“Oh Long Johnson,” a cat once said, back in the primordial history of Internet memes. “Oh Don Piano. Why I eyes ya.”
Or so said the captions — appended to the gibberish of a perturbed house cat on “America’s Funniest Home Videos” in 1999 and rediscovered in the YouTube era, when millions of people heard something vaguely human echo in a distant species. It was weird. And hilarious. And just maybe, profound.
As the “Oh Long Johnson” craze was fading a few years ago, a wave of scientific discoveries about apes and monkeys began upending old assumptions about the origins of language.
Only humans could willfully control their vocal tracts, went the established wisdom. Until Koko the gorilla coughed on command.
Surely, then, our vowels were ours alone. But this month, researchers picked up British ohs in the babble of baboons. Study after study is dismantling a hypothesis that has stood for decades: that the seeds of language did not exist before modern humans, who got all the way to Shakespeare from scratch. And if so much of what we thought we knew about the uniqueness of human speech was wrong, some think it’s time to take a second look at talking pet tricks.
“It’s humbling to understand that humans, in the end, are just another species of primate,” said Marcus Perlman, who led the Koko study in 2015.
“These kinds of videos suggest, likewise, that the vocal tract more broadly may have the potential to produce speech-like sounds. “I know of a video with a husky that says, ‘I love you.’ ”
Pity our animal cousins. Their throats and mouths are the wrong shape to form the many vowel sounds that slip between our consonants like grease between gears — sorting a clog of fricatives and plosives into the works of Dante or Celine Dion.
At least, that was the common thinking when Dion was little. It dates back to a study on a dead rhesus monkey in 1969, said Tom Sawallis, a linguist at the University of Alabama. “You’ve got to have contrasting vowels to have the vocabulary, and you’ve got to have vocabulary to have syntax,” he said. And so on, all the way up to carpool karaoke.
WP
