Читать книгу The Secret Language Of Cats - Susanne Schötz - Страница 9

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CAT FOR BEGINNERS

There are a whole lot of cats in the world—there are 95.6 million cats kept as pets in the United States, 10 million in Canada, 10 million in the United Kingdom, 3 million in Australia, and 1.5 million in New Zealand as of 2017 (McNamee 2017). Despite there being so many cats, many people cannot properly interpret the sounds their cats make. However, anyone who listens a little bit more carefully when cats “speak” to us will quickly understand that they are able to produce a great number of different sounds, and that it is not very hard at all to learn to interpret the different sounds. An example: although our cat Kompis prefers to spend his time in the garden, he likes to sleep in the house, especially when it is cold out. His favorite place is a big blanket-covered stool in front of the radiator in the hall. He often sleeps for hours, but when he wakes up and wants to go out we know right away because he uses sounds that lie in the range of frequencies to which we humans are especially receptive. “Meeaahh,” he says, in a very high-pitched and bright (with acoustically high resonances) voice. Even if we are upstairs, and very far away, we can still hear him. We also know that Kompis has a much deeper voice when he tries to scare off an intruding cat in the garden. On those occasions it sounds more like a low-pitched moouuoouu. How does he know that we understand him better when he uses his bright and high-pitched voice? Why does he change his voice when he interacts with other cats? Can cats learn how to best communicate with different species (and individuals)? Behavioral scientists and biologists have already learned a lot about how cats communicate. Can we phoneticians contribute anything to the understanding of feline communication? The differences between human speech and animal sounds are well-known. Discovering the similarities and building bridges for better understanding is especially interesting for me as a linguist.

But first let us talk about the differences between the language of humans and the language of cats. So as to clarify the difference between them I first will discuss how cats communicate in general terms, and then turn to a detailed description of the range of cat sounds.

CODES OF COMMUNICATION IN HUMANS AND ANIMALS

We humans prefer verbal, that is to say spoken, communication. Although one often hears talk of the “language” of bees, apes, dolphins or whales, a great number of researchers have recognized that their communication cannot really be described as language. Many scientific investigations have confirmed that the vocal (acoustic) codes of all other species are not only simpler, they are also more limited compared to human speech. It is unlikely that future research will discover an animal species whose means of communicating deviates from this pattern. In addition, human language is open, meaning we can add a limitless number of new words with new meanings. Animals, in contrast, communicate about a very limited number of topics. They can discuss “here” and “now,” but usually not “yesterday,” “next week,” “over there” or “in Sweden.”

When apes, cats or other animals communicate with sounds, a single sound usually corresponds to a single “word” with a specific message within certain contexts or situations (one that the hearer often interprets as a meaning). The words of human speech, in contrast, are composed of multiple small parts, like the consonants and vowels (phonemes), that contribute to the overall meaning. We can change the meaning by changing one of these parts, such as with cat and bat or house and mouse.

Animal sounds depend on their context, and though they may be meaningful, they do not consist of smaller parts that themselves can change the meaning of the sound, such as the consonants and vowels of human speech. If a cat first says “mew” and then says “meow,” the two sounds do not necessarily mean different things. A communication code with thousands of different meaningful sounds needs, among other things, a very complex apparatus such as the human voice box with which to produce those sounds—something that simply does not exist in the animal kingdom. Or does it? The most recent research suggests that many animal species do have a kind of “languageness” that is not exactly like human language, but which is not necessarily simpler or less successful as a communicative code.

HOW DO CATS COMMUNICATE?

Cats and humans have lived together for more than ten thousand years. We domesticated them. But they probably domesticated us, too. They taught us how we should best behave around them (do not approach too quickly, do not handle too roughly, do not speak too loudly). We made it clear to them that we were happy to have them around, that we like to feed them and pet them, that they can expect warmth and protection from us, as long as they are just a little friendly to us and occasionally catch a mouse or two, so that our grain stores are not emptied by rodents.

Although many cats are solitary animals who rarely seek the company of other cats, cats can live together in friendly groups. Additionally, most domesticated cats seem to like living with humans. In this sense, they are social creatures who communicate in a variety of different ways with each other as well as with us humans: through scent (olfactory), with body postures and movements (visual), through touching (tactile) and with sounds (acoustic).

Humans, unfortunately, are not hound dogs; we are not especially sensitive to scent or the pheromones that cats can detect so easily. Moreover, our eyes are often occupied by watching our smartphones, computers, books, newspapers, magazines, televisions and so forth, so we might not notice that Kitty has been sitting next to her empty food bowl waiting for breakfast for more than half an hour. Perhaps that is why cats and humans have developed a kind of acoustic language that both species are able to understand. Cats have understood that sometimes, the best and quickest way to get what they want from us is to communicate with sounds, a meow, for example. They know that we will react immediately and we mostly know what our cats want from us: for us to give them food, open a door, retrieve a favorite toy mouse from under the sofa or just spend half an hour of our time petting, cuddling or playing with them.

Touch: Tactile Communication

Our cats know very well that the best way to communicate with their humans is with sound. Even so, they have maintained other forms of communication. Nosetouching, head-bumping, and rubbing against us, head to head, head to body, or body to body, and kneading our laps with their paws (we call the rhythmic stepping of a kitten against the teats of its mother and of a grown cat against a soft surface such as a blanket kneading, kneading dough, or making biscuits). Sometimes they will also show us they have had enough with either their claws or a bite. All of these are examples of tactile communication. Touch is very important, not only between mother cats and their kittens, but also between cats belonging to the same social group. It is possible that cats want to use touch to show us that they accept us humans as their friends as well.

Cats that have befriended each other like to lie close to one another when they rest or sleep. Moreover, they may groom each other. Head- or cheek-rubbing with another cat, a dog or a human is often also a form of greeting. This tactile communication consists of friendly, affiliative gestures and serves to reinforce social cohesion.

Body Postures and Movement: Visual Communication

We should pay far more attention to the visual signals of our friends. Postures and movements, either of the entire body or of individual body parts, such as the tail, head, face, and above all, ears, eyes, and whiskers, provide clear indications as to the momentary mood or needs of the cat. In aggressive or defensive situations, the increase in the volume of the body by arching the back and raising the hair (usually referred to as piloerection) mostly means that the cat feels threatened and is meant to signal “I am big, and I have muscle and sharp teeth which I will use, unless…” However, it might often just be a bluff. That is why cats, before they attack, often assume an upright posture (often with an arched back), bristle their fur and sometimes open their mouths, so that they seem as big and scary as possible. This is how they defend themselves from any potential attackers.

On the other hand, when Vimsan crouches flat rather than standing or sitting in an upright posture whenever Donna passes by her, this usually means something very different: she is signaling that she is very small and harmless and does not want to provoke a fight under any circumstances. Cats frequently communicate with subtle visual signs, for example, through their head, ear and eye postures and movements. There are also less subtle signals, like moving the body and the tail, as well as raising their fur, but these symbols also subside quickly. By no means do they last as long as a scent marking, for example.

Slow movements like the closing of eyes, yawning, cleaning or even creeping away in slow motion demonstrate peacefulness and harmlessness. Rapid movements, in contrast, (tail wagging, foot stamping, and running toward or away from an enemy) are mostly signs of excitement. They indicate that it can get serious at any moment and that a fight might be in the making.

Tail signals are especially interesting. A tail held vertically often means “I am young, small and friendly.” A tail held upright, but puffed up like a brush can often mean “I am big and impressive.” In contrast, a tail held upright with a slight kink or hook resembling a question mark often means “I am contented, curious and friendly.”

Tail wagging has a fundamentally different meaning with cats than with dogs.

It rarely has to do with joy or with joyous excitement. Instead, it seems to be more like a reflexive reaction to an inner conflict. The stronger the wag, the stronger the conflict. While a slow wagging is often only a sign of intense concentration, stronger wagging means “I am excited,” and even stronger wagging means “I am very worked up—it is about to get serious.”

Spraying and Rubbing: Scent Signals

Unfortunately, we humans cannot perceive all of the scents that our cats leave behind. The scents called pheromones, which are essential in communication between cats, persist longer than sounds and even continue to communicate something long after the cat that left this scent message behind has gone elsewhere. Scent markings are almost like writing for cats. These signals can describe the cat’s gender, age, health and readiness to mate, as well as reveal how old the scent mark itself is. Scent marks wear off with time and need to be continually renewed. Urine, stool and scratch marks are all among the scent signals. Scratching or rubbing with the head or the body also leaves decisive scent marks behind, as cats have scent glands on their paw pads (between the toes), as well as on their head and cheeks.

We humans often entirely misunderstand these signals. When cats spray urine around or scratch the furniture, we often take it poorly and suspect malice. And we do quite a bit to prevent this behavior in our cats. We try to clean our furniture or treat it with chemicals that we hope will force our cats to give it a wide berth in the future. In the worst case, we might have to dispose of furniture that has been so treated. For the cats though, this behavior is communicative and important for the care of their claws.

For example, when Kompis pees on the bushes in the garden, he tells all other cats that the garden is his home territory. In cities, where there are many four-legged creatures in a tight space, nobody gets their own beat, but instead must negotiate the same territory.

Amazingly, cats in tight quarters are often able to reach compromises and establish a kind of shift operation: “I can patrol here in the mornings without a problem and leave my scent marks all over the place, the neighbor cats can come in the afternoon (when I am at home sleeping anyway) and do the same. That way, we rarely meet each other and avoid conflicts.” That is how Kompis solves the problem. His warning to other cats— that he is the king of “his” garden, young, healthy and ready to defend his territory—is understood by potential rivals. If another cat does come and leave a mark on his territory, he renews his claim the next day by leaving a fresh mark.

When Turbo sharpens his claws on his favorite scratching tree, it does not serve only to help maintain his claws; it is also a scent marking. The glands on his paws leave a scent on the tree, so that the other cats can tell that he was there. It is a kind of cat social media—“I am logged on, and this scent is my status update.”

Rocky and Donna also communicate with scent when they rub their heads against my legs, my face, the kitchen door or the leg of a chair. These marks mean something more like “I live here, and I feel well. I would like to leave my scent here so that the residents and things all smell like me. That way, I feel safe and secure.”

Even if I cannot entirely perceive these scents, I have noticed that it smells a bit like bananas when my cats rub their foreheads or cheeks against my face. I do not know whether I am just imagining it, but to me, this scent says something like “You are my human, and so we should both wear the same perfume.” Maybe it is a kind of declaration of love or at least a way of ensuring the togetherness and belonging of cat and human.

TIP: If you have a sufficient number of scratching posts and trees in carefully selected spots (where the cat is feeling secure and comfortable) you may reduce the scratching of your furniture.

Meowing, Trilling, Growling and Purring: Communication through Sounds

Not all cats communicate happily or frequently with sounds. Many prefer to be silent. Let us not forget that they are predators, and being a predator is deeply embedded, even in our pet cats. That is why they instinctively try to hide their location and their physical and mental state (especially when they are sick, in pain or giving birth to kittens) from other animals or humans to avoid conflicts. Still, they sometimes want to communicate with each other with the help of sounds. Cats like to be out and about at night, and sounds are an especially sensible way of communicating over long distances or when visibility is bad. Certainly many are familiar with the nocturnal concerts of cat sounds.

Cats have learned that humans react well to cat sounds. We humans do not have the same good noses that cats have, and our eyes are also often elsewhere, so that we do not notice, for example, when our furry friends have sneaked into the kitchen and sit in front of their food bowl. When we are working, are occupied with our computers or smart phones or are sleeping, sounds are especially effective. The four-legged companions have understood that and adapted themselves to us. That is why many cats develop a kind of spoken language together with their humans that is mutually understandable.

I have also found that the more I talk to a cat, the more it talks back to me. However, it is important to clarify something here: Do all cats speak the same “language”? Can they understand each other when they communicate with vocal signals? There seem to be signals that are universal and are understood by all cats. But there also seem to be geographic, cultural and breed-based differences. Maybe cats are even influenced by the language or the accent of the people around them. When I give lectures about cat communication, people often come to me afterward with comments and questions. For example, “My cats make entirely different sounds than the ones you played in your lecture. Could it be because I usually speak Japanese at home with them?” Although it has not yet been investigated thoroughly, many researchers are of the opinion that cats can, in fact, develop family, group or neighborhood dialects (Bradshaw, 2013; Leyhausen, 2005). Do cats have dialects or do they develop a set of unique sounds that only their humans can understand? This fascinating question is also the subject of my academic work.

Now we are getting down to it: I would like to explain my work as a phonetician briefly and then help you understand the sounds of cats from that perspective.

WHAT DOES A PHONETICIAN ACTUALLY DO?

My task as a scientist is primarily the investigation of human speech. I have been doing it since 2000. It sounds simple, but some knowledge of the methods is necessary.

My natural curiosity makes my work a lot easier. When I am tracking down a secret, it is not so easy to scare me off the trail. Even if everything is smooth and flawless on the surface, I like to scratch a little bit to see if something else is not hidden there after all.

How do we produce spoken language? How are the sounds of speech (vowels and consonants) produced in different languages and dialects? What do they sound like? These questions are at the core of my work and continue to catch my interest. I am also interested in how sounds, syllables, words, phrases and utterances vary in length (duration), tone (intonation, melody), loudness and voice quality—that is to say, in prosody, as well as what they sound like in different languages and dialects. I have also observed the changes our human voices undergo as we grow older using scientific methods. And it gets even more interesting: How do our emotions influence the way we speak? Why does our speaking style change depending on with whom we speak? Why do we sound different when we speak to young children than we do when we speak to elderly people, when we speak to someone we love and to someone we dislike, or when we speak in private and professional capacities?

We change the intonation or melody of our speech even when we pronounce a simple word, cat, as a question or as a statement. When we say “Cat.” as a statement the intonation generally falls, whereas when we say “Cat?” as a question the intonation rises. The sounds also arrive at our ears in very different versions. For instance, vowels are frequently louder than consonants. In the word kittens, the vowel i is the loudest sound. We emphasize it much more heavily than the other sounds, including the vowel e, which in casual speech often is not pronounced at all, although we use it when we write the word. The four consonants sound very different. Try it yourself! Pronounce the letters k, t, n and s one at a time, and listen very closely. You will be able to hear that the k, which is produced with the tongue farther back than the t, sounds darker (with acoustically low resonances). It becomes even more apparent when you compare the pronunciation of n and s, where the s sounds much brighter than the n. These differences can be explained in that the main sound energy of n can be found on lower frequencies, while s has most of its sound energy in the high frequency bands, and t usually has sound energy on higher frequencies than k. Moreover, did you notice that the i and the n are voiced, as they are produced with vibrating vocal folds (vocal cords), while the k, the t and the s are voiceless? Such phonetic characteristics, as well as a number of others, can be further studied in visual representations depicting the acoustics of speech. At the end of this book starting on page 259, you will find a phonetic alphabet containing all the vowels and consonants I use to describe the sounds of cats in this book.

The following figure shows a three-part diagram which is commonly used by phoneticians. The upper pane shows the waveform (often called an oscillogram), which is a representation of the microphone signal in a recording of me saying the words “Kittens. Kittens?” with my Swedish accent. (I pronounced the first word as a statement, the second as a question.) In the waveform, we can see how loud and how long the different speech sounds are.

In the middle, you can see a spectrogram—it shows how the sound energy of each speech sound is distributed across different frequencies. Because vowels are generally pronounced louder than consonants, they typically also have more energy, and so they show up darker (blacker) in the spectrogram. The s is dark in the upper range of frequencies, but completely white in the bottom range. That means that this s has no energy in the deeper frequencies. Instead, its energy is entirely concentrated in the higher range of frequencies. In an n, exactly the opposite is true—lots of sound energy at the lower frequencies of the spectrogram, but none at all at the top.

In the bottom pane of the diagram, the fundamental frequency (the acoustic term for the pitch contour or melody) of the words is tracked, that is to say, how our tone of voice rises and falls when we speak. You will see right away that the melody of “kittens.” (statement) and “kittens?” (question) is different.

Three phonetic diagrams for the word “kittens.” (statement) and “kittens?” (question): Waveform (top), spectrogram (middle) and fundamental frequency (pitch, melody) (bottom).

Furthermore, we have determined that the same speech sounds are pronounced differently in different dialects and languages. For example, I used a method called electromagnetic articulography, which can be used to track the movements of our speech organs, to determine how vowels are pronounced in different Swedish dialects. I literally looked inside the mouths of different speakers in order to see how they move their tongues, jaws and lips when they pronounce different vowels.

I also translated these vowels into phonetic writing. To aid me I had a system that works in every language: the International Phonetic Alphabet (see Tables 3, 4 and 5 with the phonetic symbols at the end of this book, pages 260–265). Phonetic transcription depicts sounds as they are pronounced. One symbol per sound is the rule. My pronunciation of the word kittens, for example, can be transcribed [′kɪt(ə)n̩ s].

If these phonetic methods work for every human spoken language, I said to myself, they might also work for cat sounds. And, as I have discovered, they usually do.

One of the most commonly used methods of my academic discipline is acoustic analysis. With the help of a computer we can measure different acoustic features of the sounds of speech and compare them. We can measure the length of a sound, such as an e, in milliseconds, and we can measure the intensity (loudness or volume) in decibels. Moreover, we can determine the frequency distribution of a sound signal (a speech sound or a word) when it is visually depicted in the form of a spectrogram, just like the one I have provided above.

In a spectrogram we can see, for example, that the sound energy of an e is distributed across entirely different frequencies than those present in an a, and that an m mostly has energy in a lower spectrum of frequencies, while an s, on the other hand, is mostly concentrated in the higher range. The fundamental frequency, that is to say the part that we normally perceive as the pitch or melody of speech, can be measured using acoustic methods. We can measure precisely how high or how low the pitch of an individual speaker is, whether a phrase or a sentence has a monotone melody or has tonal highs and lows, whether the melody rises or falls or maybe does both. Acoustic analysis is objective, which means that the results are always the same regardless of who conducts the measurements (at least as long as they enjoyed a basic education in phonetics).

The way the human ear perceives sound depends on the individual listener. It is subjective. A number of factors influence the way that we hear—age, experience and hearing loss, for example. For that reason, many researchers in my field conduct perception or listening tests. In such experiments, a group of listeners are asked to listen to sounds, words or sentences that are pronounced by speakers who speak either in the same or in different dialects. They then compare word A and word B, for example. Are the words pronounced in the same dialect, with the same intonation, the same melody? How old is the speaker? Are sound 1 and sound 2 the same or different? The results from all participants are then compiled and the averages are used to show how the sound stimuli were perceived by the majority of the listeners.

Phoneticians also concern themselves with categorization within linguistic systems, describing the number and type of vowels, consonants, melodic patterns and other traits that characterize a dialect or a language. In this subfield of phonetics—phonology—the rules that govern the combinations of sounds and syllables in a language are studied. English, for example, allows for combinations of consonants at the beginning of a word, such as in stripe