Deeper Than Grammar: What Sperm Whale Vowels Tell Us About Translation

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Researchers went looking for the whale equivalent of letters. They found something closer to a vowel system.

That is the short version of a paper Gašper Beguš of UC Berkeley published this month in Proceedings B, the Royal Society’s flagship biology journal. And it reframes the story I told last year about AI teaching us to speak whale, with the whales speaking back. Since then, the story has gotten deeper, the math has gotten stranger, and a couple of claims from the original post need cleaning up.

Linguistics on Notes from the Rabbit Hole