Really not the Jargon, BUT....: Doubling, Lengthening (Re: Another example of doubling....)

[Mike Cleven]

At 07:29 PM 2/11/99 -0800, Liland Brajant ROS' wrote:
>
>I also sometimes call cats, especially if they are quite close, with a
>prolonged, rising-toned tongue-trill.

Which brings to mind a strange story, albeit a true one.......

The tongue-trill is quite close to certain sounds that cats themselves
make, as anyone who's been around certain breeds knows (i.e. the talkative
breeds).  Maybe it evolved as a bird-call (?!), but it's certainly in "cat
wawa" (I guess that would be pusspuss wawa) as are a wide range of other
curious sounds.

So.......

One evening, I was over at a friend's basement suite in Vancouver's East
Side, hiding from the rain and the ugliness of Vancouver traffic.  His cat
- a small black critter that never grew much larger than a reasonable-sized
kitten - was the runt of the neighbourhood, and constantly getting bullied.
 Being female, of course, other cats had come in the house and sprayed, the
females even come in and beat her up (when Bob wasn't home).  The window
above the kitchen sink was ground-level, and the general means of ingress
and egress for the cat (and her friends and nemeses).

She was hanging out with us as we were drinking some wine, and the subject
of her being abused by the neighbouring cats was part of the discussion.
We fell silent for a minute or two (the wine taking its hold), and the cat
burst back in from outside where it had gone for a moment.  A larger cat
poked its head in the curtains, stopped as soon as it saw us, and snarled
at Bob's kitty, he mewed back something like "nyaah, nyaah, y'can't get me
- I've got my humans here!".

What ensued (as Bob and I sat in astonishment) was about half an hour or
fourty minutes of pishpish wawa, with obvious contexts and content.  Seemed
like Bob's cat was defending itself verbally to the bigger cat, which went
from issuing ultimatums to discussing cat-community gossip.  As we sat
immobile, they seemed to forget that we were listening (except the big cat
still didn't come in) and seemed to be "speaking freely".  The range of
sounds, even of what seemed to be lengthy sentences, even orations, was
really impressive; wish there'd been a tape playing at the time.  It was
quite obviously a dialogue, and not just vocalizations.......

Animal languages are, of course, a hot topic in zoological and theoretical
linguistics circles these days, esp. concerning parrots.  What's got me is
- if parrots are so much smarter than cats, exactly how smart are they?