Thank you for the post about your parrot combining words to refer to specific foods! I always love reading stories about things they say, so so fascinating. Do you have any other examples of combined words or maybe just an interesting anecdote about bird language for someone who’s never looked at your blog before?
Oh, sure. I first read about Lexical Elision in The Alex Studies, and later Alex and Me, about Dr. Pepperberg's "Avian Language EXperiment." Alex famously described apples as "banerry" (banana + cherry) when he first encountered them, possibly because they were pale inside like a banana, but round and red like a cherry--both of which words he already knew.
I guess the thing that's hard about this question is that I have normalized so many things about living with a talking parrot that I think are, for the average person, deeply abnormal. Every morning when I come downstairs he requests various foods from me (most days it's carrot, peanut, berry) and then lobbies for me to let him out by saying "Ripley wanna come out" in various different intonations. When he sees me linger by the door or put on a jacket, he says "bye," often adding, "see you later."
A lot of people think that parrots memorize phrases atomically, as in, if you teach a parrot to say "Polly wanna cracker," it may understand that making those sounds in that order results in a cracker, but it will not mean that a bird understands that its name is "Polly," that it "wanna" something, and that "cracker" is the desired food.
To an extent, this is true. If you teach a parrot a phrase in a vacuum it will never be able to deconstruct it. But most captive parrots capable of language and mimicry are exposed to the daily conversation of the humans around them, and are also inherently prone to making word salad out of whatever they hear. This is fun for them. So Polly will probably eventually learn that Polly is their name, that "wanna" can precede many different desirable things, and that "cracker" is the most important part of that sentence and the most efficient way to demand it.
Ripley loves making new sentences. He says silly sounding things all the time like "Ripley wanna chair" or "gonna watch kitchen" because he enjoys playing with words like Legos. But my favorite Ripleyism is when he says "you're so (random word)." Originally this was "you're so silly" or "you're so nice," which we do say to him pretty often. His favorite compliment is "you're so bird."
I recommend my Ripley Parrot tag if you're interested in Ripley Stories. I also highly recommend reading stories about parrots over living with a parrot.
