Re: OT: Origin of names (WAS: Re: Proto-Uralic?)

Christophe Grandsire wrote at 2003-06-29 14:29:07 (+0200)
 > En réponse à Joe :
[...]
 >
 > >   It would open up a whole new a-posteriori Conlanging field.
 > >And what would be even weirder is if we had another species as
 > >intelligent as us sitting right under our noses, and we never
 > >realised it.
 >
 > Actually, it's been quite a while that we know that. The only
 > problem is that the people telling about the impressive
 > intelligence of dolphins were not taken seriously. After all, there
 > just *couldn't* be another intelligent species on Earth but us
 > (also, for long people have considered that intelligence had to do
 > with the ability to create and use tools, something that by
 > definition dolphins cannot do - difficult without hands -).
 >

"We" don't "know that" at all, Christophe.  Some researchers in that
field have reached such a conclusion, but many others disagree.  It is
possible that they are simply blinded by prejudice, but I see no
reason to assume that to be the case.

Here are a couple of pages I've found on the subject of cetacean
intelligence and communication - I cannot vouch for their accuracy,
but they seem balanced to my inexpert eye.

http://dolphins.org/Learn/lmm-dcmm.htm
http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-be-an.htm

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