Abstract
Whistled languages are still found today in many parts of the world, the most celebrated being Silbo, in the Canary Islands. According to Australian Aboriginal legends, it was the birds who taught human beings how to speak. Similar traditions are found in Ancient Greece and Rome and modern Europe. This article explores the hypothesis that around 100 000 years BP there was an interaction of whistling sounds among birds, humans and dogs that eventually led to the development of the first natural languages, from birdsong to whistling to articulate speech.KEY WORDS evolution of natural languages, birdsong, whistling, dogs
Highlights
RESUMEN Hay lenguajes basados en silbidos en muchas partes del mundo, siendo el más conocido el Silbo de las Islas Canarias
The bird was there for a week during which it learnt to imitate our whistle for the family dog, Max, a large and amiable fox terrier
We might have an answer to the intriguing question raised by Charles Darwin in his last book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): how long have Man and Dog been smiling, frowning, etc. at each other?
Summary
During the eighteenth century fabulous sums were paid for singing birds who had been patiently taught to warble entire arias by Handel and other fashionable composers, with all the trills and roulades of the virtuosi at the opera. The birds were trained by listening, day after day, in covered cages to the teacher playing the melodies on the recorder, the name of which means ‘to sing like a bird’. Can sometimes do more than just parrot the sound of Man’s language: Australian behavioral scientist Theodore Xenophon Barber has described the communicative powers of various birds including a talking starling who spoke intelligible English when it was ‘only a few months old and was far ahead of a human child of the same age in using words meaningfully’ (Barber, 1995) In such sympathetic recognition of avian intelligence Barber was anticipated by Len Howard who made a long study of ‘Birds as Individuals’. Research Journal of the Costa Rican Distance Education University (ISSN: 1659-4266) Vol 5(1), June, 2013
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