Underestimating Elephants

A collection of noises, represented by letters.

I think a lot about a comment, and a response to that comment, regarding a finding about elephants. It seems they make a series of noises to let other elephants know very specific information, in this case about bees, which elephants apparently don’t like very much.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2010/04/elephants-have-alarm-call-bees

Here’s the comment:

I am trying to learn at least three languages at any given time: Polish (my wife’s native tongue,) French (My first class was in middle school, I haven’t made great progress considering my advancing age) and Spanish (hola.) A number of times during theses linguistic adventures I’ve performed a series of sounds with the utmost confidence that the person on the receiving end would be able to recognize meaning in their pattern. And a number of times that person has looked at me as if I were a trumpeting elephant.

Once, in France, I told a kindly old woman where I’d just parked my car. She looked at me with a sad smile, I expected her to gently touch my face as if consoling someone with a mortal brain ailment. She said, “it’s very difficult.”

At first I thought she meant the parking situation, which, yes, had been very difficult, But what she meant was, ‘trying to understand people who make confused hooting noises for no apparent reason makes me sad.”

I’ve spent months. Years maybe. Imitating the hooting noises other humans make in an attempt to communicate with them. It’s my favorite part of travel, those rare moments of understanding between people who operate using different sets of noises but who manage to communicate none-the-less.

One year we went on a road trip with our friends Maciej and Alexandra, from Poznań, Poland to Prague, for New Year’s Eve. We got drunk, along with millions of other revelers from around Europe. I fell into a conversation with a Frenchman who was sad his country didn’t received the respect he felt it deserved. I told him everyone loved the French (they don’t*) and that his language was the basis for the term “Lingua Franca” (it’s not**). This conversation was overheard by our friend Alexandra, who speaks French fluently. The next day she tried to speak to me in French, to celebrate our newfound channel for communication.

My mouth opened to respond but no sound came out. I tried again, but none of the noises that were at my disposal the night before, fueled by vodka and absinthe, were available to me anymore. Alexandra turned away, unable to bare my insensibility. The frost coated landscape of the Czech Republic coasted past. Small unnamable castles were crumbling at the peaks of unnamable hills.

All languages are systems. All systems are language. The word language comes from Latin “lingua” or tongue. It’s constructed like the word “Baggage,” the way we take a noun like “bag” and turn it into a larger bunch of the same. “Language” is just a big number of tongues. Lots of cultures like eating tongue. But I find the idea unpleasant.

So do Elephants speak what we’d call a language? Of course they do. They have a system of sounds they use to communicate with. Would it be possible to learn their language?

I can just imagine myself telling an elephant where I parked my safari vehicle, just across the river, near the bees. And I can just imagine it reaching out its trunk, gently caressing the side of my face and tooting sadly, “It’s very difficult.”

*I personally love the French, but admittedly not everyone feels the same.
**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca