Are animal signals wordlike or even sentencelike? Are their sounds and signs somehow meaningful and structured? Let's spend some videos together exploring the possible linguistics of animal communication. In part 1 I'll introduce this series and the many grammatical animals we'll meet along the way.

Groups to support: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t...
Subscribe for parts 28: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_...
Tip me once: https://www.kofi.com/NativLang
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~ Shortly and sweetly ~

I've been intrigued by animal language since my two older videos on "design features" and the bee waggle dance. After reading about how Campbell's monkeys suffix oo to their calls, I read over 100 sources to figure out if animal signals and calls contain anything like human grammar. The answer was complicated and too long for my normal animations, but the story behind the research was fascinating.

(~SPOILERS for the series in the list below!)
I decided to retell a series with several more parts. Here's the basic storytelling structure, and what to expect from the rest of my latest big animated project:
1. (this introduction)
2. humans tried to teach nonhumans our grammars
3. humans expected more from nonhumans
4. humans tried to learn "wild" nonhuman grammars
5. nonhuman wordlike signals
6. nonhuman sequences and sentencelike signals
7. human language as animal communication
8. birds, cetaceans and compositional syntax

Once finished I want to stitch everything together in one long animation.

~ Resources ~

Art, animation and music by me. I wrote a sources document to explain and back up claims and to credit all images, fonts and sounds:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r...

Within that document I share links to groups focused on animals, their habitats and the people who care for them. There's a narrative tiein that will work well by the end of the series, but for now I'll just mention and link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t...

My "Grammanimals" spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...