Professor David Farrier

of the other living thing.

so differently yeah I mean there are indigenous some indigenous languages that have free word order and so they're the whole process of constructing a sentence involves taking account of the whole context in which you're in you know and it's been it's been kind of observed that you know that speakers of these languages will micro movements of their eye will track the whole configuration of people and place and so on before generating the sentence so it has this kind of

role to play in language and in shaping our sense of reality.

I mean, not in a kind of highly deterministic way, but there are kind of more limited expressions, a kind of weak linguistic determinism.

Creating fluidity of thought.

Yeah, exactly.

So why would that not be so much greater when it comes to the language or music?

And that's another really interesting question.

Is Wales some language or music or something that is...

a third category or poetry which is kind of in between exactly but how much greater is would it would it be the case that that that those forms of communication carry a sense of lived reality that we can't access you know um and and a translation engine would not give us that and that's why i think it's really important to ask these questions it's it's

It's extraordinary.

I think we could know anything of what another species is thinking or what matters to it.

But we also need to respect that sense of difference.

You know, kinship time does not presume or the notion of distributed personhood that many indigenous cultures have does not presume upon a kind of total understanding.

I think we have to respect that sense that our particular embodied forms of perception don't put us at the centre of the world, that again, we're just one node.

And so the caution that I bring to that whole question of interspecies communication is, are we simply putting ourselves at the centre there?

Or how might thinking with animal languages help us rather to cultivate that sense of kinship

kinship that respects difference that looks for affinity and connection but also recognizes that your experience of the world is fundamentally different to mine uh and that we're richer because of that it's different the other thing that i know i feel i have to say in the book as well of course is that the natural world is being very very articulate at the moment about what we're doing to it and we don't necessarily need to know what dolphins are saying we're not listening because most of the scientists when they're interviewed who are involved in this that you know people

The analysts say to them, you know, what's the question you most want to know?

What's the question that you would put to these creatures if you could talk to them?