Would their songs be bardic or historical?

Silver in Best Portrait category: Maxime Legare-Vezina, “Voice of the Ash Forest.” Canada common raven (Corvus corax), Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada

 

Is a river alive? by Robert Macfarlane.  

    Pale whalebacks of ice-smoothed rock surface and vanish in the shallow bays: deep-time belugas. 

    "What would happen," says Wayne, 'if we could record and understand the songs of the whales, extending back to the deepest antiquity of their species? Would their songs be bardic or historical? Would they document the rises and falls of ocean levels? Would they be cartographic, mapping the routes of these immense sub-surface canyons and mountain ranges through which whales must steer on their submarine wanderings?'

    'Whale-cries as ... song-maps?' I ask.

    'Absolutely. We know for certain that whale communities teach one another. There's the now-famous example of the orcas in the Gibraltar Straits who have shared both the knowledge of, and at some level the purpose behind, attacking the keels and rudders of sailing boats in the Straits. Or the example of sperm whales in the early decades of whaling, who taught each other to flee from whaling boats after the first few seasons of slaughter, and who then developed their counter-strategies not only laterally within social groups but also intergenerationally, with parents teaching calves.'

    Wayne and I have both been reading new findings about whale song and whale speech, coming out of a research group called Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, where marine biologists have used Al to analyse datasets of whale recordings, and begun to isolate language units, building and corroborating both a possible syntax and lexis for whale speech.

     It feels, I say to Wayne, as if we're on the brink of a great and long overdue unlearning of supposed human superiority in terms of language. That we're close now to opening our ears to the countless idioms and dialects, the vast broth of other species speeches, within which we've unwittingly lived and moved since the beginning.

     Just imagine if we do become able to "speak whale", Wayne says.

On This Day (09/12):

• 2025-09-12: Would their songs be bardic or historical?
• 2024-09-12: What would less look like?
• 2023-09-12: How to avoid criticism
• 2022-09-12: Their Hurry Infected Them
• 2021-09-12: Make the piece new in very subtle ways
• 2019-09-12: 10 Things to Say to someone with an eating disorder
• 2018-09-12: A Bank of Common Comments to Teachers After Evaluation
• 2018-09-12: A Bank of Reflection Questions for Teacher Evaluation (and post-obs ""agenda"")