We all know that parrots and mockingbirds are masters of mimicking us when we talk, but it seems that we’re only just discovering larger animals can do the same.
It comes as creepy footage has re-emerged online of an Asian elephant saying ‘hello’ in his native tongue – Korean, not elephantish or whatever you’d call it.
Let’s talk about the brilliant beast called Koshik, who resides in Everland Zoo in Yongin – a city roughly an hour and a half commute south of the South Korean capital Seoul.
Koshik, who turns 35 this year, left scientists shocked as he became the first of his kind to be able to copy human speech.
He’s another unlikely animal to take a decent stab at human words after footage resurfaced of orcas doing the same thing, with terrifying results.
Using his trunk, Koshik places it in his mouth and uses the vibrations to accurately mimic a human voice – and it isn’t just ‘hello’ that he can say.
His Korean vocabulary is broad, for an elephant at least, as he’s conquered at least five words – they are ‘no’, ‘sit down’, ‘good’ and ‘lie down’, as well as ‘hello’.
After seeing the Indian elephant ‘talk’ in a video uploaded to YouTube, Dr Angela Stoeger, from the University of Vienna in Austria, reached out to the zoo enquiring about carrying a research on Koshik.
After she was given the green light hers and her teams work got underway.
“We asked native Korean speakers, who had never experienced the elephant before, to write down what they understood when we played back recordings from Koshik,” she told the BBC.
“We found a high agreement of the overall meaning.”
“Human speech has two important aspects, one is pitch (how high or low a sound is) and one is timbre (the musical quality of a voice), and Koshik is matching both of these aspects,” Dr Stoeger continued.
“He always puts his trunk tip into his mouth and then modulates the oral chamber.
“We don’t have X-rays, so we don’t really know what is going on inside his mouth, but he’s invented a new way way of sound production to match his vocalisations with his human companions.”
So it’s fair to say Koshik is really bossing it – but the Austrian doctor wasn’t done hailing him just yet!
She added: “If you consider the huge size of the elephant and the long vocal tract and other anatomic difference – for example he has a trunk instead of lips… and a huge larynx – and he is really matching the voice pitch of his trainers, this is really remarkable.”
