Headline, February 23 2025/ WORLDSHOW : ''' GRUNTS -SCREAMS- GROANS '''

WORLDSHOW : 

''' GRUNTS -SCREAMS- 

GROANS '''

ON THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world - !WOW! will revisit and recapture the patterns and themes of human speech :

! '' Grunts. Squeaks. Screams. Whistles. Groans. Moans. Squeals '' !. Then the students of the entire world will identify '' subsequences '' of sounds that frequently occurred together - such as a short ascending whistle followed by a squeak - and might be roughly analogous to a word. '' That would be from the Global Founder Framers of !WOW! '',

The English Language is full of wonderful words, from '' anemone '' and ''aurora'' to ''zenith'' and zodiac.''

But these are special-occasion words, sprinkled sparingly into writing and conversation. The words in heaviest rotations are short and mundane. And they follow a remarkable statistical rule, which is universal across human languages :

The most common word, which in English is '' the,'' Is used about twice as frequently as the second most common word [ ''of, '' in English ], three times as frequently as the third most common word [ '' and '' ] , continuing in that pattern.

NOW, an international interdisciplinary team of scientists, has found that the intricate songs of humpback whales, which can spread rapidly from one world population to another, follow the same rule, which is known as Zipf's law.

The scientists are careful to note that whale song is not equivalent to human language. But the findings, they argue, suggest that forms of social communication that are complex and culturally transmitted may have shared structural properties.

'' We expect them to evolve to be easy to learn,'' said Simon Kirby, an expert on language evolution at the University of Edinburgh and an author of the new study. The results were published in the journal Science.

'' We think of language as this culturally evolving system that has to essentially be passed on by its hosts, which are humans,'' Dr. Kirby added. '' What's so gratifying for me is to see that same logic seems to also potentially apply to whale song.''

Zipf law, which was named for the linguist George Kingsley Zipf, holds that in any given language the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank.

There is still considerable debate about why this pattern exists and how meaningful it is. But some research suggests that this kind of skewed word distribution can make language easier to learn.

If these word distributions evolved because they helped learning, scientists might also expect to find similar patterns in other complex, culturally transmitted communication systems.

'' And whale song is a great place to look,'' said Inbal Arnon, an expert on language acquisition at Hebrew University in Israel and an author of the new study.

Humpback whales sing long, elaborate songs, which are composed of a variety of sounds strung together in repeated phrases and themes. All the male whales in a particular humpback population sing the same song but that song evolves over time - sometimes gradually and sometimes all at once.

'' We have song revolutions, and that's when a song is introduced from a neighbouring population,'' said Ellen Garland, an expert on humpback whale songs at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an author of the new paper. '' So the song type turns up, and then it completely takes over.''

Precisely how that happens remains a mystery, and whale researchers face a challenge that human language researchers don't : They're not native speakers.

So the scientists first challenge was to divide the songs into meaningful units, determining where one ''word'' ended and another began. To do so, they used a quantitative approach inspired by human babies.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Science Lab Students, continues. The World Students Society thanks Emily Anthes.

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Grandparents, Parents. Students, Professors and Teachers. See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on !WOW! - for every subject - : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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