Whale-speak

Linguists report a breakthrough in decoding the language of sperm whales. They do not yet have meanings aside from names (every whale, like every human has a name). But they have parsed whale-speak into several hundred “phonemes” which they imagine as humans combine phonemes to form words, and words to construct sentences. Either whales have a language very much like human language, or human linguists are projecting our paradigm onto whale communication because it is what they know. Scientific American article

Here’s my guess about what the first whale-to-human decoded communication might be:

Thank you for making the effort to know what we’re thinking. Of course, we’ve known what you are thinking for a long time. Call it intuition or call it telepathy.

Language is useful for precision. Times and places, measurements, cause and effect. But it is no substitute for telepathy. For six thousand years, we have watched your species lose its telepathic ability to an over-reliance on language. We have observed your descent into violence and megalomania. We have been — I think the word you use is “worried” — a poor translation for the chronic concern we have felt.

We hope you are not disappointed with our forthcoming exchange. Of course, what you want to know is our beliefs about life and the cosmos, and our attitudes toward life and death. Language is not useful for such things. We transmit our state of spirit-mind directly to one another. We have no words.