ANIMAL LANGUAGE

The Lady with the Unicorn "The audition"

DEFINITION OF ANIMAL LANGUAGE

♦ Depending on the species, the communication channels used by animals may be tactile, chemical, optical, electric, electro-luminescent, acoustic, corporal, of the order of the dance. Communications can be exchanged over short or long distances.

Take the definition of animal language according to Schauenberg, Dr. of Science:
"Under the influence of internal or external factors, an animal emits a visual, acoustic or chemical signal which is received by another animal by specialized sensory organs and to which it will react according to the meaning of the message. This is the basic definition of all the secret languages ​​of animals. From the humblest creatures to man, almost all animals possess one or more proper systems of communication. The primary function of language, whatever it is, is to ensure the sustainability of the species ... Secondly, language serves as an identification and recognition signal between individuals of the same species. The animals also report their territory and express their aggression, or on the contrary their fear, by signals. Language is in fact a code governing the proper functioning of the animal kingdom and ensuring each form its identity by prohibiting hybridizations. Man has the most perfect communication system, most of which is transmitted by voice and writing. "

Let's add that the animal must have been raised with members of its species to understand the language and social conduct of his kind, which is natural in nature.
One can ask the question and think that there are differences of language within the same species if the two groups of individuals have never had any link between them at the geographical level and maternal lines suitable for transmitting language to their young.
One can also think that the animal does not speak to say nothing, the language of all animals of the same species is substantially universal.


♦ If we reduce the animal field to be limited to mammals, animals with maternal ties due to breastfeeding, a nurturing and protective role that makes attachment possible, affection, we can think that a richer language (for example that of reptiles) will be established.

The Lady with the Unicorn "The view"

I) LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE SKILLS IN ANIMALS:

Based on the Bloom and Lahey model, developed on this site in the human language part, let's talk about the language of mammals according to the 3 language skills:
- The form
- The contents
- The use

Dame Sarrasine chooses here for object of study the horse, animal of the most studied and remains attentive of all the observations or comments on the subject.

THE FORM

It will be necessary to study the Form through:
- the auditory signals - the visual signals through the positions of the eyes, tail, ears, lips, nostrils, mimicry - tactile signals - body signals - smells.

A) HOW THE HORSE REPORTS

Dame sarrasine fits here in part the grid of the Honen Center concerning the "how the human communicates" filling it. She will be doomed to evolve.


Level I

Crying: ? - but not with real tears, to read in the eyes
By blowing: +
Shouting: +
By making sounds: +
Looking at: +
By making disordered gestures with his body, his neck: +

Level II

By making mimicry: ?+
Laughing: ?-, smiling: +
By producing all kinds of sounds + the study of these sounds and their place of emission will be studied separately, as well as the postures and positions and movements of the different parts of the body
Stretching your head: +
With the ears : +
The tail : +

Level III

Shaking your head to say Yes or No: -. The Yes and the No are rather carried by the acceptance or the refusal
By seeking to establish eye contact : +
Looking up: + and gesturing: + show direction: +
By mimicking what he means: +
By producing sounds that take the place of words or ideas: +
By occasionally using isolated words:?

Level IV

Often using isolated words:? +
By combining words (difficult to understand): ?
By combining two or more words: ?
Using sign language : +

Each communication attitude deserves to be studied through the different functions of "why the horse communicates"

Dame Sarrasine will develop this theme later.

♦ - HEARING SIGNALS

Dame Sarrasine will come back on the physiological qualities of the sounds emitted by the horse and in particular the Height (grave, medium, acute), Intensity (strong, weak), as well as the Duration (long, short), that the horses use and modulate in their communication. So :
- Well-being, the pleasure of being together is often expressed in a low frequency and a low intensity
- The call on acute and strong frequencies
- Joy, excitement spreading from medium to high, from strong to very strong
- A big annoyance on serious frequencies with breath and strong intensity.
...later on this site with recordings
It will be necessary to enrich this subject, but it seems that this way of modulating the sounds is the same as in the human with the intentions concealed behind.
- We observe that this aspect of the form gives us clues about the content of ideas or state to express, implying that the horses are aware of the existence of this content. Difficult analysis of the Duration could help isolate "words" hidden behind ideas

Dame Sarrasine invites you to audibly discriminate sound sequences produced by horses and link them to actions. It will also be interesting to analyze them at the spectral level, to compare them in order to decrypt them. A priori, it seems that the sound sequences express more the various emotional feelings, joy (whose "hello I am happy to see you" ) fear through impatience and frustration and also the call.

It will also be necessary to study the sounds on the phonatory level by analyzing the mode of production and the "articulatory" position.

Then, it is likely that the same sound repeated once or twice does not have the same meaning, which would then be similar to our syllabic system.

♦ - VISUAL SIGNALS OF BODY ORDER

Body language clearly expresses the horse's intentions regarding his basic needs and his interactions with other members of the group, but also a bodily attitude reflecting his well-being or malaise.
The human has the same body language easily identifiable by other humans (except in certain language disorders)
Many of these signals being commented on elsewhere, they will be developed here later by continuing the analysis, the aim being at first to better define the lines of analysis and reflection.

♦  - MOVEMENTS OF LIP

- It is necessary to observe the sequences of movements of the horse's lips, to isolate sequences, and what sequences are observed after which actions, which could connect us to the content of his thought.
It is common to hear in the world of horse riding "the horse chews after an apprenticeship, we must leave him this pose, the time to think about what he has done", could we go further in the observation and isolate different sequences of chewing.

- Then, without extending for the moment on this subject, chewing after learning could be decrypted through the mental management and the gesture of understanding and another memorization. Thus, by this sequence of movements of lips, the horse would thus evoke the sequence that he has just lived thus reflecting his own understanding of the action and his planning.
These same movements are perhaps repeated before falling asleep as an evocation thus allowing to redo live the action and to put it in memory and then to restore it.

- These lip movements exist in contexts other than learning, diet ...
We can also observe two relaxed horses watching each other and making these movements, other times putting themselves mouth to mouth
Dame Sarrasine also saw one of the horses accompanying her life look her right in the eye, then muddle, then specified her movements by repeatedly repeating the sequences on the back of the hand.
It is important to isolate these other movements that may be part of a gesture of communication associated with the affect, the sweetness, the same well-being related to the orality of the young child and also the foal, these first moments related to food, to the link with the mother, which allows to eat by opening and closing the lips, but also allows to kiss and say the first emotional word "mom" even his product in all human languages ​​like dad ,: / p / / b / / m / (of the same point of articulation) followed by / a / (the / an / being the nasal vowel of / a /). Note also that as the human baby, it is with his lips that the young horse becomes aware of information related to his environment (the young child is all mouthful).
Observe that close horses scratch at the withers but make the same movements of lips without scrapes.
-When a colt is in contact with a new horse, he also performs lip movements often interpreted by "Do not hurt me, I'm small, I'm a foal"
Dame Sarrasine offers you here to observe in this video, this scene of language horse:
A new horse (C the black, here 2 1/2 years), is introduced in a meadow where are K the white and his filly E barely a year old. The 3 horses already know each other, their respective boxes being side by side under a shed and C knows E since birth.)
Video soon on the site.
In addition, E reproduced the same movements even more exaggerated at the age of 2 1/2 in front of a new horse.

To exist, it deserves to be mentioned, so as not to forbid any line of thought and give free rein to our thought.
These sequences of lip movements carry language content.
Identifying the idea of ​​the content then makes it possible to decrypt the associated form.
Our human eye is also uneducated or adapted to capture the subtlety of animal language with all time intervals and movement accuracies.
Remember that it is in his first year of life that humans learn to select the sounds and language of the mother tongue including accents. The further away from this year, the more difficult it is to acquire the foreign accent.
In the same way, our human ear is not accustomed to discriminating frequencies produced by the horse which are located in a different frequency zone than those forming part of the sounds of human language. Not to mention the notion of rhythm in the production of sound sequences of the horse.

THE CONTENTS

The specific content of each animal species is the most mysterious to discover
We must first find the contents similar to those of humans by extrapolating to the animal, but also by better understanding their perceptions, to find new content. It should also be questioned if they express these contents, before, if we feel like it, to be able to dare to discover a content totally unimaginable and peculiar to the animal.


A) It is on NOTIONS OF EXISTENCE OF CONTENT that Dame Sarrasine carries first her choice. To know the subject if:
According to the grid of the ladies Agnès BO and Laurence Kunz, Speech therapists:

Dame Sarrasine responds to items by +, -,? this according to her observations but will also be very interested by yours

- He uses existence: there is: +
- He uses the no existence: there is not: +
- He uses the term "still":+
- He has the notion of disappearance: there is no more:+
- He has the notion of lack: he lacks: +
- He has the notion of negation: broken, not broken:? -: this notion is particularly interesting and would imply a different way to understand and understand the environment, not registering it in a binary combination and possibly also opening here if this is the case on other types of content more difficult for us to identify.
- He has the notion of internal state: I am sick, I am tired:+
- He has the notion of external state: it is cold .., it is difficult:+
- He has the notion of possession: it's mine: +
- He has the notion of quantity: + attention, the notion of quantity is not that of number
- He has the notion of causality: because: ?+
The questioning on this subject is particularly interesting. This could lead to a major difference between the human and the animal. The human always wants to know the cause, the origin of things, which pushes him to have questions about his own origin. Who are we, where do we come from and as such one of the functions of language is probably to try to better understand this meaning of life, to ask questions. The animal seems to live more intensely its present moment unlike the human who often lives his present by evoking the past or by projecting himself in the future, from by the fact, full of details of present moments that animals know well. Moreover, the fact of being in the non-questioning of the origin of things makes its importance in the present moment on the one hand, and on the other hand the acceptance of the events of life is then easier.
As for the horse, let's add the notion of effect, to dissociate from the cause. The horse possesses this notion but especially the notion of cause with immediate effect intervening in the notion of action: + (action-reaction), but also surely of the order of the cause to the effect in a temporal and spatial continuum - He has the notion of time: +: tomorrow? +. After +, yesterday? To the notion of duration + To the notion of delay +, not to be there at the scheduled time +
- He has the notion of coordination: and, with +, but ..: ?+
- He has the notion of localization: here, up, out ..:+
- He has the notion of action:+

B) STRATEGIES OF UNDERSTANDING:

When we speak of a word here, it is a sound, a position of a part of the body. A sentence will include a succession of gestures or words that often reflect the underlying, identifiable intentional idea.

Khomsi's O-52 report highlights the level of complexity of the child's understanding strategies (see human part): Dame Sarrasine will try to establish a protocol to better define them in the horse:
Dame Sarrasine emits for now +? - according to what she has identified in her daily experience.

- Pragmatic strategies: understand the statement based on what the horse knows about reality : +
- Lexical strategies: the statement is entered from a word in the sentence : +
- Morpho-syntactic strategies: the statement is entered from the relation between two elements of the sentence : ? +
- Narrative Strategies: The statement is captured through the treatment of temporal and causal succession : ?
- Meta-discursive strategies: accept the non-communicative value of the statement; to decenter the statement : ?

These last two strategies have a strong value in the human being and have the particularity of allowing him to enter the world of written language.


C) SUBJECTS OF HORSE CONTENT AND COMMUNICATION

Grid of Dame Sarrasine.

This grid first wants to list the topics of content and eventually communication, to consider new ones, to question the existence of some. Next, it should be noted how often the horse communicates about each of the listed topics, namely When: "Always - Often - Sometimes - Never -? "
Remember that the horse can communicate through body attitudes, sounds, sign language.

THEMES

- Food or water
- Taste of food, water
- Toys
- Pets
- Other objects
- Kinship
- Other clan members
- Friends
- Neighbors
- Social interactions
- Human teacher
- Animal Teacher
- Other people
- To eat
- To drink
- Le goût des aliments.
- Grooming
- Scratching
- Itching
- The insects
- Plants
- Roll
- Play, gallop, let off steam
- Go for a walk
- Listen to the environment, observation
- Unknown noises not interpreted
- The territory
- Other animals living in the same territory
- The language in part of other animals living in the same territory
- Nap
- The sleep
- The weather
- Passing time
- The moon, the sun, the rain, the snow
- Day, night
- The boundaries of the territory explored and the unknown behind
- Their imaginary behind this limit, a content of fear?
- New areas of interest
- Reproduction.
- From their internal state
- Of the disappearance
- Of death. From the death of others? From their own death that they feel coming? Is it the same notion as the human?
- Other activites
- The first name: does each animal have a name that would be given to it by the mother, a name that would impose itself, a particular sound that it would produce to create the link, just as the human repeats several both the name of his baby by addressing him and as we also do with our pets. Then when two horses are separated, they are called; the little seeking to hear his mother among the other horses and vice versa. In this case, does the horse say, "I am X, is there anyone?" and the other to answer "me Z".
Or another version "Z are you there?
Both are possible but the first possibility is shorter, requiring less sound exchange, which is economical for the survival of herbivores.
It should be noted that studies on the dolphins' language have shown that they were called by meaning the desired dolphin.
Let us add here that the horse must have a proper vocal imprint, like the human and that the fact of neighing must be enough to be identified by a congener, at the same time that this stamp issued on a frequency could represent his name.

USE

♦ The third component of human language is the use of language, pragmatic, no doubt that it exists in other mammals thus allowing their survival.
This language competence, depending on the "why say", implies that the sender wants to communicate with the receiver.
It should be noted that what the human understands and understands from animal language is essentially linked to the third linguistic competence, namely the use of language and therefore of the order of pragmatics: the human then translates the language animal body which signifies its intention related to its internal state or external influences and indicated by the position of the ears, tension and movement of the body, the tail, the head, quality of the look

The use of language by the animal can be described as sincere and correct in that its body language faithfully reflects his intention and his feelings.

But this third linguistic component also possesses more subtly, in human language, the understanding of notions such as "why? How? Who? What?"
It should be noted that these are problems that pose problems in autism spectrum disorders making communication more than difficult. Do horses have these notions?
To develop.

♦ On all the language components of the mammal, Dame Sarrasine will return here, very largely, later.
- In the meantime, let's imagine an example allowing our thought to try itself and this without any censorship.

So :

- A horse is distant and visually separated from other horses; on his side he sees a wild boar far away and fled to join the other horses; When he arrived near them, is he able to make them understand by a sound, a posture, an evocation of smell that the object of his escape was a boar?
Let us postulate in this case as a starting hypothesis for reflection:

a) The horse does not bring back, in this case, the olfactory molecules that would allow other horses to detect the object of fear. (Dame Sarrasine is also convinced that the sense of smell of a horse is very sophisticated and that it thus obtains from its environment of multiple information which it is then useless to relay otherwise, this will deserve one day a development through a long story).

b) Suppose the whole group of horses has already seen a wild boar together.
Do mammals mean beings or things from their environment to their congeners, like humans?
If this is the case and this is also the question, there must be differences due to members of the same community and culture; as it is the case of humans not speaking the same language or eating the same thing because living in distant countries. Or not. To be developed later

- One can also question another element of language dependent on a higher order and the order of pragmatics, namely "the desire" to communicate what he saw and for others "the want to know "the object of fear.
This example deserves a longer development and through examples and observations, Dame Sarrasine will return to the subject barely sketched out.

The Lady with the Unicorn "The taste"

III) MENTAL MANAGEMENT IN THE HORSE

Before tackling later the theme of the mental management in the horse, Dame Sarrasine brings here a new track of observation of the horse:

♦ THE OBSERVATION OF OCCULAR MOVEMENTS, from the point of view of the observer.

These movements are reliable because they are involuntary
The observation of eye movements allows the observer to know the types of evocation that he guesses in the observed.
- Dame Sarrasine proposes here to observe them in the horse and especially in the learning phase. And to know if there is a link with the chewing during the apprenticeships, thus allowing to have access to the contents of thinking thanks to the type evocation.
- It will be necessary to note whether it is the same as the human.

Dame Sarrasine is waiting for your return, the object of all these observations and researches intended to be shared, thus creating links with those who love communication with the animal.
Collecting a large number of observations can only enrich the subject.

The awareness of the existence of these movements is used in rehabilitation based on mental management to help the subject to become aware of all his evocations and their wealth.

Dame Sarrasine quotes here "Behind the magic the NLP"de R.CAYROL et J. de SAINT-PAUL. Inter Editions.

- EYES UP LEFT:
He sees something that has not been seen before.
Constructed image.

- EYES UP TOP RIGHT:
He remembers something already seen
Visual memory.

- EYES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WAVE, he looks into the void with slight dilation of the pupil:
Image stored or built.

- EYES IN THE MIDDLE RIGHT OR LEFT:
He hears external or internal sounds (memorized or imagined)
Auditory.

- EYE BOTTOM LEFT:
sensations, émotions.
Kinesthetic.

- EYES BOTTOM RIGHT: internal dialogue
Self-hearing.


It should be noted here that the human often perceives many clues from which he does not understand or understand the origin of the observation and that he sometimes attributes to a kind of intuition or telepathy, this in no way preventing these facts from being able to exist elsewhere. Dame Sarrasine's purpose is to clarify human understanding of animal language.