Archive for the ‘Animal communication’ Category
February 11, 2023
It starts with an elegant Seth Fleishman cartoon in the latest New Yorker (2/13&20/23), and ends up in the world of very competent dogs; in between lie my home intellectual worlds of linguistics and g&s (gender & sexuality studies). Or you could just think of it as being about border collies and Robin Queen.
First comes the cartoon:
(#1) From left to right: on the escalator, the shepherd and three of his flock; on the ground, an understandably reluctant sheep and a border collie performing its job as herder
When advance copies of the cartoon appeared on Facebook, I immediately wrote my linguistics colleague Robin Queen (at Michigan) to say that it was as if Fleishman had created this cartoon especially for her; in addition to everything else she does (see below), Robin and her partner-in-life Susan Garrett run a small farm with a flock of sheep and with border collies that they have trained to herd them (collies that Robin enters with in stockdog competitions).
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Posted in Animal communication, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
September 17, 2019
In the run-up to Talk Like a Pirate Day (TLaPD), on Thursday the 19th, this Rhymes With Orange cartoon from the 15th:
(#1) PirateTalk + ParrotTalk, with a cartoon reversal of roles
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Posted in Animal communication, Books, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | 2 Comments »
July 9, 2016
A delightful piece in Tuesday’s NYT Science Times, “How to Talk to Fireflies” by Joanna Klein, which is about animal communication — between fireflies, by flashing lights — though I was startled by a fact that came up in passing. The first paragraph:
As Earth rotates in the summer, fireflies whisper sweet nothings to each other in the most beautiful language never heard. For millions of years the insects have called to one another secretly, using flashes of light like a romantic morse code. With some rather simple technology — a light and a battery — scientists have been decoding their love notes for years. But recently I learned that you don’t have to be an entomologist to try to talk to fireflies.
Male common Eastern fireflies, flashing
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Posted in Animal communication, Language and animals | Leave a Comment »
July 8, 2016
Two cartoons from the latest (July 11/18) New Yorker, by veteran artist Danny Shanahan (in the magazine since 1988) and newcomer Edward Steed (first appeared there in 2013):
(#1)
(#2)
The Shanahan (which is, in a sense, “about” animal communication) exemplifies the cartoon meme of the animal in a bar (most often a dog, but many other animals have engaged in bar conversations); in this case, the animal in a bar is combined with a comic trope in which a bartender covers for a patron by telling a caller to the bar (clasically, the patron’s wife) that the patron isn’t there. The Steed is a bizarre bulletin in the news for penises.
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Posted in Animal communication, Comic conventions, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
October 26, 2015
The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal from the 24th:
And no wonder: Baby Noam knows enough about Language to start a sustained argument that animals don’t have it, but not enough about the details of English to understand that the woman was asking what the conom (conventional onomatopoetic word — see discussion in the last section of my posting on Liam Walsh) is in English for the sound made by a chimp. (Note: there isn’t one, so far as I know). The facts of English usage in this domain are fairly complex, but little kids (other than Baby Noam, it seems) manage to cope very well with it.
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Posted in Animal communication, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics | 3 Comments »
