[Antarctica]: Penguin dialogue or linguistic pirouettes

Dear friends, today I propose to go on a linguistic journey. Consider how penguins build dialogues. From the side it seems that apart from wild screams, little else can be heard. But it turns out that penguins, like chimpanzees, use linguistics that are very similar to those of humans.

The first scientific studies were carried out on 28 individuals. They analyzed 590 different "songs" that penguins published. Interestingly, the penguins perfectly "talk" among themselves and at great depths. What can I say, they can be called real talkers.

What did the scientists find out? The cries of penguins turned out to be very similar in structure of linguistics to human communication. Two basic rules in communication are not alien to penguins. Let's take a look at them.

The first rule is Zipf's law of brevity:

The frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its serial number in the frequency lists.

The second rule is the Menzerath-Altmann law:

The longer, for example, the sentence, the shorter the subordinate clauses included in it. Or like this: the longer the word, the shorter the syllables or words in sounds.

All "talks" of penguins are covered with breath. At the moment, there are three types of "conversations":

-- On a short exhalation - lasts 0.18 seconds (short).
-- Slightly longer when exhaling - lasts 1.14 seconds (long).
-- On exhalation - lasts 0.38 seconds (average).

We can conclude that the linguistic foundations of communication in humans and penguins have the same laws. Previously, it was thought that only primates "vocal" is similar to humans ...

Thank you for attention!

Sincerely, @r3benok.

Photos from the personal archive.
Camera SONY DSC-H400, 20.1 Mega pixels (63x Optical Zoom)