There's a furry little mammal called the Hirax, native to the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East,

that looks something like a combination rabbit and guinea pig, but is actually more closely related to elephants.

They are 10 out of 10 on the cuteness scale.

But what may be most memorable about hyraxes is all the noise they make. While we currently don't

know what, if anything, they mean, scientists have discovered something absolutely stunning

about those barks and screams. They have syntax. From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris

Boyd. Hirax syntax amounts to a set of rules for the order

of sounds, just as syntax dictates word order in human languages. But hyraxes don't arrive in the

world knowing how that works. As do human babies, they learn it from those around them. So if

hyraxes have syntax, could hyraxes have languages?

And what does that say about the capacity of other animals to talk in some way?

Eric Kirshenbaum is a zoologist who spent four years studying hyraxes as part of his research interest into animals' capacity for something like language.

He is a lecturer and fellow at Gerton College at the University of Cambridge,

and he's written a book called Why Animals Talk, the new science of animal communication.

Eric, welcome to think.

Hi there. Nice to be here.

You note that if we want to understand what animals are saying, we should maybe start by looking at how they relate to one another.

Do highly social animals seem to communicate more than those that are more solitary?

Yes, I think that's absolutely true.

And it's not surprising because although we as humans think of language as something very natural, something very useful, something we use all the time, it's actually something that's evolved for a purpose.

Communication of all sorts evolves for a purpose. And the purpose of communication, needless to say, is exchanging information

with other individuals. So it's really the nature of interactions between the different

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