PrimatePoetics | SocialFiction

The Common Reader of PrimatePoetics

According to the Dyak of Malaysia the Orang-utan, a Malayan name variously translated as ‘reasonable being of the woods' or 'old person of the forest', is fully capable of language but prefers not to show this to humans out of fear of being put to work. Similarly, the West African Oubi believe that the chimpanzee is human, only smarter. When the world was made some people refused to work and the creating spirit punished them by making them ugly. To the Oubi the Gue (their word for chimp, meaning ‘ugly’) are family, ugly, but family nevertheless. A Jewish story tells how the construction workers of Babel were turned into apes for their heretic labour. A medieval bestiary describes the ape as a creature without a tail but with human mentality, and continues by describing the devil as having ape form.

Along the historic horizon of opinions the Western insistence on a deep divide between us and the ape is a rare and aggressive exception to the norm, and presumably this was caused by prejudice and unfamiliarity. But the once unbridgeable gap between humans and ape is closing. Fifty years ago absolutely nothing was known about the lifestyle of wild apes and Jane Goodall only had to show up at Gombé, see what was in front of her, to know more about chimps than the entire primatological establishment combined. The story is still unfolding and with every new report the ape becomes a degree more rational. The ramifications of this echo through science, philosophy, popular culture and the legal system. Ironically, in a twisted, psychotic way, primate vivisectionists were leading the primate-renaissance with their insistence on working with great apes as the closest non-human animals. Now the insight has gone beyond them, their dismissal of the ape mind is no longer accepted, and their facilities will all be shut down sooner or later. The next step will be to grant the great apes personhood and a certain amount of legal protection.

1) If apes are able to communicate in a language in which humans can communicate too, and there is no doubt that this situation has occurred several times in the last forty years, and 2) if every first instance of a language is automatically poetic as a poet like Shelley had it, than 3) there is no doubt that ape language deserves to be a subject of interest to literature. The question if apes are capable of language remains the most compelling and most hotly contended battlefield in the larger reassessment of apes as people, and of ourselves as the third chimpanzee. One reinforces the other, the biological and psychological realm become poetic, poets become anthropologists, the ape demanding an M&M becomes a poet and the process of evolution takes the argument further back, to small apes and monkeys first and into deep history second.

Poetic revolutions happen when a new kind of mind and a new kind of awareness demands entrance into the fold of a dominant language, the great ape who has learned a human language must count as the greatest revolution in literature so far. This, unfinished, common reader of PrimatePoetics, organized to be read as a continues story, charts the history of the revolution in the words of philosophers, poets, primatologists and bystanders.


Early 19th Congo statue with chimp skull.

Pliny, Natural History, 78.
The types of ape that are closest to humans in shape are distinguished from one another by their tails. Apes are extraordinarily cunning characters. People say they smear themselves with bird droppings and in imitation of hunters put on nooses, set to catch them, as if they were shoes. Mucianus says that apes with tails have played draughts and can distinguish real nuts from imitations made from wax. They are sad when the moon wanes and worship the new moon with great glee. Other quadrupeds also are afraid of eclipses.

Apes are notably fond of their young. Domesticated monkeys carry their new-born young about. They show them off to everyone and are pleased to have them fussed over, and look like persons who understand they are being congratulated. So in many cases they smother their young by hugging them. The baboon is naturally fiercer, just as an orang-utan is very gentle. Ethiopian apes are almost completely different; they are bearded and have a tail that is wide and flat at its base. The animal is said to be unable to live in any other climate but that of Ethiopia, its birthplace.

Samuel Pepys, Diary, 1666.
We are called to Sir W. Batten's to see the strange creature that Captain Holmes hath brought with him from Guiny; it is a great baboon, but so much like a man in most things, that though they say there is a species of them, yet I cannot believe but that it is a monster got of a man and she-baboon. I do believe that it already understands much English, and I am of the mind it might be taught to speak or make signs. 

Giambattista Vico, De Constantia Philologiae, 17?.
The whole art of poetry reduces itself to this, that anyone who wishes to excel as a poet must unlearn all his native language, and return to the pristine beggary of words; by this necessity he will express the feelings of his mind by means of the most obvious and easily perceived aspect of things; he will, by the aid of the senses and the imagination, point the most striking and lovely images of things, manners and feelings; and just as anyone who wishes to be a philosopher must first purge himself of the prejudice of children and common people, so anyone who would write a poem must feel and think entirely according to the childlike and common views of the world. In this way he will become really imaginative, and will compose at once sublimely and in accordance with the popular understanding.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L'Homme Machine, 1748.
Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence, and yet cannot learn music. What is the reason for this, except some defect in the organs of speech? But is this defect so essential to the structure that it could never be remedied? In a word, would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so.

I should choose a large ape in preference to any other, until by some good fortune another kind should be discovered, more like us, for nothing prevents there being such a one in regions unknown to us. The ape resembles us so strongly that naturalists have called it "wild man" or "man of the woods." I should take it in the condition of the pupils of Amman, that is to say, I should not want it to be too young or too old; for apes that are brought to Europe are usually too old. I would choose the one with the most intelligent face, and the one which, in a thousand little ways, best lived up to its look of intelligence. Finally not considering myself worthy to be his master, I should put him in the school of that excellent teacher whom I have just named, or with another teacher equally skilful, if there is one.

Lord J. B. Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 1773.
I still maintain, that his [the orang-utan] being possessed of the capacity of acquiring it [language], by having both the human intelligence and the organs of pronunciation, joined to the dispositions and affections of his mind, mild, gentle, and humane, is sufficient to denominate him a man.

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791.
We talked of the Ouran-Outang, and of Lord Monboddo’s thinking that he might be taught to speak. Dr. Johnson treated this with ridicule. Mr. Crosbie said, that Lord Monboddo believed the existence of every thing possible; in short, that all which is in posse might be found in esse. JOHNSON. ‘But, Sir, it is as possible that the Ouran-Outang does not speak, as that he speaks. However, I shall not contest the point. I should have thought it not possible to find a Monboddo; yet he exists.’

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry, 1819.  
In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.

George Steiner, Extraterritorial, 1975.
Bees dance exact messages to each other as to the direction, amount, and quality of honey to be found. Dolphins pipe signals of warning and summons. It may be that the trills and whistles of birds convey rudimentary meaning. Meaning, in fact, is the essence, the underlying structure of natural forms. Colours, sequences, odours, regularities, or salient anomalies of shape and event, all are informant. Almost every phenomenon can be ‘read’ and classed as a statement. It signals danger or solicitation. Lack or availability of nourishment; it points towards or away from other significant structures. Living beings, above elementary units, dispose of a large, manifold range of articulation: postures, gestures, colourations, tonalities, secretions, facial mien. Separately or in conjunction, these communicate a message, a unit or unit cluster of focused information. Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals, to sort out from the random flux those literally vital to oneself and one’s specie, and to decode the pertinent signal with sufficient speed and accuracy. An organism failing to do so, either because its receptors are blunted or because it ‘misreads’, will perish. A marmot dies when it misread – i.e. fails to decode accurately – the message of tint, odour, or texture which differentiates the statement of identity of a venomous mushroom from that of a edible variety.

In the message-flight of the bee, the exact angle matters; each beck and volte in our courtship minuet of the moor-hen is an expression of coded meaning; very probably, a pointer can ‘read’ accurately hundreds of gradations of smell. Long before man, the planet was many-hued, loud and odorous with statement and reply. We know of fossils of organic structures three thousand million years old. The development of specific information codes, of signal systems through which emitter and receiver could formulate and exchange messages of identity, need, and sexual correlation, cannot be much younger. Where there is multi-cellular life, where different phyla coexist and compete, there is, there has to be, the articulation of meaning. Only the inert is mute. Only total death has no statement to make.

I have not until now used the word language.

Simon Kirby and Morten H. Christiansen, From Language Learning to Language Evolution, 2002.
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~simon/Papers/Kirby/From%20language%20learning%20to%20language%20evolution.pdf
There are an enormous number of communication systems in the natural world. When a male Tungara frog produces “whines” and “chucks” to attract a female, when a mantis shrimp strikes the ground to warn off a competitor for territory, even when a bee is attracted to a particular flower, communication is taking place. Humans as prodigious communicators are not unusual in this respect. What makes human language stand out as unique (or at least very rare indeed) is the degree to which it is learned. The frog’s response to mating calls is determined by its genes, which have been tuned by natural selection. There is an inevitability to the use of this signal. Barring some kind of disaster in the development of the frog, we can predict its response from birth. If we had some machine for reading and translating its DNA, we could read-off its communication system from the frog genome. We cannot say the same of a human infant. The language, or languages, that an adult human will come to speak are not predestined in the same way. The particular sounds that a child will use to form words, the words themselves, the ways in which words will be modified and strung together to form utterances — none of this is written in the human genome. Whereas frogs store their communication system in their genome, much of the details of human communication are stored in the environment. The information telling us the set of vowels we should use, the inventory of verb stems, the way to form the past tense, how to construct a relative-clause, and all the other facts that make up a human language must be acquired by observing the way in which others around us communicate. Of course this does not mean that human genes have no role to play in determining the structure of human communication. If we could read the genome of a human like we did with the frog, we would find that, rather than storing details of a communication system, our genes provide us with mechanisms to retrieve these details from the behaviour of others. From a design point of view, it is easy to see the advantages of providing instructions for building mechanisms for language acquisition rather than the language itself. Human language cannot be completely innate because it would not fit in the genome. Worden (1995) has derived a speed-limit on evolution that allows us to estimate the maximum amount of information in the human genome that codes for the cognitive differences between us and chimpanzees. He gives a paltry figure of approximately 5 kilobytes. This is equivalent to the text of just the introduction to this chapter.

Robbins Burling, in The Evolutionary emergence of language, 2000.
If we had been clearer about the ability of human beings, both young and old, to understand more than they produce, we might not have waited so long to ask how much spoken human language non-human primates can learn to understand. Even if an ape is incapable of uttering a single spoken word, an ability to comprehend would demonstrate some genuine knowledge of a language. Anecdotal reports have suggested that captive chimps have sometimes learned to understand a good deal of spoken language even though they said nothing at all. These reports have sometimes been met with some skepticism for the same reasons that parental claims for their children’s ability to comprehend have been doubted, partly because production seems more real than passive comprehension, but also because it is so difficult to measure skill in comprehension. Like people, apes can infer a great deal from the context in which language is used. It is always difficult to know how much any listener, even an ape, depends upon context, and how much upon the language. Hayes and Nissen suggest that Viki learned to understand a considerable amount of spoken English, but they were so eager to teach her to articulate words that they did not systematically study her comprehension (1971). As a result, Viki is remembered for her failure to speak, rather than for her success at understanding.

With the help of Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues, Kanzi, the famous bonobo, has now drastically confirmed the ability of apes to learn to comprehend a significant amount of spoken language. At the age of eight, Kanzi was compared to a two-year-old human child, and their ability to understand English were remarkably similar. Kanzi, like the girl, was to respond correctly to a large number of different words and to a considerable variety of spoken sentences. Kanzi’s receptive skills give far better evidence of linguistic ability than has ever been shown by any nonhuman primate who has been trained to produce language or language-like signals, whether by articulating spoken words, signing, manipulating plastic chips or pressing buttons. Indeed, Kanzi’s ability to comprehend a human language seems sufficiently extensive that he should be credited with a degree of linguistic competence that linguists have most often presumed to be exclusively human. No one need fear that a bonobo or any other ape is about to give serious competition to human children in their speed or thoroughness of language learning, but I do not doubt that Kanzi has learned a good deal of English. The pattern is consistent. Not only humans of all ages, but apes as well, are always able to understand more than they can say.

Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 1963.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/lorenz.html
An inexorable law of perception prevents us from seeing in the ape, particularly in the chimpanzee, an animal like other animals, and makes us see in its face the human physiognomy. From this point of view, measured by human standards, the chimpanzee of course appears as something horrible, a diabolical caricature of ourselves. In looking at the gorilla or the orang-utan, which are less closely related to us, our judgement is correspondingly less distorted. The heads of the old males may look to us like bizarre devils' masks, impressive and even aesthetically appealing. However, we cannot feel like this about the chimpanzee: he is irresistibly funny and at the same time as common, as vulgar, as no other animal but a debased human being can ever be. This subjective impression is not altogether wrong: there are reasons for supposing that the common ancestor of man and the chimpanzee stood not lower but considerably higher than the chimpanzee does today. Absurd though the contemptuous attitude of man to the chimpanzee may be in itself, its strong emotional content has nevertheless misled several scientists into building up entirely unfounded theories about the origin of man: his evolution from animals is not disputed, but his close relationship to the repulsive chimpanzee is either passed over in a few logical skips or circumvented by sophistic detours.

The chimpanzee, however, is irresistibly funny just because he is so similar to us. What is worse is that in the narrow confinement of zoological gardens, adult chimpanzees degenerate much in the same way as human beings would under comparable circumstances, and give an impression of real dissoluteness and depravity. Even the normal chimp observed in perfect health gives the impression not of an extremely highly evolved animal but rather of a desperate and debased human being.

J.M Coutzee, The Lives of Animals, 1999.
Sultan is alone in his pen. He is hungry: that food that used to arrive regularly has unaccountably ceased coming.

The man who used to feed him and has now stopped feeding him stretches a wire over the pen three meters above ground level, and hangs a bunch of banana’s from it. Into the pen he drags three wooden crates. Then he disappears, closing the gate behind him, though he is still somewhere in the vicinity, since one can smell him.

Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think. That is what the banana’s up there are about. The banana’s are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one ‘s thinking. But what must one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not want those crates any more? But none of these is the right thought. Even a more complicated thought – for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick it up from the floor? – is wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the banana’s?

Sultan drags the crates under the banana’s, piles them on top of the other, climbs over the tower he has built, and pulls down the banana’s. He thinks: Now will he stop punishing me?

The answer is: No. The next day the man hangs a fresh bunch of banana’s from the wire but also fills the crates with stones so that they are to heavy to be dragged. One is supposed to think: Why has he filled the crates with stones? One is supposed to think: How does one use the crates to get banana’s despite the fact that they are filled with stones?

One is beginning to see how the man’s mind works.

At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled toward lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus to towards acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied.

Gary Snyder, Practise of the Wild, 2004.
Some will say, so far so good. "We are mammal primates, but we have language and the animals don't." By some definitions perhaps they don't. But they do communicate extensively, and by call systems we are just beginning to grasp.

It would be a mistake to think that human beings got 'smarter' at some point and invented language and then society. Language and culture emerge from our biological-social natural existence, animals that we were/are. Language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves. Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden. It is of a complexity that eludes our rational intellectual capacities. All attempts at scientific description of natural language have fallen short of completeness, as the descriptive linguists readily confess, yet the child learns the mother tongue early and has virtually mastered it by the age of sic.

Language is learned in the house and in the fields, not at school. Without having ever been taught formal grammar we utter syntactically correct sentences, one after another, for all the waking hours of the years of our life. Without concious device we constantly reach into the vast word-hoards in the depths of the wild unconscious. We cannot as individuals or even as a specie take credit for this power. It came from some place else: from the way clouds divide and mingle (and the arms of energy that coil first back and then forwards), from the way the many flowerlets of a composite blossom divide and redivide, from the gleaming calligraphy of the ancient riverbeds of the Yukon River streaming out the Yukon flats, from the wind in the pine-needles, from the chuckles of grouse in the ceanothus bushes.

Richard Lynch Garner, Speech of Monkeys, 1892.
http://www.archive.org/details/speechofmonkeys00garnrich
It had never been any part of my purpose to teach a monkey to talk; but after I became familiar with the qualities and range of the voice of Moses, I determined to see if he might not be taught to speak a few simple words of human speech. To effect this in the easiest way and shortest time, I carefully observed the movements of his lips and vocal organs in order to select such words for him to try as were best adapted to his ability. I selected the word mamma, which may be considered almost a universal word of human speech; the French word feu, fire; the German word wie, how; and the native Nkami word nkgwe, mother. Every day I took him on my lap and tried to induce him to say one or more of these words. For a long time he made no effort to learn them; but after some weeks of persistent labor and a bribe of corned beef, he began to see dimly what Iwanted him to do. The native word quoted is very similar to one of the sounds of his own speech, which means "good'' or "satisfaction." The vowel element differs in them, and he was not able in the time he was under tuition to change them; but he distinguished them from other words.

In his attempt to say mamma he worked his lips without making any sound, although he really tried to do so. I believe that in the course of time he would have succeeded. He observed the movement of my lips and tried to imitate it, but he seemed to think that the lips alone produced the sound. With feu he succeeded fairly well, except that the consonant element, as he uttered it, resembled "v" more than "f," so that the sound was more like vu, making the ''u" short as in "nut." It was quite as nearly perfect as most people of other tongues ever learn to speak the same word in French, and, if it had been uttered in a sentence, any one knowing that language would recognize it as meaning fire. In his efforts to pronounce wie he always gave the vowel element like German "u" with the umlaut, but the "w" element was more like the English than the German sound of that letter.

Taking into consideration the fact that he was only a little more than a year old, and was in training less than three months, his progress was all that could have been desired, and vastly more than had been hoped for. It is my belief that, had he lived until this time, he would have mastered these and other words of human speech to the satisfaction of the most exacting linguist. If he had only learned one word in a whole lifetime, he would have shown at least that the race is capable of being improved and elevated in some degree.

William Furness, Observations on the Mentality of Chimpanzees and Orangutans, 1916.
http://www.archive.org/details/proceedingsamer120socigoog
If these animals have a language it is restricted to a very few sounds of a general emotional signification. Articulate speech they have none and communication with one another is accomplished by vocal sounds to no greater extent than it is by dogs, with a growl, a whine, or a bark. They are, however, capable to a surprising degree of acquiring an understanding of human speech. In the case of the orang-utan it took at least six months of daily training to teach her to say "Papa." This word was selected not only because it is a very primitive sound, but also because it combined two elements of vocalization to which orang-utans and chimpanzees are, as I have said, unaccustomed, namely: the use of lips and an expired vowel sound. The training consisted of a repetition of the sounds for minutes at a time, while the ape's lips were brought together and opened in imitation of the movements of my lips. I also went through these same manoeuvre's facing a mirror with her face close to mine that she might see what her lips were to do as well as feel the movement of them. At the end of about six months, one day of her own accord, out of lesson time, she said "Papa" quite distinctly and repeated it on command. Of course, I praised and petted her enthusiastically; she never forgot it after that and finally recognized it as my name. When asked "Where is Papa?" she would at once point to me or pat me on the shoulder. One warm summer's day I carried her in my arms into a swimming pool; she was alarmed at first but when the water came up to her legs she was panic stricken; she clung with her arms about my neck; kissed me again and again and kept saying "Papa ! Papa ! Papa !" Of course, I went no further after that pathetic appeal.

The next word I attempted to teach her to say was "cup." (Let me say that by this time she understood almost everything that it was necessary for me to say such as "Open your mouth," "Stick out your tongue," "Do this," etc., and she was perfectly gentle and occasionally seemed quite interested.) The first move in teaching her to say cup was to push her tongue back in her throat as if she were to make the sound "ka." This was done by means of a bone spatula with which I pressed lightly on the centre of her tongue. When I saw that she had taken a full breath I placed my finger over her nose to make her try to breathe through her mouth. The spatula was then quickly withdrawn and inevitably she made the sound "ka." All the while facing her I held my mouth open with my tongue in the same position as hers so that her observation, curiosity, and powers of imitation might aid her, and I said ka with her emphatically as I released her tongue. After several lessons of, perhaps, fifteen minutes of this sort of training each day she would draw back her tongue to the position even before the spatula had touched it, but she would not say ka unless I placed my finger over her nose. The next advance was that she herself placed my finger over her nose and then said ka without any use of the spatula ; then she found that in default of my finger her own would answer the purpose and I could get her to make this sound any time I asked her to. It was comparatively very easy from this to teach her to say "kap" by means of closing her lips with my fingers the instant she said ka. At the same time I showed her the cup that she drank out of and I repeated the word several times as I touched it to her lips. After a few lessons when I showed her the cup and asked "What is this ? " she would say cup very plainly. Once when ill at night she leaned out of her hammock and said "cup, cup, cup," which I naturally understood to mean that she was thirsty and which proved to be the case. I think this showed fairly conclusively that there was a glimmering idea of the connection of the word with the object and with her desire.

By getting her to stick out her tongue and then by holding the tip of it up against her teeth and at the same time forcing her to breathe through her mouth I finally got her to make the sound Th. This was preliminary to teaching the words : the, this, that. All this was encouraging I will admit but then — "I never nursed a dear gazelle . . . ," etc.; the poor little animal died four or five months after this first tiny inkling of language. I have tried persistently for five years to teach my surviving chimpanzee pupil to say "mama" ; she says it, but very poorly. I think I must honestly say it is a failure. Again and again I have tried by the same method that I used with the orang-utan to teach her to say "cup", but to no avail. On the whole I should say that the orang holds out more promise as a conversationalist than does the chimpanzee; it is more patient, less excitable, and seems to take instruction more kindly.

The Ape and The Child, About Gua.
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/history/wnk/ape.html
No investigation in Kellogg's career brought him more attention than did the study involving the rearing of his infant son Donald with an infant chimpanzee, Gua. The study is well documented in the 336 pages that comprise The Ape and the Child.

The idea for the study emerged in 1927 when Kellogg was still a graduate student at Columbia University. Kellogg and Kellogg give us that date for the idea but not its source. However, our guess is that it was stimulated by an article on the "wolf children" of India which was published that year in the American Journal of Psychology. Similar to Itard's "wild boy of Aveyron," the wolf children were two young girls found in a cave inhabited by wolves. These children behaved as though they were wolves, eating and drinking like those animals and making no use of their hands except to crawl around on all fours, which was their method of locomotion. Eventually the girls learned to walk upright, although they could never run. One acquired speech, at least a vocabulary of approximately 100 words, but the other continued only to make grunting noises. Howling noises at night were never extinguished, nor were their human teachers able to break them of the rather distasteful habit of "pouncing upon and devouring small birds and mammals". Both girls died at an early age. Like other feral children, the wolf children were judged to be sub-normal in intelligence and it was assumed that their intellectual deficits prevented them from being able to adapt to their new surroundings. This interpretation was common in explaining the problems of adjustment in feral children and was, in fact, the explanation offered by Squires. Kellogg disagreed with that interpretation, and in two replies published in the American Journal of Psychology, he argued that the wolf children, and others like them, were probably born of normal intelligence. Indeed, it was unlikely that they would otherwise have been capable of survival. From his environmentalistic perspective he contended that these children learned to be wild animals because that was exactly what their environment demanded of them.

Douglas Adams, Meeting a Gorilla, 1993.
I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that he would be able to tell us of his life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

Eugene Linden, Apes, Men and Language, 1974.
Some innovations indicated Washoe possessed unexpected abilities that the Gardners were not prepared to evaluate. They referred to these unexpected bonuses as 'lagniappe,' a creole expression that refers to an extra measure of goods a shopkeeper gives to a customer. Examples of lagniappe occurred when Washoe would invent signs. On occasion the Gardners themselves were forced to adapt Ameslan (ASL) signs for objects for which they did not know the proper gesture. 'Bib' was one of these objects, for which the Gardners used the Ameslan sign 'wiper,' made by touching the mouth with five fingers in a wip[ing motion. One day Washoe was asked to identify her bib and, unable to remember the 'wiper' gesture, drew the outline of a bib on her chest. The Gardners acknowledged that Washoe's sign was just as good as theirs, but they noted that the purpose of the project was not to learn a language devised by an infant chimpanzee but to teach Washoe a human language, and they insisted she use the 'wiper' gesture. Later they discovered that Washoe's 'bib' sign was, after all, the correct gesture in Ameslan.

Noam Chomsky, New York Magazine, 1979.
Language is highly specialized human ability. It is about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human being teaching them to fly. Would a human physiologist interested in studying flight in birds study a man jumping? You may laugh at this idea, but a man jumping is closer to a chicken flying than an ape will ever come to language. At least a man jumping can flap his arms. An ape's use of symbols is in no way homologous to human language.

Ernst von Glaserfeld, The Yerkish Language for Non-Human Primates, 1975.
http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J79/J79-1012.pdf
One of the first of Lana's spontaneous 'generalisations' concerned the lexigram NO. She had learned the use of this 1exigtam.in me specific context, i.e. in answers to questions such as: ? BANANA NAME-OF THIS, when the object ostensively indicated to her was, for instance; her blanket. One morning, Tim Gill, to whose ingenious devising of training situations the project owes a great deal of its success, entered the room with a bowl of banana slices. As he moved around the corner of Lana's cubicle in order to fill the dispenser that responds, to the keyboard message PLEASE MACHINE GIVE PIECE OF BANANA, he popped a banana slice into his mouth. Seeing this, Lana adopted a threatening posture and hooted angrily. Then, suddenly, she ran to the keyboard and, three times in succession, vigorously pressed the key bearing the lexigram NO.

Conversation recorded on May 6th, 1974.

On the preceding, days Lana had learned the lexigrams for a bowl and a metal can, BOWL and CAN. This had been accomplished By first using objects whose names were already known to her, putting an M&M candy inside them, and asking her: ? WHAT NAME-OF THIS. On May 5th she reliably replied with the correct lexigram when the reward was placed in the bowl or in the can. The next morning Tim came in with the bowl, the can, and a cardboard box. While Lana was watching, he put an M&M candy in the box, and the following exchange took place:

Birute Galdikas, interview with Claudio Dreifus, New York Times, 2000.
Q. Based on what you've seen, do you believe that orang-utans can learn language?

A. I think orang-utans can learn how to use language at the level of a 3-year-old child. I had a student in 1978, Gary Shapiro, who came to Camp Leakey and he taught an adult female, Rinnie, sign language. He could not believe how fast she learned it. Rinnie took the tutoring personally. One day, Rinnie took Gary by the hand and tried to seduce him. Gary pushed her away. She thereafter lost all interest in signing. Interestingly, my son, Binti, who was then 2, picked up signing from watching Gary and Rinnie together -- though Binti thought that you could communicate with all orang-utans through signs. For a while, he went around and signed with all the animals, even those who'd never been taught sign language.

Q. Did Binti speak orang-utan?

A. He could interpret what they meant. He moved it and he felt it. His whole body posture would be like an orang-utan.

Q. Did Binti identify as an orang-utan?

A. It was heading in that direction.....

Conversation with Chantek 1, from Steven M. Wise, Drawing the Line, 2003.
Lyn Miles drove through a staff entrance at Zoo Atlanta. She stopped and pointed towards an outside enclosure. One of three orang-utans stirred from a hammock and shuffled to the edge of the enclosure, the way an astronaut might after an extended flight. I knew orang-utans are the world’s largest arboreal animal, but I didn’t see any trees inside his enclosure. His enormous cheek pads made him appear immense.

“How much does he weigh?” I asked.

“Three hundred pounds,” Miles said.

“His head…”

“When they gain too much weight, their cheek pads balloon, he’s on a diet now.”

“YOU.” The orang-utan gestured with his right hand. Miles began a simultaneous translation. “YOU, YOU, YOU, YOU, LYN.”

Miles lifted her hands high above the steering wheel.

“SECRET,” she signed.

“WHERE?” asked Chantek.

“OVER THERE,” Miles signed.
Chantek moved his fingers.

“He is asking for fruit,” Miles said. “He knows he is not allowed to have fruit. I’m going to tell him about you.”
“NEW FRIEND. GOOD MAN BRING FOOD. ” She turned toward me. “He’ll like that.” She clenched her fist and placed it on her forehead. “STEVE.” She stared at Chantek. “That will be your name sign. An S on the forehead.

“STEVE,” Chantek signed. “Steve.”

Wait here while I get the food out of the trunk and bring it over,” Miles said to me.

She carried the groceries towards the enclosure. At her signal, I walked towards them, Miles was laying out grapes and oranges. As she walked, she said Chantek often sends her on errands to buy stuff, especially Naya, Canadian bottled water. Children’s puzzles were stacked beside her. She handed me latex surgical gloves.

“It’s the rules.”

She was apologetic. She gave Chantek a puzzle from “Lights, Camera, Interaction.” Each piece was cut in the shape of a motor vehicle. He dumped the pieces on the cement, then placed the puzzle board on his lap. He picked each piece up and began turning it around until it fit a hole. Miles held out an orange. He placed a clenched fist on his forehead.

“STEVE.”

“He wants you to give it to him.”

I offered it. He slowly smothered it in huge puffy fingers and withdrew it into the cage. Miles began to play “Simon Says.”

Simon says ‘clap,’” she said.

Chantek clapped.

“Simon says ‘pat head.’”

He patted his head.

“Simon says ‘pat right shoulder with left hand.’”

He did it.

Whenever Chantek made a sloppy sign, Miles said, “Sign better.”

He would try again. If the sign was still slipshod, she reminded him, “Sign better.” And he would. After an hour, Miles held up a grape.

“Steve,” Chantek signed.

Miles handed me the grape. I passed it through the bars. Chantek grasped it between one Brobdingnagian thumb and index-finger, then “accidentally” squeezed the top of my index finger. It felt like a vise (I write “accidentally” because more than one scientist familiar with orang-utans suspects Chantek saw me as a mark from whom he could steal a glove to use to trade for goodies). Instinctively I jerked away. But he caught the tip of my finger.

“Let go!” Miles said Sharply. “Let go!!”

He did.

Conversation with Chantek 2, Susanne Antonetta, 2005.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/152/
When our van pulls up to Chantek’s habitat he swings out onto one of its inside branches and asks for bottled water, which he calls “car water,” since Lyn usually has some in her car. He’s particular about bottled waters, preferring Naya. Chantek appears as harmlessly shaggy as a Sesame Street figure, the colour of a November pumpkin, the size of an enormous easy chair. Because of his strength, though, we’re not allowed into his habitat, so he kisses and strokes Lyn through the bars.

I know very little sign, so Lyn asks Chantek to teach me some. Chantek has an active vocabulary of about three hundred words and a passive vocabulary of a thousand or more, which he can comprehend either by speech or by sign. We start with the basics.

Teach her apple, says Lyn.

Chantek shows me apple, brushing his cheek. I mimic him, and Good, he signs, then asks Lyn what’s wrong with her hand, which has a scratch on the knuckle.

I did it cleaning, she tells him, and he makes a grimace of sympathy, then asks to touch and kiss it.

Lyn introduces me as Writer—which becomes my sign name—the friend of Dawn You Made A Necklace For. Chantek has had surgery recently on his laryngeal flap, the long black fold under the chin that makes orangs look like some kind of colonial barrister, and she asks him how he’s feeling, if the suture’s healing okay. Yes, says Chantek, he’s fine. He has missed Lyn and wants to play ball. Oh, and there’s poop on the other side of the habitat, presumably left there by his companion, Sibu; it’s dirty and he’d like it removed.

Lyn and Chantek speak head to head; her disorderly reddish hair makes them look for a second like mother and son, a repetitious mother, a leaning son anxious not to misunderstand. I stand there like anyone hanging around two family members who chat familiarly, neither of whom you know very well; you try to find ways to interject yourself into the conversation. Mine turns out to be no more mysterious than a bag of yellow raisins, which Chantek loves and my five-year-old son Jin, who flew here with me, got tired of. In other words, with one part of my mind I’m aware of the fact that I’m doing this slightly unreal thing, talking with an orang-utan. With another, I’m just a socially awkward person in a group, hoping I don’t say anything stupid, and that I can perhaps say or do something a little memorable.

“Sad,” Chantek says when we, or more precisely, Lyn, leaves.

CHANTEK USES WORDS plus gestures to speak: He might tell Lyn “I you talk,” indicating the other side of the cage, when he wants privacy from me—from my keen and almost predatory listening—as he does several times when I’m there. (He insists on privacy to discuss the poop situation.) His inability or unwillingness to use complicated syntax puts him at a child’s linguistic level, as do other behaviours. In some ways, his resemblance to Jin and every other human child in the world cracks me up. When we give him an apple and ask him to share it with his habitat-mate Sibu, he carefully pulls off a crumb of apple-flesh and hands it to her, the way Jin will share a bit of cookie. “Really share or you can’t have any more,” Lyn scolds orally, and he resignedly breaks off half. He signs over and over—begs—for ice cream and cheeseburgers. Other things I see show a sophistication a child wouldn’t have. Chantek, as always, dabs his mouth clean after eating but surprises both Lyn and me by folding the napkin to a fresh side and sponging out the sutured part of his laryngeal flap, which tends to catch food crumbs. He has never cleaned this area in the past and seems to realize the suture needs special attention. Sibu, an orang who has never had human acculturation, grabs a napkin and begins wiping her own mouth as she watches his slow and deliberate swipes. It’s not quite the apes throwing bones in the air in front of a monolith from the film 2001, but Sibu has clearly, at that moment, absorbed a piece of culture.

Roger Fouts with Stephen Tukel Mills, Next of Kin, 1997.
Communication on the island (of Dr Lemmon) resembled a primate Tower of Babel. Booee, Bruno, Thelma, and Cindy let each other know what they wanted through natural chimpanzee gesture, vocalization, and facial expression. For example, if Booee wanted Bruno to play he would make a play face, laughing and motioning to him. But Washoe would sign a more specific message like COME TICKLE CHASE. When the other didn't respond, she would sign again very slowly and emphatically, like a mother signing to a baby. When they still didn't understand, she would get her message across just like they did, by gesturing and vocalizing.

Washoe's friends had been raised in human homes so they understood a good deal of English. For example, I would say, “Move that tire,” and they would do so. Washoe had never heard English, but she and I had always communicated with food grunts, screams, laughter, pant-hoots, and a lot of other meaningful vocal signals. Now that we were on the island, Washoe seemed to perceive English as an outgrowth of the vocal communication she was already familiar with, and in no time she could comprehend as much English as her friends. And the more time I spent with the other chimps, the more I mastered chimpanzee vocal communication.... It was not uncommon on the island to see a human-chimpanzee conversation that involved English, pant-hooting, ASL, and facial signals.


Fouts and Lucy Temerlin.

E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Stuart Shanker, Talbot J. Taylor, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind, 1998.
Matata clearly possessed the idea of purposeful communication, and I could not escape the impression that she often vocalized to attempt to tell me things - things I did not understand. I know that I certainly vocalized to tell her things that she did not understand. Thus, each of us remained locked into communication systems that worked with our own species but did not work at all between us. I wanted to learn more about her communication system, but she did not know how to teach me. Likewise, she wanted to learn more about my communication system, but I did not know how to teach her. To overcome these barriers between us, I and other scientists endeavoured to employ a visual communication system with apes. By pointing to visual symbols, we could avoid the problems inherent in asking apes to produce sounds.


Kanzi and Savage-Rumbaugh.

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Stuart Shanker, Talbot J. Taylor, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind, 1998.
Just before we reached the Treehouse, I felt Kanzi’s body began to stiffen, and I noticed that the hair on his legs, which was all I could see of him when he was astride my shoulders, was beginning to come erect. Kanzi made a soft ‘Whuh” sound and gestured to the side of the trail. There, a short distance from my foot, was coiled a very large snake. I screamed and jumped back several feet, almost falling as Kanzi grabbed hold of my head to hang on. Kanzi’s keen eyes had enabled him to give a last-minute warning that had just come in time. I returned Kanzi to Jeannine, found a very long, sturdy stick, and proceeded to prod the snake with the stick, Kanzi produced extremely loud “Waaa” calls, as though to warn me that what I was about to do was dangerous. Each time I actually struck the snake with the stick, Kanzi felt it necessary to “Waaa” yet again. Pretty soon Jeannine and I were “Waaaing” ourselves. “Waaa” seemed to be a pretty good word for “snake”, and when it was uttered with the gusto that Kanzi mustered, the ferocity of the sound itself was almost effective enough to scare the snake away. I soon became so accustomed to giving “Waaa” barks to alert Kanzi whenever I saw a snake in the woods that I began to find myself “Waaaing” even when I was walking home alone and came across a snake.

Roger S. Fouts, Deborah H. Fouts, Chimpanzees’ Use of Sign Language, 1993.
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/fouts01.htm
In our live observation and subsequently in the remote video recording of the chimpanzees, we observed that they talked to themselves. This was not a new observation, since the Gardners had also noted that Washoe would do this when she was young. In fact, her private conversations with herself were truly private, even to the extent that if we tried to eavesdrop she would turn away; and if we continued to try to see what she was signing she would actually get up and move to a more secluded location. She would label pictures of things that she saw in magazines, or merely sign to herself. She would do this while alone in her bedroom, or to make sure she was not bothered sometimes she would take a magazine to the top of a thirty-foot willow tree and sign to herself up there.

In one study we recorded over 5,200 instances of chimpanzee to chimpanzee signing. This signing was analysed into different categories. The majority of signing by the chimpanzees occurred in the three categories of 'play', 'social interaction', and 'reassurance'; these accounted for over 88 per cent of the chimpanzee to chimpanzee conversations. The remaining 12 per cent was spread across the categories of 'feeding', 'grooming', 'signing to self, 'cleaning' and 'discipline'. An interesting aspect of these findings was that they indicated that the chimpanzees used their signs primarily for various types of social interaction. It also showed that food was not a major topic, since it accounted for only about 5 per cent of their conversations. 

Richard Byrne, The Thinking Ape, 1995. 
The determination to believe in many ‘unique’ traits of humans is rather pervasive, and definitions of the traits get changed to rule new facts out of court. Language, for instance, used to be defined as a communication system with arbitrary relations between concept and signal pattern; until the deciphering of the dances of bees forced a re-think. Bees encode the distance and compass the direction of a source of honey in their waggle dances, performed in the dark inside the hive. The bearing of the flowers to the sun is encoded in the angle at which the bee dances to the vertical, and the distance is away if measured by the waggle rate, both awkwardly arbitrary relations. So, language became the ability to learn and bestow new relationships, which bees can’t do. But this has been challenged by experiments with captive chimpanzees (challenged, that is, if the idea that language is uniquely human must be sacrosanct). Now ‘real’ language has become equated with syntax, with which chimpanzees have trouble. No doubt this will persist until some animal turns out to use syntax to structure its communication. It looks very much as if preserving human uniqueness has become a goal of its own. 

Hugo Ball, Karawana, 1917.

Wilfried Hou Je Bek, Poem for a Chimpanzee, 2008.
waoh aach-aach
ohoh hoo-hoo
eech eech eech eech hoo-hoo
aich-aich huu hoo-hoo
waaa waa waaa waow
waaa waaa waa aach-aach
huu-huu huu huu eech eech
 
oo .. oo
 
huh-huh huh-huh huu-huu aich-aich waaa
uu huh-huh huu-huu aich-aich waaa waoh waoh
waaa waoh waoh aach-aach waaa waaa waaa waaa waaa

Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan, Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare, 2002.
http://www.vivaria.net/experiments/notes/publication/
In response to the familiar idea that if an infinite number of monkeys are given typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan, all Sulawesi Crested Macaques living at the Paignton Zoo Environmental Park (UK) had a computer placed in their enclosure. The following is one page of their 'typing':

Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to man's place in nature, 1868.
http://www.archive.org/details/evidenceastomans00huxl
All observers testify to the prodigious volume of voice possessed by these animals. According to the writer whom I have just cited [Dr. Salomon Miller], in one of them, the Siamang," the voice is grave and penetrating, resembling the sounds 'goek, goek, goek, goek, goek ha ha ha ha haaaaa', and may be easily heard at a distance of half a league." While the cry is being uttered, the great membranous bag under the throat which communicates with the organ of voice, the so-called " laryngeal sac," becomes greatly distended, diminishing again when the creature relapses into silence.

M. Duvaucel, likewise, affirms that the cry of the Siamang may be heard for miles - making the woods ring again. So Mr. Martin describes the cry of the agile Gibbon as "over-powering and deafening" in a room, and " from its strength, well calculated for resounding through the vast forests." Mr. "Waterhouse, an accomplished musician as well as zoologist, says, " The Gibbon's voice is certainly much more powerful than that of any singer I ever heard." And yet it is to be recollected that this animal is not half the height of, and far less bulky in proportion than, a man.

Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, 1871.
Two Excerpts

1) The voice of the adult male gorilla is tremendous, and he is furnished with a laryngeal sack, as is the adult male orang. The gibbons rank among the noisiest of monkeys, and the Sumatra species (Hylobates syndactylus) is also furnished with an air sack; but Mr. Blyth, who has had opportunities for observation, does not believe that the male is noisier than the female. Hence, these latter monkeys probably use their voices as a mutual call; and this is certainly the case with some quadrupeds, for instance the beaver. Another gibbon, the H. agilis, is remarkable, from having the power of giving a complete and correct octave of musical notes, which we may reasonably suspect serves as a sexual charm; but I shall have to recur to this subject in the next chapter. The vocal organs of the American Mycetes caraya are one-third larger in the male than in the female, and are wonderfully powerful. These monkeys in warm weather make the forests resound at morning and evening with their overwhelming voices. The males begin the dreadful concert, and often continue it during many hours, the females sometimes joining in with their less powerful voices. An excellent observer, Rengger, could not perceive that they were excited to begin by any special cause; he thinks that, like many birds, they delight in their own music, and try to excel each other. Whether most of the foregoing monkeys have acquired their powerful voices in order to beat their rivals and charm the females- or whether the vocal organs have been strengthened and enlarged through the inherited effects of long-continued use without any particular good being thus gained- I will not pretend to say; but the former view, at least in the case of the Hylobates agilis, seems the most probable.


2) In the class of mammals, with which we are here more particularly concerned, the males of almost all the species use their voices during the breeding-season much more than at any other time; and some are absolutely mute excepting at this season. With other species both sexes, or only the females, use their voices as a love-call. Considering these facts, and that the vocal organs of some quadrupeds are much more largely developed in the male than in the female, either permanently or temporarily during the breeding-season; and considering that in most of the lower classes the sounds produced by the males, serve not only to call but to excite or allure the female, it is a surprising fact that we have not as yet any good evidence that these organs are used by male mammals to charm the females. The American Mycetes caraya perhaps forms an exception, as does the Hylobates agilis, an ape allied to man. This gibbon has an extremely loud but musical voice. Mr. Waterhouse states, "It appeared to me that in ascending and descending the scale, the intervals were always exactly half-tones; and I am sure that the highest note was the exact octave to the lowest. The quality of the notes is very musical; and I do not doubt that a good violinist would be able to give a correct idea of the gibbon's composition, excepting as regards its loudness." Mr. Waterhouse then gives the notes. Professor Owen, who is a musician, confirms the foregoing statement, and remarks, though erroneously, that this gibbon "alone of brute mammals may be said to sing." It appears to be much excited after its performance. Unfortunately, its habits have never been closely observed in a state of nature; but from the analogy of other animals, it is probable that it uses its musical powers more especially during the season of courtship.

This gibbon is not the only species in the genus which sings, for my son, Francis Darwin, attentively listened in the Zoological Gardens to H. leuciscus whilst singing a cadence of three notes, in true musical intervals and with a clear musical tone. It is a more surprising fact that certain rodents utter musical sounds. Singing mice have often been mentioned and exhibited, but imposture has commonly been suspected. We have, however, at last a clear account by a well-known observer, the Rev. S. Lockwood, of the musical powers of an American species, the Hesperomys cognatus, belonging to a genus distinct from that of the English mouse. This little animal was kept in confinement, and the performance was repeatedly heard. In one of the two chief songs, "the last bar would frequently be prolonged to two or three; and she would sometimes change from C sharp and D, to C natural and D, then warble on these two notes awhile, and wind up with a quick chirp on C sharp and D. The distinctness between the semitones was very marked, and easily appreciable to a good ear." Mr. Lockwood gives both songs in musical notation; and adds that though this little mouse "had no ear for time, yet she would keep to the key of B (two flats) and strictly in a major key." ... "Her soft clear voice falls an octave with all the precision possible; then at the wind up, it rises again into a very quick trill on C sharp and D.

M.E. Hardus, A.R. Lameira, I. Singleton, H. Morrogh-Bernard, C.D. Knott, M. Ancrenaz, S.S. Utami-Atmoko, S.A. Wich. A Description of the Orangutan Vocal and Sound Repertoire: with a focus on geographical variation. ?.
http://www.aim.uzh.ch/orangutannetwork/orangutancallrepertoires.html
Identified calls: Ahh Vocalisation, Ahoor Call, Bared-teeth scream, Bark, Chomps, Complex calls, Contact uff, Crying and Screaming, Fast Long Call, Fear squeak, Frustration scream, Gorkum, Grindin, Grumble, Grumph, Grunt, Kiss squeak, Long cal, Lork call, Mating squeals, Nestsmacks, Play ooh, Raspberry, Roar, Rolling Call, Soft hoot/whimper, Squeak, Throatscrape, Whine.

Three examples:

(1) Bared-teeth scream: This vocalisation consists of one or several very loud, high-pitched, drawn-out hoarse screams, each of which may end with a choking sound. Distinctive of this vocalisation is a wide-open mouth with the teeth and gums exposed. This facial-vocal display was given by animals who were attacked and bitten; in such cases the vocalisations last at least as long as the contact. In a less intensive form, the bared-teeth scream was observed during ‘rapes’. On such occasions the female might show this element in connection with ‘ducking’, ‘struggle’ and ‘flight’.

(2) Contact uff: A very soft sound, the production of which is not marked by any particular facial expression, takes form of short repetitive expulsions of air through the nose. It seems to be a restrained ‘squeak’ vocalisation. The contact uff can only be heard at very close range. only noticed it in rehabilitant orangutans, when an individual performed ‘touch and smell’ behaviour in which it brought its nose close to the face of its partner.

(3) Gorkum: Gorkums are bouts of grumphs alternated by rolling calls, where the throat pouch plays an important role and is swollen during emission. It is not clear whether grumphs and/or rolling calls have exhalatory or inhalatory nature. Grumphs, gorkums and lorks are components of a rising sequence in duration and intensity (loudness), although lots of transition phases are possible. Mostly given after a kiss squeak, but also occasionally single. Regularly emitted by adolescence and adult individuals of both sexes as a sign of disturbance and annoyance, and during intimidation display. It can be made towards predators, dangerous animals to intimidate or scare them away, or towards observers. Also heard in fighting situations made by the non-dominant (unflanged) male and from a female during and after copulation. A transformation can been seen between the vocalisations grumph, rolling call, gorkum, and complex call, where it is sometimes difficult to make a clear distinction.

Esther Clarke, Ulrich H. Reichard, Klaus Zuberbühler, The Syntax and Meaning of Wild Gibbon Songs, 2006.
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000073
Gibbon song notes as distinguished by Raemaekers et al:

(1) The ‘wa’ note is a short and steeply rising note, appearing as a more or less straight line on the spectrogram; sometimes appearing slightly concave. It consistently spans over 100 Hz in the frequency domain, which sets it aside from the ‘hoo’ note.

(2) The ‘hoo’ is a low frequency quiet note consistently spanning a much narrower frequency range than ‘wa’ notes.

(3) The ‘leaning wa’ notes may be more or less straight like the ‘wa’ notes but longer in duration, and therefore lean more to the right; sometimes they have a slight bump in the middle.

(4) The ‘oo’ note is of a relatively even pitch and therefore produces a flat note, as seen on the spectrogram, of varying duration. Sometimes it may rise slightly at the start.

(5) The ‘sharp wow’ note is a loud and penetrating note. It rises steeply at first then falls steeply to produce a concave curve. It invariably spans more than 700 Hz in the frequency domain. The end of the note may be prolonged horizontally.

(6) The ‘waoo’ note is highly variable. It always rises steeply at first, but then may hold pitch at an even level or fall in pitch to create a convex curve. It spans a much lower frequency range than the ‘sharp wow’.

(7) Notes that did not fit in with the shapes and definitions of the other six notes described above were allocated as ‘other’. These were highly variable, and some may warrant their own unique note category, but for the purposes of this study they are grouped together. This category also describes the above six note shapes when given with major pitch modulations that give them a wobbly or trembling quality.

Finally, the ‘ooaa’ is extremely rare and was not found in any of the analysed recordings in this study, and so is not described here.

Vervet Monkey Calls
http://www.theprimata.com/cercopithecus_aethiops.html
(1) Chutter: This is a low-pitched, monotonal and staccato vocalization. The mouth is closed and the teeth are covered, and this call is emitted by adult females and juveniles. This call is used to express aggressive threat and also is used to solicit support from other group members.

(2) Bark: This call is low-pitched and gruff in sound. This call is emitted by adult and subadult males. This call is given towards other vervet monkeys who are fighting, it is emitted to stop the fighting.

(3) Intergroup grunt: This call consists of nasal grunts that have a short range. This call is emitted by males in response to seeing members from another group while on patrol of a territory.

(4) Squeals and screams: These calls are high-pitched and tend to be piercing. The mouth position varies for these calls and the teeth may be covered or not. These calls are emitted by females and juveniles that are seeking help from threats by an aggressor.

(5) Woof-woof: This call is non-tonal, deep, and has a guttural sound. The mouth is closed or slightly opened. This call is emitted by subordinate males to show submission.

(6) wa: This call is a continuous tonal exhalation that occurs with a grimace. This call is emitted by subordinate males to show submission.

(7) Woof-wa: This call is a combination of the woof-woof and the wa. This call is emitted by subordinate males to show submission.

(8) Long aar: For this vocalization the mouth is slightly open and puckered and the teeth are covered. This call is emitted by females and juveniles in response to trespassing by non-members of the group. This call brings other group members to the area.

(9) Rraugh: For this call the mouth is closed or partially opened and the teeth are covered. This call is emitted by yearlings when they approach older members of the group, and is a signal of nonaggression.

(10) Teeth-chattering: For this sound the teeth chatter, and is given by adult and subadult males. This is usually given when grooming and sometimes as a response to red-white-and-blue.

(11) Progression calls: This call consists of nasal grunts that have a short range, and they are emitted by group members to no specific receiver when the group starts to move. The calls are emitted by all group members over the age of 4.5 months, and the calls tend also to communicate who is giving the call because there some individual variation amongst callers.

(12) Purring: This call is very quiet and is given by juveniles when they are play-wrestling.

(13) Uh: This call functions as a response to minor predators and is emitted by all group members except infants. This call is low-intensity in nature.

(14) Nyow: This call is given in response to the sudden appearance of minor predators and is given by all group members except the juveniles; this call is moderate in intensity.

(15) Chirp: This call is low in frequency, and is short and sharp; the mouth is wide open and the teeth are exposed. This call carries for a long distance and is emitted by females and juveniles in response to a major mammalian predator.

(16) Rraup: This call is short and rough and not repeated. The call is given by females and juveniles in response to avian predators, and group members respond by leaving the tree tops and/or running into thickets.

(17) Threat-alarm bark: This call is like the rraup, but is given repeatedly. This call is emitted by adult and subadult males and serves to communicate an aggressive threat.

(18) Rrr: This call is emitted by infants and juveniles to communicate distress to their mothers and/or other group members.

(19) Eh, eh: This call is given by infants and juveniles upon a reunion with their mothers. This call is quiet, short, and non-tonal in nature.

Daniel Dennett, Out of the Armchair and Into the Field (in Brainchildren), 1998. A vocalization that Robert and Dorothy are currently studying has been dubbed the Moving Into the Open (or MIO) grunt. Shortly before a monkey in a bush moves out into the open, it often gives a MIO grunt. Other monkeys in the bush will often repeat it--spectrographic analysis has not (yet) revealed a clear mark of difference between the initial grunt and this response. If no such echo is made, the original grunter will often stay in the bush for five or ten minutes and then repeat the MIO. Often, when the MIO is echoed by one or more other monkeys, the original grunter will thereupon move cautiously into the open.

But what does the MIO grunt mean? I suggested to Robert and Dorothy that we sit down and make a list of possible translations and see which we could eliminate or support on the basis of evidence already at hand. I started with what seemed to be the most straightforward and obvious possibility:

I'm going

I read you. You're going.

But what would be the use of saying this? Vervets are in fact a taciturn lot, who keep silent most of the time, and are not given to anything that looks like passing the time of day by making obvious remarks. Like E.F. Hutton, when a vervet talks, others listen. "Well, then," I asked, "could it be a request for permission to leave?"

May I go, please?

Yes, you have my permission to go.

This hypothesis could be knocked out if higher ranking vervets ever originated the MIO in the presence of their subordinates. In fact, higher-ranking vervets do tend to move into the open first, so it doesn't seem that MIO is a request for permission. Could it be a command, then?

Follow me!

Aye, Aye, Cap'n.

Not very plausible, Dorothy thought. "Why waste words with such an order when it would seem to go without saying in vervet society that low-ranking animals follow the lead of their superiors? For instance, you would think that there would be a vocalization meaning 'May I?' to be said by a monkey when approaching a dominant in hopes of grooming it. And you'd expect there to be two responses: 'You may' and 'You may not' but there is no sign of any such vocalization. Apparently such interchanges would not be useful enough to be worth the effort. There are gestures and facial expressions which may serve this purpose, but no audible signals."Perhaps, Dorothy thought, the MIO grunt served simply to acknowledge and share the fear:

I'm really scared.

Yes. Me too.

Another interesting possibility was that the grunt helped with coordination of the group's movements:

Ready for me to go?

Readywhenever you are.

A monkey that gives the echo is apt to be the next to leave. Or perhaps even better:

Coast clear?

Coast is clear. We're covering you.

The behaviour so far observed is compatible with this reading, which would give the MIO grunt a robust purpose, orienting the monkeys to a task of cooperative vigilance. The responding monkeys do watch the leave-taker and look in the right directions to be keeping an eye out.

Suppose then, that this is our best candidate hypothesis," I said. "Can we think of anything to look for that would particularly shed light on it?" Among males, competition overshadows cooperation more than among females. Would a male bother giving the MIO if its only company in a bush was another male? Robert had a better idea: suppose a male originated the MIO grunt; would a rival male be devious enough to give a dangerously misleading MIO response when he saw that the originator was about to step into trouble? The likelihood of ever getting any good evidence of this is minuscule, for you would have to observe a case in which Originator didn't see and Responder did see a nearby predator and Responder saw that Originator didn't see the predator. (Otherwise Responder would just waste his credibility and incur the wrath and mistrust of Originator for no gain.) Such a coincidence of conditions must be extremely rare.

Richard Lynch Garner. Gorillas & Chimpanzees, 1896.
http://www.archive.org/details/gorillaschimpanz00garniala
The speech of chimpanzees is limited to a few sounds, and these are confined chiefly to their natural wants. The entire vocabulary of their language embraces perhaps not more than twenty words, and many of them are vague or ambiguous, but they express the concept of the ape with as much precision as it is defined to his mind, and quite distinctly enough for his purpose. In my researches I have learned about ten words of his speech, so that I can understand them, and make myself understood by them. Most of these sounds are within the compass of the human voice, in tone, pitch, and modulation ; but two of them are much greater in volume than it is possible for the human lungs to reach, and one of them rises to a pitch more than an octave higher than any human voice. These two sounds are audible at a great distance, but they do not fall within the true limits of speech. The vocal organs of this ape resemble those of man as closely as any other character has been shown to resemble.

Although the sounds made by the chimpanzee can be imitated by the human voice, they cannot be expressed or represented by any system of phonetic symbols in use among men. All alphabets have been deduced from pictographs, and the symbol that represents any given sound has no reference to the organs that produced it. The few rigid lines that have survived to form the alphabets are conventional, and within themselves meaningless, but they have been so long used to represent these sounds of speech that it would be difficult to supplant them with others, even if such were desired. As no literal formula can be made to represent the phonetic elements of the speech of chimpanzees, I have taken a new step in the art of writing by framing a system of my own, which is rational in plan and simple in device. Deaf mutes are able to distinguish the sounds of speech and reproduce them, although they do not hear them. By close study and long practice they learn to distinguish the most delicate shades of sound. In this plain fact lies the clue to the method I have used. It is, as yet, only in the infant state, but it is possible to be made, with a very few symbols, to represent the whole range of vocal sounds made by man or other animals. The chief symbols I employ are the parentheses used in common print. The two curved lines placed with the convex sides opposite, thus, ( ), represent the open glottis, in which position the voice will utter the deep sound of "O." The glottis about half closed utters the sound of " U," as in the German, and to represent this sound a period is inserted between the two curved lines, thus, (.). When the aperture is contracted still more it produces the sound of " A " broad, and to represent this a colon is placed between the lines, thus, (:). When the aperture is restricted to a still smaller compass the sound of " U " short is uttered, and to represent this an apostrophe is placed between the lines, thus, ('). When the vocal cords are brought to a greater tension, and the aperture is almost closed, it utters the short sound of " E." To represent this sound a hyphen is inserted between the lines, thus, (-). These are the main vowel sounds of all animals, although in man they are sometimes modified, and to them is added the sound of " E " long, while in the ape the long sounds of " O " and " E " are rarely, if ever, heard.

From this vowel basis all other sounds may be deduced, and by the use of diacritics to indicate the movement of the organs of speech, the consonant elements may be easily expressed. A single parenthesis, with the concave side to the left, will represent the initial sound of " W," which seldom, but sometimes, occurs in the sounds of animals. When used, it is placed on the left side of the leading symbol, thus, )(), and this symbol, as it stands, should be pronounced nearly like " U-O," but with the first letter suppressed, and almost inaudible. Turning the concave side to the right, and placing it on the right side of the symbol, it represents the vanishing sound of " W," thus, ()(. This symbol reads "O-U," with the "O" long, and the "W " depressed into the short sound of " U." The apostrophe placed before or after the symbol will represent " F " or " V." The grave accent, thus, ('), represents the breathing sound of " H," whether placed before or after the symbol, and the acute accent, thus, ('), will represent the aspirate sound of that letter in the same way. When the symbol is written with a numeral exponent, it indicates the degree of loudness. If there is no figure, the sound is such as would be made by the human voice in ordinary speech. The letter "X" will indicate a repetition of the sound, and the numeral placed after it will show the number of times repeated, instead of the degree of loudness. For example, we will write the sound (.), which is equivalent to long " U," made in a normal tone, the same symbol written thus (.)2 indicates the sound, made with greater energy, and about twice as loud. To write it thus, (.)X2, indicates that the sound was repeated, and so on. One peculiar sound made by these animals, which is described in connection with the gorilla, appears to be the result of inhalation, but I know of no other animal that makes a sound in this manner. As an example of the use of this method, we will write the French word " feu," which Moses mastered, thus, '('), which is equivalent to " vu" with the " U " sounded short, the other word "wie," in German, thus, )('), which is pronounced almost like "wu," giving " u " the short sound again. 

I shall not lead the reader through the long and painful task by giving the entire system as far as I have gone, but what has been given will convey an idea of a system, by means of which it will be possible to represent the sounds of all animals, so that the student of phonetics will recognise at once the character of the sound, even if he cannot reproduce it by natural means. It would be tedious and of no avail to the casual reader to reduce to writing here the sounds made by the chimpanzee ; but it may be of interest to mention and describe the character and use of some of them. Perhaps the most frequent sound made by all animals, appears to be that referring to food, and therefore it may claim the first place in our attention. This word in the language of the chimpanzee begins with the short sound of the vowel " u " which blends into a strong breathing sound of "h," the lips are compressed at the sides, and the aperture of the mouth is nearly round. It is not difficult to imitate, and the ape readily understands it even when poorly made.

Another sound of frequent use among them is that used for calling. The vowel element is nearly the same, though slightly sharpened, and merges into a distinct vanishing " w." The food sound is often repeated two or three times in succession, but the call is rarely ever repeated, except at long intervals. One sound is particularly soft and musical, the vowel element is that of long " u " as in the German. This blends into a "w," followed by the slightest suggestion of the short sound of " a." It appears to express affection or love. This sound is also the first of the series of sounds attributed to the gorilla.

The most complex sound made by them is the one elsewhere described as meaning "good." They often use it in a sense very much the same as mankind uses the word "thanks," but it is not probable that they use it as a polite term, yet the same idea is present.

There are other sounds which are easily identified but difficult to describe, such as that used to signify "cold" or "discomfort"; another for "drink"; another referring to " illness," and still another which I have good reason to believe means "dead" or "death." There are perhaps a dozen more that I can distinguish, but have not yet been able to determine their meaning. I have an opinion as to some of them which I have not yet verified. The chimpanzee makes use of a few signs which seem to be fixed factors of expression. He makes a negative sign by moving the head from side to side, but the gesture is not frequent or pronounced. Another negative sign, which is more common, is a motion of the hand from the body towards the person or thing addressed. This sign is sometimes made with great emphasis, and there can be no question as to what it means.

In conclusion, I will say that the sounds uttered by these apes have all the characteristics of true speech. The speaker is conscious of the meaning of the sound used, and uses it with the definite purpose of conveying an idea to the one addressed ; the sound is always addressed to some definite one, and the speaker usually looks at the one addressed ; he regulates the pitch and volume of the voice to suit the condition under which it is used ; he knows the value of sound as a medium of thought. These and many other facts show that they are truly speech.