{"id":607,"date":"2008-02-12T19:19:10","date_gmt":"2008-02-12T18:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/12\/birdsong-and-language\/"},"modified":"2008-02-12T19:19:10","modified_gmt":"2008-02-12T18:19:10","slug":"birdsong-and-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=607","title":{"rendered":"Birdsong and language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the Indian state of Kerala, the Brahmin priests apparently chant their prayers in something that sounds utterly unlike language but quite like birdsong, according to a post on <a href=\"http:\/\/ltsblogs.org.uk\/connected\/2008\/02\/02\/the-longest-oral-tradition\/\">this blog<\/a>. The prayers have been passed on from generation to generation for thousands of years and might even pre-date language, according to this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/story\/0,,2184234,00.html\">article<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Birdsong is perhaps the nearest thing to human language and music in non-human creatures. Maybe language and\/or music first developed partly as a result of our distant ancestors imitating the birds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Indian state of Kerala, the Brahmin priests apparently chant their prayers in something that sounds utterly unlike language but quite like birdsong, according to a post on this blog. The prayers have been passed on from generation to generation for thousands of years and might even pre-date language, according to this article. Birdsong [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}