The Secret Language Of Cats. Susanne Schötz

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СКАЧАТЬ our basement with food, blankets and water. The next morning, I went to see whether Black-and-White and Graywhite had been to their new sanctuary and discovered their food, but when I went down to the basement, I found a surprise. A totally unfamiliar small gray tabby cat had made herself comfortable on the windowsill and stared at me, her big dark eyes filled with fear and curiosity.

      I did not know what to do—I had to get to work. Maybe the cat had just stopped by for a visit. But when I went back to the basement after work, she was still there. I was able to pet her cautiously, and when I did, I discovered a serious large wound on her right hind leg. The whole leg was one large open wound. The fur had been almost totally ripped away and hung on in strips. It was already infected and looked terrible. To the vet! We were lucky to get an appointment early the next morning. The treatment lasted the whole day. Luckily, nothing was broken. The wound could not be stitched; too much fur and skin were gone. One could only hope that the wound would heal itself.

      We called the police and put ads looking for the cat’s owner in the paper and on the web. Everyone who got in touch went away disappointed. She was not their cat. In the meanwhile, we had given her a name. “Vimsan,” Swedish for bum-wiggler, because her rear end shook with every step she took, a clear consequence of her injury.

      Vimsan is a great cat—but only when she wants to be. She likes to play and cavort with us, but she cannot stand other cats. She likes to lie on our laps and cuddle, but otherwise hates being touched. She never ever wants to be picked up, and if you do anyway, she will bite lickety-split. But we still love this small striped gray-brown cat with the big scar on her leg and the too-short tail (she must have lost the tip in an earlier life).

       Four Become Five

      Vimsan often got into fights with other cats in our neighborhood. Black-and-White and Graywhite were indubitably among her enemies. When a young black tomcat with white paws and a white chest and belly showed up in our garden sometime in the winter, there was a fight almost every day. The young unneutered tomcat was extremely interested in Vimsan, but she did not want anything to do with him. There were fights high up in our apple tree, in our hedge and on our lawn. One day, the newcomer showed up with large wounds on his cheeks that just would not heal. He did not seem to have a home. We took him to the vet, cleaned and treated his wounds for several weeks, and looked for his owner. But nobody responded to our ads.

      The cat had become a good friend by then. He liked being with us while we worked in the garden or drank a coffee outside. We called him “Kompis” (Swedish for buddy or friend). And—you guessed it—we kept him. By now his wounds have healed and he has gotten a bit fat, but we love him just the way he is.

      Although he is our biggest cat, he has the smallest baby voice, it is even higher in pitch (melody) than the voice of our smallest, Vimsan.

      With that, it was decided: our family of five cats is complete with Kompis.

       CATS AND PHONETICS

      I am a phonetician by profession. I do research and teach at Lund University, in the very south of Sweden. Phonetics, my area of expertise, studies the sounds of human speech. As part of my research, I ask the following questions: How are these sounds produced, and how do they differ from each other (acoustically or auditorily)? I analyze the spectral characteristics (how the sound energy is spread across all frequencies) as well as the prosody (the melody, rhythm and dynamics of speech) in different words, utterances, dialects and languages. Among the hazards of my professions is a tendency to listen more to how something is said than what is being said.

      That is how it is with human speech and, as a cat fancier, it is no surprise that I began to listen to the phonetic properties of cat sounds as well. I started to ask myself what vowels were present in a meow. How does the pitch or melody change in the meows of my cats when they are asking me to play with them? And does the melody change in different situations or contexts, such as when they want to be let out into the garden or when they have hidden inside a closet and I accidentally closed the door?

      I still remember how I first noticed that my cats meowed differently when they were asking for food at home and when they were in the carrier and on the way to the vet. The melody as well as the vowel sounds of the meows sounded completely different. How could that be? Can it be coincidence? Do cats vary their meows instinctively, or do they learn the different nuances of vowels and melodies and how to use them in different contexts or situations? Could it even be that cats have learned to deliberately use different sounds and their variations in different situations?

      At that moment, my love of cats and science first came together. I started to record the various sounds that Donna, Rocky and Turbo made and analyzed them using phonetic methods—the same ones I normally use when I investigate human speech. Using my “phonetic ears” I listened closely to the sounds, tried to transcribe them using the symbols of the phonetic alphabet and investigated their different phonetic characteristics. In which high and low frequencies could my cats vary their meows? Which cat sounds are voiced and which are voiceless? Which vowels and consonants can cats produce, and how do they move their mouths—their tongues, lips and jaws—when they produce the different sounds?

      I read a lot about the different cat sounds, primarily in scientific books and articles. I found that there was remarkably little phonetic research on cat sounds. I took it upon myself to change this.

       CAT SOUNDS: AN OVERVIEW

      The scientific investigation of cat sounds is, in itself, nothing new. Charles Darwin wrote about cat sounds. He recognized six or seven different vocalization (or sound) types and was especially interested in purring because it is produced during both inhalation and exhalation.

      Marvin R. Clark (1895/2016) goes a step further in his book Pussy and Her Language. He refers to the work of the French natural scientist Alphonse Leon Grimaldi, who had ascertained that the vowels a, e, i, o and u can be used to form almost every word in the language of cats and that the liquid consonants l and r occur in the majority of all utterances. Other consonants, he argued, occur only rarely. If we follow Grimaldi, the language of cats consists of about 600 basic “words,” which are used to form all other “words.” We also learn from Clark’s book that the language of cats bears a strong resemblance to Chinese in that both have only a few words, but those words change meaning depending on pronunciation— especially in relation to the tone (intonation, melody) of the language. Both languages are therefore very pleasant to the ear, almost like music. Modern scientists do not take Grimaldi’s book all that seriously, though some of his descriptions can be accurate.

      Mildred Moelk published the first (as far as I know) phonetic study of cat sounds in 1944. She listened very carefully to her own cats and organized their sounds into sixteen phonetic patterns divided into three main categories. She also used a phonetic alphabet to transcribe or write down the different sounds; purring, for example, is given as [ˈhrn-rhn-ˈhrn-rhn…] and meowing becomes [ˈmiɑou:ʔ]. Today, cat sounds are still often divided into the three main classes suggested by Moelk.

       1. Sounds produced with a closed mouth, the murmurs (purring, trilling)

       2. Sounds produced when the mouth is first opened and then gradually closed (meowing, howling, yowling)

       3. Sounds produced with a mouth held tensely open in the same position (growling, snarling, hissing, spitting, chattering, chirping)

      Moelk operated on the assumption that the various acoustic patterns in the sounds signaled different messages, for example acknowledgment, bewilderment, request, greeting, demand and complaint.

      Jennifer Brown and her colleagues Buchwald, Johnson СКАЧАТЬ