As a child I was fascinated by the idea of dolphin language. Twenty years ago, I read Lilly and Bateson. Now, recently, I have been reading the literature on dolphin and other animal communication – of which there is a surprisingly great deal. The internet continues to delight me long after I should have been used to its ability to fulfil whatever whimsical long tail academic desire (of which I am full) occurs to me.

Dolphins along with bats and some other animals are able to sense the world through sonar. Imagine: given a constant output, they receive a variety of inputs back which give them a 360 degree view of their world, and in some cases, can show the contents of containers. What if each whistle could represent some abstract representation of this all-round-and-partly-through view of the world?

Pictographic writing has abstract representations of the pictures to represent words. Chinese and Japanese symbols for mountains or earth are simplifications of pictures of what they represent. Onomatopoeic words sound like what they represent. What if dolphin words are similarly abstract onomatopoeic representations of mountains, earth or what, say, a school of fish typically sounds like when viewed with echolocation?

In “Seeing Through Sound”, Louis Herman, Adam Pack and Matthias Hoffmann-Kuhnt (Journal of Comparative Psychology, 1998, Vol. 112, No. 3, 292-305) show that Bottlenosed Dolphins have a nearly perfect ability to translate pairings of familiar, but complexly shaped objects, from vision to echolocation or from echolocation to vision. This could suggest that they have formed abstract representations which are independent of modality. Perhaps their whistle for mountain evokes the echolocation for an abstraction of a mountain and from this what a mountain looks like?