scrolling through your backlog and the sparrow language stuff is pissing me off so bad. i am not an actual linguist, im an undergrad student, but even with my limited knowledge wow hes just so confidently wrong. just so completely not how language OR animal communicaton (different things) work. Your sparrow is not teaching you "sparrow language" hes realized making a sound gets him a treat. Thats not language man. Also the idea that language is divided by species is deranged ok okok
I mean, Andy isn't wrong when he says that birds have language. I never said he was. But he is wrong about how language works, let alone animal linguistics, and I still believe that he's projecting onto Nuggie and the flock outside his window to a significant extent.
Now is as good a time as any to post an update about this whole thing, I guess.
Here are a few older posts of Andy's that I haven't previously shared.
This was about a month and a half before his huge thread about sparrow language.
Do I believe that birds can understand human language on a basic level and that they have their own languages? Yes. Do I believe that they have a sense of humor? Also yes. As I've said before, I lived with a parrot for many years and we were very close. I was far and away his favorite person. He could use a certain number of English words and phrases appropriately in context (as well as at random when he wanted attention or was talking to himself); he clearly displayed a wide range of emotions (and seemed to be able to interpret and respond to ours); and he also made a lot of sounds that, even after more than twenty years, I never learned to interpret beyond two distinct ones that seemed to mean "I want attention" and something like "Fuck, shit, help plz". I am very well acquainted with how well birds can communicate with us and how intelligent and emotionally complex they are. But that's where Andy and I part ways.
Apparently sparrows employ adjectives and emotion words, and Andy can understand those, too.
Again, Andy understands sparrow emotion words. He can have meaningful conversations with Nuggie about his feelings.
I touched on this in my post five days after this pair of tweets, but yeah, Andy has repeatedly talked about Nuggie's ability to follow the plots of movies and to relate to the characters.
This was shortly after my first post about Andy the Bird Whisperer. Note the change in tone.
This isn't about sparrow language or Andy's anthropomorphizing Nuggie, but given his past, I didn't like it at all. Fortunately, only a couple of people asked for tarot pulls and Andy lost interest.
Yes, that's a big gap--Andy slowed down a lot on the bird-whisperer-posting. Anyway, here, the head of the flock outside Andy's window has died and they seem to be trying to pick his replacement. He's trying really hard to cover his ass, but even as he mentions how small his sparrow vocabulary is, he still seems to assume that the sounds Nuggie has used to train him are valid and meaningful "words" in sparrow language. And please note that he has not always emphasized that he's not an ornithologist. "I'm not Dr. Doolittle" was as close as he got in the midst of that thread about sparrow linguistics in 2024.
He posted this the next day:
Again, he's covering his ass. Because he is reminding us not to project onto sparrows, surely that means Andy isn't projecting onto them himself, right?
Here is a link to that video (and part two).
And here are a few articles by the scientist profiled in the video, Toshitaka Suzuki, mainly because I think he and his work are really cool:
Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls (2016)
Wild Birds Use an Ordering Rule to Decode Novel Call Sequences (2017)
The syntax–semantics interface in animal vocal communication (2019)
Animal linguistics: Exploring referentiality and compositionality in bird calls (2021)
Experimental evidence for core-Merge in the vocal communication system of a wild passerine (2022)
Note the amount of observation and especially experimentation Suzuki does before he concludes that sound X corresponds to thing or concept Y. It took him four years, according to the first video, to establish conclusively that a specific sound made by Japanese tits means "snake".
I'm not sure what you mean about language being divided by species. The videos linked above talk about how Suzuki's research shows that other bird species--and even some prey animals other than birds--can at least recognize predator alarm calls by Japanese tits. I don't know whether bird languages have been studied enough yet to tell how similar they are across different species, aside from what's covered in the second video.
But anyway...Andy has been observing Nuggie and the flock outside his window for a little less than three years. If he is to be believed, he and Nuggie "can literally verbally communicate about [Nuggie's] feelings" and he can understand sparrow language beyond things like frequently used nouns and general alarm calls. Despite what he says in the post above, that would put him miles ahead of Suzuki, a highly awarded researcher with a master's and a Ph.D, who has been studying Japanese tits for over twenty years. I think it's fair to be a little bit skeptical of his claims.
