Animals are smart. Apparently, many of them can say their name just like how we, humans, say our name or call others with their names. This article highlights the list of animals that say their name, which just shows how amazing and diverse the world we live in.
Anyone who's heard
an English cuckoo knows where it got its name. Cuckoos make a two-note
call, the first sounding like the vowel in "cook" and the second like
the vowel in "coo." Between the two, there's even a little catch. This
bird says its own name.
Or maybe not.
Aside from not knowing that that's its name, there's that matter of
how the bird actually "says" it. Birds don't really use their tongues as
we do. They don't make an actual "k" sound, or pretty much any other
consonant sound either. They also don't move their tongues around to
make vowel sounds as we do. And, obviously, they don't have lips.
So why do we hear cuckoos saying "cuckoo"? There are a couple of reasons.
First of all, birds have other ways to alter the shape of their
resonating space. They can control the opening of the beak and the size
of the space at the back of the throat. They also have a more complex
voice box that can change a lot of the tonal details before they even go
into the throat. You don't need a human mouth to make sounds that sound
like speech, after all — the speakers on your stereo aren't shaped
anything like your mouth.
Secondly, the sound cuckoos make isn't really
exactly
"cuckoo." It's really more like a "woo-'oo" than a "cook-coo" or
"cuckoo." But humans tend to process animal sounds into the kinds of
sounds
we would make. And we like the crisper onset and the
clearer break of the "k" sounds. So when we imitate the bird, we make an
English-sounding word out of it, "cuckoo," and so we call the bird a
cuckoo. And when we hear the bird, we hear it saying "cuckoo" because
we're expecting that.
Let's look at some other birds that seem to say their names — plus two mammals that do as well.
Chickadee
You've probably heard this bird. It has
two calls, one a three-note song and the other two quick high chirps
followed by several lower, raspy notes. It's the latter one that is said
to sound like "chickadeedeedeedee." But listen again: You won't hear a
"ch" or a "k" in there anywhere, just a couple of sharp breaks in the
notes. We humans are completely unable to imitate those quick breaks.
The best we can do is to give an impression of the quickness and the
high pitch with "chicka" — and then we approximate the repeated part
with a "dee." When we hear the chickadee, we can hear that
"chickadeedeedeedee" — but a human saying "chickadeedeedeedee" sounds
exactly nothing like a chickadee. Still not sure exactly what it
does
sound like? Listen to it, and many other birds — including some of the
other ones I mention here — at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's site,
allaboutbirds.org.
KeaThis New Zealand bird has a simpler, easier
name call. It makes a sound that starts high and tight and then breaks
to a lower, more open-sounding note. An acoustic phonetician would tell
you that speech sounds are made and identified by the relative strength
of sets of harmonics of the base note, and when a kea makes its noise,
the first strong set of harmonics above the base note moves from low to
high, while the next strong set above those moves from high to medium.
But if you watch one of these parrot-like birds make the sound (as well
you may if you visit New Zealand's South Island, because they're not
exactly shy), you won't see it move its tongue like you would for
"eeaa"; it modifies the sound by other means. You also won't see it say a
"k" before the "eeaaa" — because it doesn't. Again, we just want to
insert one there to emphasize the sharp beginning of the sound — that's
how we would do it.
Hoopoe
This bird makes a sound you'd probably
hear more as "whoooop-whoop," though if you said "whoop-whoop" the way
you would read it off the page, you wouldn't sound like this bird. The
ancient Romans called it "upupa," and in English we used to call it
"hoopoop." Somehow that came to be change to "hoopoe"; I don't know
whether that was for reasons of decency or dignity, or simply random
mutation, but I do know other versions of the name from earlier
centuries include "whoophoo" and "whopee." Meanwhile, the hoopoe doesn't
give a whoop whether it's getting its name right… it just gives a
"whoooop-whoop."
KiskadeeThe three-part song of this bird has
gotten it the Portuguese name "bem-te-vi" and the Spanish name
"bien-ti-veo." If you listen to it, you will probably hear something
like a raspy "Ih! Ee weeo," largely due to the first note being high and
short, and then next holding a little lower but dipping in the middle
and then gliding downward. How does this make it "kiskadee"? Well, you
insert "k" and "sk" to indicate the sharp start and almost as sharp end
of the first part, and then stick in a "d" instead of a "w" probably
because you're thinking of a chickadee…
CurlewOne sound the curlew (or one kind of
curlew) makes has a long liquid sound between two high chirping sounds,
and it seems that a long time ago people in France found that
"currrrrrrleu" was a good approximation of it. I think it sounds more
like a squeeze toy or someone cleaning a mirror, but, then again, if
someone were to try to spell either of those sounds, they might end up
with "curlew" too. Because how do you spell a sound humans can't quite
make?
Whip-poor-will
If you know this bird's name, you
can hear it when you hear its call. On the other hand, if someone told
you it was called a "Quaker reel" you'd hear that. Or "potpourri." Or
any of quite a few other possibles. What is clear is that there's a
sound at the start that reminds us of an "o" or "u" or "w" sound
(because the first and second sets of harmonics are both low); there's a
catch between the first and second parts that we'd think of as a
version of a stop consonant like "p" or "k"; the second note is longer
and lower than the first and is mainly a trill; and the third note is
much higher and quicker and trails off a little at the end. There just
happen to be a lot of plausible sets of English sounds that match that.
Picking one is sort of like seeing animals in clouds.
BobolinkThis bird's name comes from its call —
or some part of its actually incredibly varied vocal repertoire —
supposedly sounding like "Bob o' Lincoln." To my ears it sounds more
like an excited R2D2. But the many little notes coming quickly one after
another have a little resemblance to the sound we make it we say "Bob
o' Lincoln" quickly — or "little kitty litter" or "abalone goblet" or…
Well, someone picked this version, and it stuck. Meanwhile, the bobolink
goes on babbling and doesn't care what it's called.
Tuco-tucoThis cute little South American rodent
spends a lot of its time burrowing, but when it makes a sound, the sound
is something that sounds like "tuc-tuc-tuc." So why call it
"tuco-tuco"? Because you find it in countries where they speak Spanish
and Portuguese, and in either language "tuc" is not a well-formed word,
but "tuco" is. And we got the name from them.
Ai
Here, at last, is an animal that we can
actually think of as able to say its name as we do. It's a sloth, a
furry slow-moving three-toed jungle creature — but a mammal with a vocal
tract a bit more like ours, although of course not able to carry on a
conversation. When a female ai calls out for a mate, or when a male or
female is in danger, it makes a high-pitched sound like a woman
screaming (not very laid-back for such a chillin' creature), and sure
enough, the way its mouth starts wide open and then closes down makes
the cry sound sort of like a human "ay" or "ai" — but a very high one!
Source
"A better attitude leads to better actions and a better world..."
Photographer Nick Brandt, who has a long association with east Africa – he directed the video for Michael Jackson's Earth Song
there in 1995 – took a detour from his usual work when he discovered
perfectly preserved birds and bats on the shoreline. "I could not help
but photograph them," he says. "No one knows for certain exactly how
they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the
lake's surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass
windows, they crash into the lake."
