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Genius Scientist Proved Birds Can Talk and Use Grammar (Part 2)

A Curious Birb

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For over 20 years, Professor Toshitaka Suzuki dedicated his life to show that birds don't just make noise, but rather, combine sounds in structured ways that resemble complex language. Through years of careful observation and creative experiments, he discovered something incredible: these birds have specific words for objects much like we do and can combine these words to form sentences.

We explore this in detail in Part 1: After 20 Years, This Scientist Proved Bird...
Where we look at how he proves that birds can in fact talk and use grammar in detail.

In this video, we go beyond grammar and into communication itself. Looking at how early birds seem to learn language in their life, whether different species can understand one another, and even whether birds can lie.

Together, these findings challenge the idea that language is uniquely human and suggest that communication, meaning and understanding may have evolved far earlier than we once believed.

#birds #science #linguistics #nature #animalcommunication
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Research Sources and Other Useful Links:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?...
https://link.springer.com/article/10....
https://link.springer.com/article/10....
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep1...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/...
https://link.springer.com/article/10....
https://www.academia.edu/25269600/Ref...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...

Videos of Professor Suzuki:
鈴木俊貴/ 受賞者プレゼンテーション World OMOSIROI Award 10th.
Animal Linguistics: Origins and Evolution of Language - Toshitaka Suzuki, The University of Tokyo

Finnish Program - https://areena.yle.fi/1-3405613

Professor Suzuki's profile and homepage:
https://www.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/re...
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Full image credits (including authors, licenses, and source links) are available here:
FULL IMAGE CREDITS – https://1drv.ms/w/c/d2863ccf42cb2eac/...

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20 Comments

@CuriousOwl-l5p Creator 8 months ago (edited) Pinned

Part 1: https://youtu.be/jmys2abx4co?si=iYj4E5pFWiRPwIqv

All sources are included in the description

Hi Everyone,

I hope you all enjoy this video as much as Part 1. I did try to structure it in a way so that new viewers won't be confused and not know what's going on so there's some small sections which cover slightly similar things (I tried to make sure it was still new footage/images for those parts so there's still something new to look at). But open to feedback on this!

Hopefully there's enough new content to keep it interesting and I tried to answer some of the main questions I saw from the comments on part 1.

Also I noticed a lot of people mentioning parrots, but the thing that is different about Suzuki is that parrots have taken time to learn OUR language. But Suzuki has taken time to learn THEIRS and shown they have a complex language too.

@ninjapacman26 8 months ago

The part where he heard their snake call and looked around for a snake is where I realized that he can literally understand an animal the same way we understand each other. That's pretty awesome.

@meakimon 8 months ago

This was me as a kid, having no friends, living w my mom and her friends who owned a dog kennel up in the woods. The owner would also feed stray cats and I, being mad about cats at the time, would spend all my time with them. Watching, listening, imitating. It came to the point where i could understand their body language and sounds to mean different things. And i spent all day outside of school with them.

I remember i came home from school and one of the cats "Gouda" was waiting for me by the road that splits into the one that goes down to the house, and the other continues to a farm circa 1km away.
She meowed at me with the very typical "come here, come here" sounds and walked down the road.
So I followed her and she took me inside the barn. I had never been in there before and was scared I would get into trouble. I could hear a tractor not to far away.
She went into the hay bells, and she showed me kittens! She probably saw the tractor staring to take hay bells out and knew the kittens wouldn't be safe. I went home asap and told the kennel owner who came along and told the farmer to stop so we could get the kittens. And this was a semi wild cat, who only came to the kennel with around 15 other strays in the woods to get fed. The cats were not the cuddly sort.

It still amazes me to this day. I know now that cats do this more often than we think, and that they have learned to often trust even strangers. But it was such a magical moment to little me.^^

@fastenbauer 8 months ago

Some years ago a hunter told me that when a human enters an area certain birds will make alarm calls and even the large animals the hunter wants to shoot will react and be on the lookout. It's fascinating to think how much communication there might actually be going on in the forest.

@haroldberserker 8 months ago

I saw a BBC (i think) documental about a brid that would play "danger" noises so small animals like squirrels ran away and they could steal the food they left behind

@OriginalCreatorSama 8 months ago

Humans: "two words isn't a sentence. alert + gather? oh please!"

Also humans: "Hey, c'mere!" (alert + gather)

@rainytreecat3992 8 months ago

When i walk around, sometimes i hear birds talking. It feels the same as listening to a human language i don't know, and i remember thinking "that's way too much talking to be just alarm/mating calls etc." This seems like it should be obvious, but i guess we've got a bit more to go to really prove it

@Atrudas 8 months ago

Same tit language with different regional accent is such a funny thing to me, they're just like us. The little dinos never disappoint

@melissamoore6137 8 months ago

imagine having a talk with a bird. just hanging out, talking about witch seed type is best or something

@harudot 8 months ago

His Japanese is so pure. he’s so deep into his research that he even forgets his honorifics sometimes. It’s like he’s becoming more bird than human, and it’s honestly adorable.

@SirJinx-t9m 8 months ago

Imagine a bird gaslighting you

@SireSatire 8 months ago

we decoded bird language before gta 6

@TooFarGone-g5c 8 months ago

“Is the problem really that they’re too stupid to understand our language, or that we are currently too daft to understand theirs?”

@thestellarator815 8 months ago

"Rented a cabin and handmade birdhouses"
This man is a legend and inspiration to us all

@torkleven6515 8 months ago

I think what would really make a strong argument for bird grammar would be if he could construct a new sentence that described a scenario that never occurs naturally, then play this sentence to the birds and have them react appropriately or maybe create this unnatural scenario himself and then see if the birds describe it with the predicted sentence.

@overlysk 8 months ago

This is honestly such a subtly monumental thing, and I hope this can be expanded, especially to more animals such as the ones that we usually keep around us all the time! Most specifically dogs/cats if it hasn’t been done already.

@fennexplodes 8 months ago

My dad argues something really similar, in regards to the conclusion. He relates our relationship with technology and nature to the ant death spiral, where lost ants inevitably start spinning in circles. Others will sense that ant’s pheromones and follow, not realizing that they’re all going in a circle. Eventually, they die. My dad says that if we don’t reconnect with nature, we’re gonna be the dead ants someday.

@tarwod1098 8 months ago

Sometimes shortly before sunset I hear birds talking quietly. It sounds like telling about what happened today or like a good night story.
Even the loud crows do this. I love it when I hear it and I wish we could understand it.
After 30 years Prof Suzuki identified a few sounds. There is no way to ever understand a whole story

@Vraj-108 8 months ago

This guy is literally genius

@yurigagarin9765 8 months ago

So many humans are incredibly arrogant in regards as to what animals can and cannot do.

I had a dog for 15 years. Like many dog owners, I would often throw her a ball for her to chase it and bring it back. I was a bit devious in that, after some years, I would sometimes fake throwing the ball, so she would think I had thrown it, but after a short while she'd end up figuring that I had hid it at my back instead. Eventually, this would make her angry, barking at me when she figured out I had fooled her.

A while after I started doing this, she would sometimes bring me the ball, but when I'd lean over to take it from her, she'd quickly move back, as if cheating me out of the established expectation to get back at me. So dogs are definitely capable of learning to "lie", even if very, very few people will ever see them do it.