Dutch linguist Leonie Cornips was fascinated with the way cows communicate. But can you really call this “language”?
To Dutch Leonie Cornips He was long late for his breakfast break. The cold air of the fall made a hot drink appetible.
But Cornips was busy. He had started his work with a small flock of dairy cows a few hours ago. If I left now, I would lose something that would take time to recover. Cornips and the flock had entered a delicate and shared space to which it calls “The rhythm of the cow”.
Cornips is a sociolingista at the MeerSens Institute in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Academics that pass through the institute’s ornate gate specialize usually in the study of Language and Language and culture.
The soft voice researcher won her academic laurels in the 1990s and continues to study syntax variations among different Dialectics of the Netherlands. But beyond that, Cornips’ work has taken more recently what professionals in the area call “the animal turning”.
For years, Cornips spent the summer holidays on a farm. From the beginning, it was impressed with the different personalities of each cow. Read an essay from a philosopher who asked why Linguists never study animals.
This affected her deeply. Cornips felt that the cows had the intelligence and social habits needed to be good research objects for a linguist. As a Dutch, he also knew they were cultural icons in a cheese passionate nation. Therefore, he dedicated his professional skills to cows.
For centuries humans have assumed that the ability to use language is a measure of our superiority. There is even an academic term for this: “logocentrismo”, That is, those who use the words (from the Greek logos, which means ‘word’ or ‘reason’) occupy a privileged position. Language, many linguists say, is what makes us human. Animals can grunhir, bark or squeak, but they have nothing that tells you as language.
Cornips is using your work with dairy cows to counteract this idea. This work prolongs Half a century of effort Which started with the work of Jane Goodall with chimpanzees and the recordings of hunchback whales made by Roger Payne in the 1960s, in an effort to show that humans may not be as unique from the linguistic point of view as it was supposed.
Many of Cornips colleagues were skeptical when the linguist suggested that they apply the structure of linguistics to animals.
“The problem is that people don’t have a clear idea about language,” he says. “When they talk about language, always refer to what comes out of the mouth”.
But after spending six years completely immersed in the life of cows, Cornips thinks that language is better understood as “distributed” between the mouth, body and environment, making it incorporated, multimodal and sensory. “I’m eating with the cows, playing, kissing, walking, hugging,” he says.
Cornips and farmers who recruit to help them record the frequency, duration and intensity of the sounds that cows emit. But it also focuses on other forms of expression of meaning among cattle.
Its methods are often ethnographic, a way of studying cultures that is strongly based on the researcher’s observation.
Cornips carefully observes the behaviors and interactions of the cows, along with the sounds, to determine the way they communicate.
“I notice that, with the cows, The body is an instrument to know the other“, it says. Recognizing this fact leads Cornips to speak less “language” and more widely “language practices.”
Cows, for example, have a prepared greeting ritual What Cornips must follow to successfully integrate into the rhythm of the herd, he says. This has become obvious with Piet, a young Fleckvieh male from an intensive managed interior installation that Cornips brought to join five other cows in an outdoor pasture.
“I was always so happy to see him that when he arrived at his meadow, he would right to him and try to touch him immediately,” says Cornips. When she did it, Piet walked away.
Gradually, Cornips understood the need to respect Piet’s personal space, as he would with a human being. He learned to keep his arms beside his body and use visual contact justly, taking turns with Piet to look at each other and then deviate their eyes.
“It took me a long time,” he says. “I was very stupid. They are teaching me how to call me. ” Cornips realized that he had to learn a label. Without patience and attention, she says, she would never see himself.
Patience is also crucial when cows communicate with each other. When a mother calls her calf, they are sometimes necessary 60 seconds to answer it. The space between them is filled by body gestures.
Studies carried out in Austria show that the positioning of the ears and stretching of the neck are an integral part of the language of cows. Humans consider the ability to shake the ears as a party trick.
For a cow, it seems to be fundamental for communication. It is likely that the first sentence of a conversation with a cow involves the movement of the ears and a look.
One difference between humans and many animals is the use of the environment. Cornips found that cows communication is based more on the surrounding environment than ours. He observed a herd in which individuals used their bodies to hit an iron sealing to communicate with the rest of the herd at food, which considers a type of language.
He noticed that the cows responded differently as far as she entered a stable with solid or open walls: since cows are surrounded by different physical characteristics, this offers different opportunities of linguistic expression.
Cows, he argues, develop diverse language practices – almost as dialects – where the Meaning depends on the shape of your environmente.
Like other domestic animals, cows face the additional challenge of human communication with humans. “Most farmers are not sensitive to the rhythm of the cow,” says Cornips.
“Cows have to obey the farmer’s rhythm.” The dairy herds are constantly displaced between the food, milking and pasture sites. If one Cow does not learn the daily routine Or you can’t be productive, go to the slaughterhouse.
Cornips is shocked by the ease with which people assume that cows are stupid. “To become dairy cows,” he says, ‘have to have very rich communicative abilities, because have to understand what the farmer wants May they do… which is not easy ‘.
Cornips analyzed recordings that show that cows simplify their vocalization when the farmer recognizes his needs. Instead of being removed intelligence to be more complacent, Cornips thinks that domestic animals are forced to develop a communication repertoire more complete than wild animals.
Many traditional linguists still hesitate to attribute language to nonhumans.
Leora Bar-ElLinguistics Professor at the University of Montana, in the United States, is not hostile to the idea of animal language, but considers that it is worth asking what we earn and what we lose by widening the definition of language to cows.
“We may lose the fact that there is something unique in human language,” Bar-El. For example, human language allows incredible creativity. Let’s think about the works of Shakespeare. It can also refer to distant events and even reflect on itself, as happens when language provides a definition.
But Eva Meijerauthor of the essay that inspired Cornips and the 2018 book Animal Languages, argues that such statements may be self-realizable. “What we see as language has been developed excluding the language of other animals,” he says.
In fact, we define language in a way that makes it easier to deny it to others. Meijer draws attention to the long history of human oppression associated with the denial of language to other people.
The author believes that language recognition in animals provides new tools to understand them and perhaps even to learn how to inhabit the planet more sustainably.
Cornips knows that things are unlikely to change quickly. However, recently, he has noticed that the idea that animals have language has become more common in academic magazines.
It expects linguistics to be a tool to unlock different attitudes. “My most important goal,” says Cornips, ‘is to show others that Look with other eyes on a domestic animal’.
