this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Solarpunk technology
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Technology for a Solar-Punk future.
Airships and hydroponic farms...
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What about with dolphins, though? Most other animals don't actually have enough of a repitiore of patterns to figure out a lot of things they might be saying, but dolphins have been shown to have speech patterns in their calls so similar to all human languages, it's hard not to think they have some kind of actual language.
Dolphins, whales, apes, bats, elephants and prairie dogs would be good candidates. For most species however, since their repertoire of communication is quite limited, attempting communication wouldn't be likely to succeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_language
Prairie dogs, being a species well accessible by humans (they live in fixed underground "settlements", don't swim or fly where people cannot record them, and aren't dangerous to approach) have been studied to an extent, and their language does have semantics:
I imagine that prairie dogs are already capable of coming up with statements like "big cat coming slowly from north", so maybe some of their colonies, in the right conditions, develop more complex language. Since they don't travel much, each of their colonies might have a different language, however.
Perhaps the most interesting language would be that of squids: