The Echo Incident

[Guest DWA]

^^^Baby steps.

[dmaker]

HOLY COW!  Plus for dmaker for responding to a post and using the words 'if bigfoot exists', then offering a hypothesis based on the 'what if'.

Good job!! Never dreamt I'd see the day!!  

:-)

Yikes. I need to stop that.  My point was more to try to understand how a person can say parrots speak English and then dismiss any other alleged attempts at language by a creature that he believes to be, at a minimum, a great ape.  Didn't make sense to me. 

Edited May 23, 2014 by dmaker

[southernyahoo]

Not true at all. According to the American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association:

Language is different from speech.

Language is made up of socially shared rules that include the following:

-- What words mean (e.g., "star" can refer to a bright object in the night sky or a celebrity)

-- How to make new words (e.g., friend, friendly, unfriendly)

-- How to put words together (e.g., "Peg walked to the new store" rather than "Peg walk store new")

-- What word combinations are best in what situations ("Would you mind moving your foot?" could quickly change to "Get off my foot, please!" if the first request did not produce results)

Speech is the verbal means of communicating. Speech consists of the following:

Articulation

-- How speech sounds are made (e.g., children must learn how to produce the "r" sound in order to say "rabbit" instead of "wabbit").

Voice

Use of the vocal folds and breathing to produce sound (e.g., the voice can be abused from overuse or misuse and can lead to hoarseness or loss of voice).

Fluency

The rhythm of speech (e.g., hesitations or stuttering can affect fluency)

Using these definitions, all animal life has some sort of "speech" capability. Language however, is a whole different matter. To date, only humans have demonstrated the ability to create, write, organize, and develop rules for a true language. I have no doubt that if BF exists, then it has the ability to vocalize speech and communicate in a primitive, instinctual fashion as do all other animals. To claim that BF have "language" though? There is no proof of that, and yes, I am familiar with Scott Nelson and his work with the Sierra Sounds. The problem there is, he is a solitary "expert" that has only found indicators of possible language. Nothing definitive. On top of that, I take no stock in a solitary mans assertions with no other "experts" to back him up. You can find a "rent-an-expert-witness" on almost any topic, just spend some time around a major urban courthouse. How about getting some other linguists on board, or some primatologists who have studied ape speech? Then you might be able to make your case that BF has "language."

 

Nonhuman Apes don't speak because they can't make the articulations and modify the acoustics to produce various distinctive vowels particularly the quantal vowels which are needed to encode meaning. So they have a small repetoir of calls they use for various things. We call that animal communication. Speech and language I would use synonymously because they both require the configuration of an 1 to 1  ratio of oral to pharyngeal region of the vocal tract to produce the quantal vowels found in very nearly everyone of the worlds 6000 human languages Some birds just so happen to be able to match this configuration and make very similar sounds. Reordering them to create new meaningful words and sentences is the foundation of language. Being that there are so many human languages, we could expect to not understand what a bigfoot might say, but that doesn't mean it's just jibberish.

 

BTW, Bipto did share a recording they had made in area X which he compared to the Sierra sounds somewhere on the first CD. What I hear in it is definitely voice and articulation.

[Guest DWA]

Great.

 

And just like orbing, shape-shifting and telepathy, now we have to ask scientists to take it seriously.

 

Footrprints I'd expect them to.  I'd expect them to be able to garner consistent behavioral and morphological characteristics from the anecdotal evidence.

 

But what's our evidence that sasquatch speak?  What you heard in a recording?

[Guest Stan Norton]

Hey, according to some members here sasquatch speak not gibberish but a number of European tongues, plus Hebrew! Who'd have thought?

[Guest DWA]

I've heard Japanese and Korean.  The Pacific Rim Connection, we really should be exploiting.  But the mainstream keeps fingers firmly in ears, while the opportunities orb out of sight.

[Guest Stan Norton]

I prefer the 'land bridge via Spain(!!!) theory' myself. Or that sasquatch are a lost tribe of Israel.

[Guest DWA]

I'd personally like to see Melba's man-lemur get more traction.

[Guest Stan Norton]

Now I'm confused. I thought Melba was in touch with the romantic forest folk?

[Guest DWA]

Let's just put it this way:  if anything worthwhile ever comes out of The Circus That Is Melba, color that the most shocking moment in my whole association with 'footery.

 

Even shock-i-er than [edited because we are nice people here, and Melba I am trying but you are very trying as witness...]

 

http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2013/03/dr-melba-ketchum-may-have-discovered.html

Edited May 23, 2014 by DWA

[Guest Stan Norton]

Dirty lemur pervs...

[Guest DWA]

The entire PRO-simian pun aside.

[Guest zenmonkey]

What about all that hair?

 

 

What about that little pointy head? The heavy brow?

 

I'm not disagreeing they're obviously fairly close to humans on the tree of life. But so are orangs and the other great apes. 

 

You continue to ignore the salient point I made above: Humanity is not morphology. It's mental. It's bigger than what something looks like, it's how it acts. In what way do wood apes act like humans? Where's their art? Their mythology? The evidence of their technology? Tools? Shelters? Any commonly understood relic of human culture whatsoever? 

 

That have nothing humans have. They live like apes. 

I will reiterate:

 

 

You keep doing the math backwards. IMO.

It seems that some folks we know that are on the anti kill will come up with about anything in order to keep someone to kill I think that a lot of times they use the "they are human" stuff to push that opinion. The rest just seems to be a basic lack of understanding of biology and animal classification. sorry but bipto hit it right on the head with that statement above! keep up the good work!

That's kinda of my point right there. If wood apes are "human" so are chimps and gorillas and orangutans. Hell, maybe even dolphins and whales. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

didn't see this or i would of included it thats a perfect description.

[Guest]

speech is a wholey human capacity and it's evident in many accounts of bigfoot, You are ignoring that and dismissing it by citing it's not proven,

I've heard it, and not just on the Sierra Sounds CD. As a group, we've heard it and recorded the sounds. We have expertise in linguistics in the group. What we've heard is gibberish. It's usually used by the apes in an exclamatory fashion or as a warning. Not like how people talk to one another.

I am familiar with Scott Nelson and his work with the Sierra Sounds. The problem there is, he is a solitary "expert" that has only found indicators of possible language. Nothing definitive. On top of that, I take no stock in a solitary mans assertions with no other "experts" to back him up. You can find a "rent-an-expert-witness" on almost any topic, just spend some time around a major urban courthouse. How about getting some other linguists on board, or some primatologists who have studied ape speech? Then you might be able to make your case that BF has "language."

Yes. A single source does not a "scientifically shown fact" make. You need review and repeated results. As far as I know, Nelson is the only person who claims to have found bigfoot language.

Nonhuman Apes don't speak because they can't make the articulations and modify the acoustics to produce various distinctive vowels particularly the quantal vowels which are needed to encode meaning.

So you're again saying morphology = humanness. They walk on two feet, therefore human. They leave footprints that sorta look like ours, therefore human. They can make sounds that can be interpreted by the unskilled as words, therefore human. Never mind the fact that they do *absolutely nothing* that makes humans unique from all the other animals.

Really going to enjoy Disneyland once I get there, BTW.

Edited May 23, 2014 by bipto

[salubrious]

Dang! Have a good time!