Interesting ... I wonder what other animals and what capacity they have to learn to mimick language.<p>Anecdotally, we have a small poodle. She's an unusually vocal dog -- not a guard dog; she rarely barks at people, but we noticed early on that her barking sounds like the word "what", so we've always riled her up by saying "what" to her and watching her repeat. We've noticed if we vary the sounds (two barks, three barks), she'll often concentrate and then reliably repeat the pattern, but it rarely sounds anything similar to the original sound.<p>Fast forward to two weeks ago when I was recovering from strep throat. I lost my voice but the dog had a lot of energy and wanted to horse around, so I looked at her and said "what", but my "what" was very deep, rumbling and monotone. The dog looked at me for a second, let out a low rumbling growl and said "wha" in the lowest sound she could muster. I laughed, did it again, and she repeated it, successfully, several times in a row (missing one or two).
> and scientists couldn’t be more fascinated<p>Wow, the scientists are really at max fascination? Has that ever happened before? That's amazing. I think the story should be about that.
The video wouldn't play. Here's one from YouTube instead<p><a href="https://youtu.be/46RSYCXwSXo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/46RSYCXwSXo</a>
Funnily, I was walking along the American River yesterday morning, and there were some ducks quacking away in the river - but their quacks literally sounded like someone with a deep belly laugh<p>HA HA HA HA HA HA HA<p>It was rather eerie. And there were two of them doing this back and forth, it sounded like the two were telling eachother really funny duck jokes...
> while most mammals are born with innate vocalization abilities, humans are not.<p>Maybe I'm not understanding the nuances of this statement, but in my experience, newborns of all origins have very similar vocalizations, and babies that can't speak yet say "ugh ugh" or similar guttural monosyllables.
Something similar appeared recently, in case anyone's interested: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28397524" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28397524</a><p>A seal called "Hoover" that had a remarkably human sounding call :D