earlier change on the human lineage than the divergence to the Neanderthals; it's something we share with the Neanderthals.

5Kb Cognitive Differences Between Us and Apes

- Posted: 14.Jul.2009.

Opening excerpt from 'From Language Learning to Language Evolution' (PDF-link) by Simon Kirby and Morten H. Christiansen; clear discussion of language vs communication systems:

There are an enormous number of communication systems in the natural world. When a male T´ungara frog produces “whines” and “chucks” to attract a female, when a mantis shrimp strikes the ground to warn off a competitor for territory, even when a bee is attracted to a particular flower, communication is taking place. Humans as prodigious communicators are not unusual in this respect. What makes human language stand out as unique (or at least very rare indeed) is the degree to which it is learned. The frog’s response to mating calls is determined by its genes, which have been tuned by natural selection. There is an inevitability to the use of this signal. Barring some kind of disaster in the development of the frog, we can predict its response from birth. If we had some machine for reading and translating its DNA, we could read-off its communication system from the frog genome. We cannot say the same of a human infant. The language, or languages, that an adult human will come to speak are not predestined in the same way. The particular sounds that a child will use to form words, the words themselves, the ways in which words will be modified and strung together to form utterances — none of this is written in the human genome. Whereas frogs store their communication system in their genome, much of the details of human communication are stored in the environment. The information telling us the set of vowels we should use, the inventory of verb stems, the way to form the past tense, how to construct a relative-clause, and all the other facts that make up a human language must be acquired by observing the way in which others around us communicate. Of course this does not mean that human genes have no role to play in determining the structure of human communication. If we could read the genome of a human like we did with the frog, we would find that, rather than storing details of a communication system, our genes provide us with mechanisms to retrieve these details from the behaviour of others. From a design point of view, it is easy to see the advantages of providing instructions for building mechanisms for language acquisition rather than the language itself. Human language cannot be completely innate because it would not fit in the genome. Worden (1995) has derived a speed-limit on evolution that allows us to estimate the maximum amount of information in the human genome that codes for the cognitive differences between us and chimpanzees. He gives a paltry figure of approximately 5 kilobytes. This is equivalent to the text of just the introduction to this chapter.

Riding in the Car to Get Cherries

- Posted: 24.Jun.2009.




Kanzi, the canonical poet of PrimatePoetics, is also a painter who names his own paintings. William M. Fields, Great Ape Trust Director of Bonobo Research, has this to say about Kanzi's painting:

“Kanzi understood early on in his life about performance and ability,” Fields said, “and he often jealously guards an area of expertise, such as stone tool making, or flint knapping. We have seen many examples of this when Panbanisha (Kanzi’s half-sister) or Nyota (Panbanisha’s son) are making stone tools, and Kanzi can often be expected to express concern through displays of protest.”

However, when painting with the other bonobos, Kanzi is as congenial and cooperative as he his protective of his flint-knapping prowess.

“He appears to be interested in the paintings of other bonobos and enjoys painting while everyone else is painting,” Fields said. “While Panbanisha seems to be as good at painting as Kanzi is at stone-tool manufacturing, she often is not disposed to say as much about her paintings as Kanzi, as we suppose she feels her paintings speak for themselves.

“Kanzi, on the other hand, seems to feel he is able to express complicated ideas with the assistance of a painting, in which he is able to illuminate his message through the question-and-answer moment, using the painting as a point of reference or as an illustration. He seems to use the paintings to complete the dialogue informing those matters on his mind that are difficult to communicate merely through lexigrams.”

The process involved in the creation of Watermelon, a Kanzi original offered in this year’s Apes Helping Apes exhibit, seems to reinforce that, said Susannah Maisel, a bonobo caretaker and trusted friend of Kanzi’s.

The painting was created over two days, Nov. 5-6. Kanzi used his lexigram to ask Maisel if he could paint, and as she readied the supplies, he made another request: He wanted to eat watermelon during the activity. In her creative documentation, Maisel noted that the colors Kanzi selected – light red, dark red and white – were the same as the colors found in a slice of watermelon.

“He started with two shades of red, mixing white into the darker shade to make pink,” Maisel wrote. “He took his time with this painting, pausing between brush strokes to snack on watermelon.”

Kanzi left the painting unfinished on Nov. 5. The next morning, the bonobo pointed to lexigram symbols for “watermelon” and “paint,” indicating his desire to continue work on the painting. He added orange to some areas of the canvas that he had previously painted red, and then mixed white and green, which Maisel said could be interpreted to represent the color of watermelon rind. Last, he added more touches of pure red.

Maisel said it would be “easy to interpret this painting as a literal representation of watermelon, given the colors that Kanzi chose.”

However, researchers say that viewing Watermelon through the rich social situation in which the painting was completed – over slices of watermelon shared with his mother, Matata; siblings Elikya and Maisha; and nephew Nyota – the art may suggest something more.

Above: Riding in the Car to Get Cherries


Watermelon




Cheese

That Sullen Look!

- Posted: 16.Jun.2009.




VIA

Kanzi Watches TV

- Posted: 16.Jun.2009.




Does he know he is watching what he could have been?

Mirror Test Taken by a Chimp

- Posted: 16.Jun.2009.


(Click for full size)

Kanzi signs

- Posted: 31.May.2007.




Kanzi signs to Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh the world's foremost expert on language in animals. One anecdote:

Paul Raffaele, at Savage-Rumbaugh's request, performed a Maori War Dance for the Bonobos. This dance includes thigh-slapping, chest-thumping, and hollering. Almost all the Bonobos present interpreted this as an aggressive display, and reacted with loud screams, tooth-baring, and pounding the walls and floor. All but Kanzi, who remained perfectly calm, and conveyed in Bonobo language (interpreted by Savage-Rumbaugh to Raffaele) that he knew that no threat was meant, but that the performance should be apart from the other Bonobos so as not to upset them.