The elephant that speaks Korean

An Asian elephant has astonished his keepers by learning to imitate at least five words in their native tongue including "hello" and "good". 

The Telegraph, Nick Collins, Science Correspondent, 1 Nov 2012

Cases of mammals being able to make human-like sounds are extremely rare, because even close animal relatives like chimpanzees do not have enough vocal control to match our pitch and tone.

But Koshik overcame sizeable anatomical hurdles – the fact that elephants have no lips, for instance – to mimic human sounds by placing his trunk in his mouth and massaging his vocal tract into a different shape.

The unusual technique, which has never before been seen in animals, allows him to imitate human word sounds and match the pitch of his trainers' voices despite being much larger, and having a longer vocal tract and bigger larynx.

A study by researchers from the University of Vienna established that Koshik, who lives at Everland Zoo in South Korea, could mimic five words: "annyong" ("hello"), "anja" ("sit down"), "aniya" ("no"), "nuo" ("lie down"), and "choah" ("good").

Sixteen native Korean speakers were asked to listen to 47 recordings of the elephant "speaking" and spell out what they believed they had heard.

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Some 56 per cent of people provided the correct spelling for "annyong", 44 per cent agreed on "aniya" and 33 per cent identified "nuo".

Researchers observed that Koshik was better at mimicking vowel sounds than consonants, with many people mistaking "choah" for "boah" ("look") or "moa" ("collect").

Koshik's human mimicry was first noticed in 2004 at the age of 14, but researchers suggested that it most likely developed as a result of trying to communicate with his keepers while he was the only elephant at Everland between 1995 and 2002.

Writing in the Current Biology journal, they said: "The social circumstances under which Koshik's speech imitations developed suggest that one function of vocal learning might be to cement social bonds and, in unusual cases, social bonds between species."

Other documented cases of animals replicating human speech include Hoover, a harbour seal who was raised by a Maine fisherman and learnt to speak simple phrases, and an adult male beluga who could say his name "Logosi".

There have even been anecdotal reports of a "bilingual" Asian elephant in a Kazakhstan zoo which could pronounce words in both Russian and Kazakh, but there is no known evidence proving the claim.

Meanwhile, keepers at the National Zoo in Washington attached a harmonica to the trunk of an elephant named Shanthi earlier this year after noticing that the 36-year-old was "musically inclined". 

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Cross-species friendships are springing up all over. Of them, Matthew said in 2010:

“The innocence of animals, who act from instinct, never from malice, automatically qualifies all except a few species to ascend with Earth. Along the way those who now are wild will become tame, predators will become vegetarians, and all will live peaceably with each other and humankind. Already there is evidence of cross-species friendship, even mothers of one species nurturing infants of another, and instances of bonding between wild animals and humans.”  (Matthew message - Channelled by Suzanne Ward, Aug 13, 2010)

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