Animal communication – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Animal communication’ Category
Send in the border collies
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).
Posted in Animal communication, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »
The amazing talking pirate
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
Posted in Animal communication, Books, Comic conventions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv | 2 Comments »
“Farley”, the dog said, “get me a slice”
May 23, 2017
Three cartoons in today’s feed: a Bizarro with a talking dog; a One Big Happy with a slice that OMG might grow into a pizza; and a Zippy riff on Farley Granger and They Live by Night:
Posted in Animal communication, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Puns, Shirtlessness | Leave a Comment »
Ten language cartoons
February 25, 2017
On the Comic Kingdom site on the 21st, “Tuesday’s Top Ten Comics on Language” (where language is understood broadly), with comments from the site.
Posted in Animal communication, Bilingualism, Implicature, Linguistics in the comics, Paralinguistics and kinesics, Style and register | Leave a Comment »
Squirrel Girl
January 13, 2017
From linguist friends on Facebook, this cartoon, of obvious linguistic interest:
(#1)
This is the strip _Squirrel Gir_l, in the Marvel Comics universe.
Posted in Animal communication, Linguistics in the comics, Technology | 1 Comment »
Toon animal time
October 30, 2016
Two cartoons in today’s feed, a Bizarro on the perennial meme of the Ascent of Man; and a One Big Happy on animal bilingualism and its advantages:
(#1)
(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
(#2)
Posted in Animal communication, Bilingualism, Evolution, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
A profusion of fireflies
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
Posted in Animal communication, Language and animals | Leave a Comment »
Someone old, someone new
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.
Posted in Animal communication, Comic conventions, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
“says”
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.
Posted in Animal communication, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics | 3 Comments »
Speaking with the (dead) animals
September 27, 2015
From Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird for 8/23, reprinted in the October Funny Times, a story that manages to combine speaking with the animals and speaking with the dead. (Related posting on “The power of naming”, earlier today.)
Posted in Animal communication, Weirdness | Leave a Comment »