Do sperm whales have a phonetic alphabet?

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I was at the beach in Maui. I had done my hair because we were going to a fancy lunch. Someone said, "If you go under water you an hear the whales talking." So much for the hairdo. I put my head under and could hear them beeping.My daughtervsaid, "Wonder what they are saying." I said, "They're saying, , "If you put your head out of the water you can hear the people talking.'"

There's also Mahler's quote: "If a composer could say what he wanted to say in words, he wouldn't bother trying to say it in Music."

I just LOVE the name of Project CETI, a pun between the Latin word for "whale" and SETI ("search for extra-terrestrial intelligence").

What we perceive as pitch and timbre is just pulses when slowed down. If they perceive their own clicks more like tone and color than discrete clicks, then those two whales could've been harmonizing.

WHALE:”You had me at . . . …”

I read some research several years ago about dolphins seemingly using names for each other, using and repeating specific whistles when meeting particular individuals they knew, and sometimes announcing themselves by whistling their own "name," which tells us something about these animals' sense of identity and self as well as their communicative abilities.

even if the sperm whale phonetic system turns out to be less like words and language and more like music I wonder about the possibility of using it on ships as signifiers to whales. We could take maybe an couple uncommon possible combination of clicks, for large cargo vessels, medium sized vessels, and small vessels. ans start using those to broadcast as the ship sails. and with that, even if those clicks mean nothing to whales in reality, we signify our otherness and with experience give them information about what is approaching. in essence telling them whether they need to avoid something like a large container ship which can cause a dangerous collision, or to not be bothered by a small vessel approaching.

I can’t be the only one who found the whales saying “hello” as utterly terrifying, was a bad time to be wearing headphones hahaha

Fascinating. I wonder if 1+1+3 is so common in these samples because it's like a simple identification ping. This pod/clan/group of whales could use it to indicate to others that they belong to the group. Other groups could potentially use different codas for this purpose, and if individuals from different groups encounter each other, the exchange could be like [I'm a Smith] [I'm a Smith] [I'm a Smith] [I'm an Anderson] [I'm a Smith] [I'm an Anderson .] [...] [I'm an Anderson] That opens up a can of worms, because if different groups can identify each other, do they have dynamics? Are there sperm whale alliances and feuds? Obviously I'm doing a MASSIVE amount of anthropomorphization here, but the fact that we seem to have identified a basic set of symbols that these whales use to communicate is inspiring. Maybe one day we can learn what those symbols can combine to mean.

theme song? nonono that is a whale gang sign

That (hypothetical) whale conversation at 10:25 was a real trip for me with earbuds in. Nice work. On a separate note--pun intended--I did NOT expect the tie-in to music at the end, although in retrospect I really should have. I enjoy linguistics as a hobby but I studied music in school, and your comparison here was immensely satisfying to me. If you're ever looking for a related topic to give a phonetician's viewpoint on, I heard somewhere that research had shown that orcas' vocalization have been shown to vary between family groups, and that lone, "clanless" orcas appear to have separate "dialects" from members of families. Perhaps that could be something interesting to explore. Great work as always!

Let me, as a biologist, make a correction to the very beginning of the video: the generic name should be capitalized, and the whole binomial should be in italics.

I'm really gonna need a grounder news that checks if ground news itself is factual and accurate in their analyses, because somehow most companies that have sponsored this many youtubers have turned out to actually be kind of scummy, a recent example being betterhelp

This was fascinating, and I'm really surprised to hear the whole idea for the video was suggested by the sponsor, that's some good marketing.

The final "ornamentation" click at the end of the video was a beautiful touch.

Amazing! I've been seeing lots of buzz lately about decoding whale language with AI, but rarely are the details expanded on... And I hadn't realized it until seeing this thumbnail, but you're the perfect person to break it down! Thanks again for another beautifully constructed and deeply fascinating video! 🙏😊

Also, regarding the whales, the problem is what they reference in their sounds, that is their worldview, as a particular group, as speech is something not inherently obtained but learned within some culture. It may be much easier to try to understand that first without trying to "translate" into something specific for our culture. It is very likely that they partially reference things and not only things, but some situations, events in some places by their acoustic patterns, and then marking those patterns in their language.

As a kid I instead of speaking under my breath sometimes I would speak through my nose with my tongue at the top of my mouth and lips closed. There's a voiced/unvoiced fricative, plositive, a nasal sound, and I guess an "h". Turns out I was just missing the massive skull to reverberate my phenomes off of!

Ok, you nailed the coda on that one. :) The thought that whales speak is exciting, but the thought they enjoy music is weep-inducing.