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Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
- docmechanic 2y ago[flagged]
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- pvg 2y agoRecent smol thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088
- docmechanic 2y agoThank you for sharing!
- dang 2y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: In the Calls of Bonobos, Scientists Hear Hints of Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601682 - April 2025 (2 comments) Bonobos' calls may be the closest thing to animal language we've seen - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43575088 - April 2025 (12 comments)
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- docmechanic 2y ago[flagged]
- Y_Y 2y agoand then spend most of their time arguing about it?
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- mrtobo 2y agoAnyone know where we can hear such recordings?
- smusamashah 2y ago> They recorded over 300 of these observations, including what the caller was doing at the time, what was happening in the environment and the behaviour of the caller and audience after the vocalisation. > To reveal the meaning of each call, they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established this dictionary,” says Berthlet. “We have one vocalisation and one meaning.” This is lots of manual effort, could the recent advancement in language models help decode animal languages more easily? I guess it will need lots 24/7 capture of physical movement/action and sound data and train a model (that already understands vocal English too) perhaps.
- bbor 2y agoI definitely think you’re touching on some exciting possibilities, but adding a language model at this early stage would endanger the goal of this particular research: proving that the compositionality exists in the first place. If there was a foundational language model we’re involved, it might be reading patterns into the calls regardless of whether they’re really there — that is what it’s designed to do, after all! Re:”lots of work”, I think you’re misunderstanding the quotes a bit. They applied PCA to categorical data to generate semantic positions for each call type—or, in other words, ran a prewritten mathy algo on a big csv. Collecting the CSV data in the first place certainly sounds extremely hard, but that’s more of a practical issue than a scientific one! Bonobos aren’t known for living in easy-to-reach places ;)
- HappMacDonald 2y agoIf you make that cloud exist in a high enough number of dimensions you'll find yourself emulating a machine learning language model. :)
- keybored 2y agoMaking models of the physical world is a lot of work. Can’t they install cameras and record hundreds of thousands of hours of objects getting shot through cannons, birds flying and trees swaying in the wind? Maybe with some more nuclear power plants they could get close to approximating something like Newton’s Laws of Motion (kind of close is good enough, no need to be nerdy about it).
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIt is funny how at least the press written about this sort of research seems to imply only humans have language and some new evidence might challenge that notion. Really if you ever own a pet, probably any pet I bet, you find that communication in a way that is arguably a language is pretty low level stuff in the animal kingdom. And it makes sense as it is quite useful for a species to communicate things about the world. You turn your community into a meta organism: rather than continuous appendages and nerve endings you might have a meerkat a couple hundred yards observing for predators for you sharing their own senses on their own body with you through their long distance communication abilities in the form of their vocalizations or body language. Now you can solely be a meerkat and get all this information about the area without having to evolve into some lovecraftian horror with a set of eyes and ears every 100 yards.
- empath75 2y agoLanguage is not just "communication" and not every communication is language. Bees and ants communicate information chemically, but they're not using a structured language. Dogs may growl to intimidate or yelp if they get hurt, and that surely communicates information, but whether they are using a structured language is a matter of research.
- floxy 2y agoHoney bees do the waggle dance though: https://animalwise.org/2011/08/25/the-honeybee-waggle-dance-%E2%80%93-is-it-a-language/ https://animalwise.org/2011/08/25/the-honeybee-waggle-dance-...
- empath75 2y agoYeah, but that's just another example of communication-without-language
- foltik 2y agoBut isn’t what whatever we call language just a few more levels of recursion in fundamentally the same continuous process?
- fedeb95 2y agothey're called Large Language Monkeys
- thinkingtoilet 2y agoCute.
- layer8 2y agoIn the article it says that “This finding doesn’t mean that bonobos have language, though”.
- techtalsky 2y ago[flagged]
- vinceguidry 2y agoIf you really wanted your pedantry to sound smart, you'd have also noted that bonobos aren't monkeys, they're apes.
- mattdeboard 2y agoReinforcing my strongly held belief that what fundamentally sets humans apart isn't spoken language, or tools, or any of that, but rather the fact we write down what we know, then make those writings available to future generations to build on. We're a species distinguished from all others by our information-archival and -dissemination practices. We're an archivist species, a librarian species. Homo archivum. In my opinion.
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- antisthenes 2y agoThanks for validating my data-hoarding tendencies. I'm just following my Homo Archivium genetic programming.
- moffkalast 2y ago> calls that seem to mean "pay attention to me" and "I am excited" to say "pay attention to me because I am in distress" It's hard to say how accurate those meanings are, but it does interestingly track with the odd thing that does separate humans from other hominids... we ask questions. Apes who learned sign language have supposedly never done so. To write down knowledge means having a concept that others have information that you don't, and you can access it in their writings or give them information with yours. If you can't conceive of that in the first place, writing doesn't even make sense at all.
- ghc 2y agoIf that were the case, then you would expect isolated groups of humans who never developed a writing system to be significantly different from "homo archivum", but we know that's not true. We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation. Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories. Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many generations. For an extreme example, see: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ . I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not technological.
- DadBase 2y agoIf bonobos start using syntax, it’s only a matter of time before they demand a seat at the dinner table and correct my grammar mid-banana.
- WalterBright 2y agoFortunately bonobos have not yet learned to say "No".
- WalterBright 2y ago> One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined into longer sequences, like words into sentences. I would think that syntax is a structure to the sequence of symbols, not just a sequence in any order. For example: Thag ate Fish Fish ate Thag have different meanings.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoSyntax is hierarchical, and not as much sequential as you may think. LLMs are based on these two facts.
- somenameforme 2y agoI think your sentence would be much more accurate if you replace hierarchical with recursive.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoTrue, at least conceptually (does brain actually do recursion?) - I was really thinking of linguist's hierarchical sentence parse trees, which are a nice visual representation of how different parts of sentence are syntactically unrelated and can therefore be processed in parallel, with levels of the "hierarchy" then corresponding to layers of the LLM.
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- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago> For example, the phrase “blonde dancer” has two independent units: a blonde person who is also a dancer. This seems a rather odd "random" language example, especially coming from New Scientist. Being politically correct by then referring to the "blonde" as a "person" doesn't help much. May as well just use "brunette stripper" as an example - a brown haired person who takes their clothes off for money.
- someoneontenet 2y agoI think that you might be taking that example in bad faith.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoReally? How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women, and if you really feel the need to use "blonde" as your adjective, but insist it's a sexless "person", then how about "blonde engineer" instead of "blonde dancer"?! I've got nothing against blonde dancers, and am far from politically correct myself, but in a scientific article about language and Bonobos, couldn't they have chosen a more appropriate example such as "yellow banana"?
- marcellus23 2y ago> How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women Never, because men's hair is "blond". But seriously, the original quote does not call the person "a blonde," (which indeed might offend some) but instead uses "blonde" as an adjective to describe the dancer, which is perfectly acceptable. You can have a "blond man" or a "brown-haired man" just as easily as you can have a "blonde woman".
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoWell, as an example of language/syntax, any language example (including "blonde dancer") would be "acceptable", but in this context something like "fruit tree" might be more appropriate than "dumb Polack" (no offense - just a syntax example).
- d332 2y ago> This finding doesn’t mean that bonobos have language, though, because language is the human communication system I hate this attitude. Also, I'm curious how advances in AI will shape our empathy towards animals.
- ceejayoz 2y agoI really wonder if that's a misquote or poor paraphrase. It's not in quotation marks. > This finding doesn’t mean that bonobos have language, though, because language is the human communication system, says Berthet. “But we’re showing that they have a very complex communication system that shares parallels with human language.”
- lithocarpus 2y ago[dead]
- ang_cire 2y agoPeak anthropocentrism. You see this attitude all over, unfortunately even in circles that should know better. It even feels circular, like saying "Language is how we know people are more 'advanced' than animals, but animals can never have language, because language is what humans do."
- linguistbreaker 2y agoCool! Now do it for cetaceans.
- mkl 2y ago> Now we have evidence that both chimps and bonobos have syntax, it is inevitable that this capacity for compositionality was inherited from our last common ancestor, says Leroux. “They just showed, unambiguously, that this core building block is evolutionary ancient and at least 7 million years old, and maybe even older.” This is not true at all. It's like saying that tool construction must be >300 million years old because both chimpanzees and New Caledonian crows make tools. Things can be invented or discovered multiple times by different species. It might be inherited from a common source, but it might not.
- jterwill 2y agoIt is exciting times in animal communication. This is not just distributional information analysis in the sense that ‘tokens’ are grounded in other ‘tokens’. They’ve grounded these calls in naturalistic situational context. This is hard won data. If I understand, the finding here is that bonobo calls are “non-trivially” compositional, e.g., the semantic embeddings of pairs of vocalizations point in different directions surrounding the base vocalization. But it seems there is no “trivial” compositionality in the sense that constructions like [good __] might point in a similar direction. I would expect this latter result. This seems like a conspicuous absence? Is this really compositionality? Not sure what to make of it. Some interesting context: bonobos and other (non-human) great apes are believed to have more intentional and flexible control over their gestural repertoire than their vocal repertoire and that these gestural repertoires are larger. Human language likely evolved from gesture (or so some believe). So, if their vocalizations are in fact compositional, it may be a separate evolutionary prong.
- xeonmc 2y agoMight this explain why Italians can’t talk if you tie their hands?
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> Is this really compositionality? Usually it would be called "noncompositionality", the phenomenon that distinguishes words from phrases or sentences. As you might expect from that term, it's the opposite of compositionality. It also goes under the fancier name "the arbitrariness of the sign" or the even fancier "l'arbitraire du signe". For example, hat, sat, bat, and flat are all semantically unlike each other, and flare, phlegm, flick, and flood are also all semantically unlike each other. It isn't the case that you can predict the meaning of flat by knowing what hat, sat, bat, flare, phlegm, flick, and flood mean. The article draws an analogy to a general syntactic rule: > But, so far, only “trivial compositionality” has been identified in non-human animals, whereby each unit adds independently to the meaning of the whole. For example, the phrase “blonde dancer” has two independent units: a blonde person who is also a dancer. Humans were thought to be unique in also having “non-trivial compositionality”, where the words in a combination means something different to what they mean individually. For example, the phrase “bad dancer” doesn’t mean a bad person who also dances. Bad dancer is compositional in that you can know the meaning of the phrase by knowing the meanings of bad and dancer. So far so good; the article agrees that it is compositional. They observe that the two words in the phrase aren't independent; a one-legged dancer is a dancer who has one leg, but a bad dancer isn't a dancer who is bad in general; it's a person who is bad at dancing. The reason this is still compositional is that you can use any appropriate adjective this way: you can be a strong dancer, an energetic dancer, a timid dancer... so this is just a rule about the formation of certain English phrases, and knowing what bad means in general is sufficient to know what bad means in the phrase bad dancer. They don't appear to be making a similar claim for the bonobos: > For example, “high-hoot + low-hoot” combines the calls that seem to mean “pay attention to me” and “I am excited” to say “pay attention to me because I am in distress” This example looks more like an arbitrary sign to me. But that might be an artifact of poor data management: > they used a technique from linguistics to create a cloud of utterance types, placing vocalisations that occurred in similar circumstances closer together. “We kind of established this dictionary,” says Berthlet. “We have one vocalisation and one meaning.” There is no reason to expect that one vocalisation should possess only one meaning. They also have poor methodology: > Once they had this semantic cloud, they could see whether the individual calls in a combination had distinct meanings, and found that the combinations were close to the units that they were made of, which would suggest compositionality. Using this approach, they identified four compositional calls By comparison, throw, throw up, and throw away are all similar in meaning, which is why they have similar forms, but they are not compositional - knowing what one of them means won't help you with the others.
- glial 2y agoCue the goalpost moving.
- BrenBarn 2y agoThis is certainly interesting, but I'm not sure I'd call this "syntax" (and I'm no Chomskyan).
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]