The Origin of Chicken Talk and Human Speech
The mysteries of the origin of chicken talk and human speech may be found in the goings-on among the frogs and toads in your farm pond, says my ornithologist friend Gene Morton, who has written extensively on animal behavior and communication. Frogs and toads that came into being some 250 million years ago likely began communicating for the same reasons today’s frogs do — to attract mates and repel rival males.
Size Matters
If you were to keep a frog or toad as a pet for several years, you would see that it never stops growing. So within each species, frogs of all sizes compete for mates and space. This competition is reflected in their calls.
Bigger toads make a lower-pitched call than smaller toads. The lower call alone is enough to cause smaller male toads to back off and move elsewhere.
The lesson gained from frog and toad calls, and applied to chickens, is that vocalizing first arose as a symbol of an animal’s physical size. Generally the larger the size, the older the animal. The older the animal, the better it becomes at finding food and surviving disease.
A female frog wants a successful frog as a dad for her offspring. So she prefers to mate with a bigger male. Listen to the toads chorusing in your pond and you can hear the deep big guys and falsetto smaller guys. If you could see the females, they would be swimming toward the big guys.
This primitive form of communication arose because it allows disagreements to be settled without fighting. The big guys get what they want (mates) and the small guys survive another day by backing off.
Diplomacy was born in the frog pond.
Greater Diplomacy
Chickens, of course, are not frogs. They, like all other warm-blooded animals, stop growing at maturity. Such animals have a need for greater diplomacy, which adds another dimension to communication. Instead of merely reflecting the size of adversaries, their sounds also reflect their emotions.
But diplomacy is still based on force, or the threat of force. So size becomes a symbol, rather than a simple reflection of bigness. And this symbol is seen in the relation between pitch and size — a physical reality that cannot be changed. A bass drum sounds deeper than a snare drum no matter what you do, just as an Aseel cock crows at a deeper pitch than a Sebright.
When the element of emotion is added, the motivation for making a specific sound influences the sound’s structure. Here’s an example: One of my playmates when I was a kid was a neighbor named Ricky. When his mother wanted him home, she’d stand in her doorway and call out “RI-cky,” in a motherly tone of voice. Five minutes later, if he didn’t show up, she’d call again.
She didn’t wait five minutes before calling a third time, now in a shrill tone: “Ri-CKY!” Whereupon Ricky would scuttle home, because the next call would be a staccato, “Ricky-Duckworth-you-come-home-right-now!” At that point you didn’t need to understand the words to know Ricky was in big trouble.
Similarly, a chick’s soft peeps tell you the bird is contented. If the peeps sound shrill, you know the chick is unhappy.
Emotion Reveals Motivation
The sound of most human words is arbitrary, except when words describe what something sounds like — onomatopoetic, like cluck or coo or cheep. Otherwise it’s a mere accident of birth whether we call that beautiful insect a butterfly (English) or la mariposa (Spanish).
So we humans must learn what words mean. But when we add the element of emotion, our speech follows the same rules chickens use, by which motivation influences a word’s structure — clear evidence of the common origin of chicken talk and human speech, and the reason we humans can easily interpret what chickens are saying.
This blog was written in collaboration with ornithologist Gene Morton, author of Animal Vocal Communication.