There’s news this week about an orangutan that’s doing something very unusual: she is making noises that sound like human noises. Human speech patterns have been heard in monkeys before, but not in the so-called great apes, such as gorillas and orangutans, which typically grunt.
According to a study published this week in the scientific journal, Plos One, there’s a 50-year-old orangutan by the name of Tilda who lives at the Cologne zoo in Germany who has been clicking her tongue and smacking her lips and making noises that sound like letters.
Meantime, the latest version of Google Translate is supposed to be pretty spectacular, so we give it a try.
Related
- The orangutan that learned how to sound like a human — and blew scientists away
- One Orangutan Has Learned to Sound Just Like Us
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.