Research has shown that African penguins' conversations are subject to Zipf's Law and Mentzerat's Law.
The penguin language resembles human communication and obeys the same linguistic laws. This conclusion was reached by an international group of scientists after their research, the results of which were reported by the newspaper The Independent.
Experts from the University of Turin (Italy), in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Lyon (France), analyzed 590 recordings of "conversations" of 28 adult African penguins that lived in Italian zoos. Scientists have focused on two rules inherent in all natural languages, i.e. used to communicate between people and not purposefully created. One of them is the so-called Zipf's law, which describes the patterns of frequency distribution of words in a text in any natural language. According to this rule, long words are less common in the text than short ones.
The second rule is Mentzerat's law, which affects the structural aspect, according to which the length of a general structure (for example, a word) is inversely proportional to the length of its components (syllables), that is, longer words consist of shorter syllables. The results showed that penguin 'conversations' were consistent with both of these laws. In particular, the experts found that, as these linguistic rules suggest, the sounds that animals used more often than others were shorter in duration. In addition, the longer "words" consisted of additional, but shorter "syllables".
"Our results show that African penguin conversations obey Zipf's Law and Mentzerat's Law," the researchers noted. “This is the first conclusive proof that the conversations of non-primate species conform to the linguistic laws of natural languages,” they added.
Earlier, experts from the University of Rohampton in London found that the gestures of chimpanzees are to a certain extent similar to the forms of human communication and are subject to the same linguistic laws. After analyzing more than 2,000 different gestures used by animals, biologists found that the movements that chimpanzees used more often than others were shorter in duration. In addition, the longer gestures consisted of shorter individual movements. This, in turn, corresponds to the linguistic laws of Zipf and Mentzerat, which are manifested in human communication.