Language Lessons*
I sit in my New York den, trying to beat July’s raw heat
by listening to forty-ton humpback whales as they belt out
songs in deep ocean waters off the coast of Hawaii’s big island.
Their melody begins with a lone male. It continues as another
arrives. Soon their sounds expand to choir. This old album has
stacked humpback songs into tracks alive with moans, groans,
cries, sighs. One can almost see them rise, swirl, leap, dive
backwards into cold, steep waters. We hear splash, crash of fins,
flukes. Imagine mists twisting, flying, crying. A yodel, a whoop,
a juke joint holler, a wistful chant, a pitched, swelling moan.
Stranded in my land-locked room, tunnels of sound bloom
beneath the surface of inky seas. I wonder what words loom
large in those calls and reprise. What stories are launched into
whitecaps as brazen petrels, albatross, shearwaters dive through
foam mountains to compete for krill and squid. Perhaps sea chanties
emerged first from these far-from-dainty leviathans, not from sailors
toiling on wooden ships roiling in their midst. Did they warn of certain
doom of launched harpoon? Pray to distant, veiled gods? Croon news
of square sails, whaleboat crews to their pods, each switched octave
an alarm pitched faster, higher, farther as harm drew nearer?
I want to diagram a whale sentence. Discover the verb’s click,
the noun’s pulse, the adverb’s whistle, the adjective’s groan. To
follow a paragraph’s coda as it nuzzles beneath the surface
just before aeration frisson fills the ocean with billowed waves.
Echolocation as grammar lesson. Each variation provides
a new dialect, accent, idiom. A new window into lives we suspect
cannot be known, through a medium that represents cross-species
wisdom. From mother tongue to other tongue. Imagine becoming
steeped in their own Melville of the deep, reaping rewards
from Ahab’s demise as envisioned through cetacean eyes.
Belugas have been described as canaries of the sea. For more
than twenty-two years, the US Navy held one in captivity.
NOC, a juvenile when caught by Inuit hunters, learned how
to mimic human speech. On recordings, his pastiche sounds
like people talking in far distance. Perhaps he reached out with
calls, cries, clicks to convey sorrows, joys, surprise. Did he want
to preach the difference between beluga songs and human noise?
Whale brains are the largest of any species. Their complex codas
are neither random nor simplistic. More like letters, says an MIT
linguist. One day, they may teach us how wise they really are.
Can today’s leviathan messages presage disaster from plastic
debris as it sweeps below, surrounds, entangles? Or ship strikes,
or coastal waters warming faster than words forming? Listening
to whale songs feels like hearing hints of a ghostly gospel chorus
that has vanished into dawn’s glistening mists just before we
caught the final halleluiah. Linguists join ecologists to study
each grammatical flourish inherent in whale canticles. What
is romantic aria to some is calming psalm to others. If we can
shun cacophony’s human thunder, there are liquid lullabies
to be heard – each mystical verse a poem of love, awe, wonder.
*Scientists have learned that whale song structures expression in hierarchies similar to those we describe by diagramming sentences. A humpback whale, for instance, follows a repetitive pattern whose units would seem to be fixed—like a sort of grammar —but that can be reordered to express different actualities. Some scales of repetition are short, with six or so units, analogous to human words. Others can be 400 units long, like a novella or a scholarly essay. Combining these units lends a whale song its structure – the whale equivalent of what linguists call syntax in human language. Whale vocalizations consist of clicks or codas that express accents and dialects, as well as tones, phrases, pitches and pulses. Different whale species
vocalize in a manner that can be recognized by experts as unique to that species. https://www.britannica.com/explore/savingearth/the-language-of-whales