We humans invented the English language, but we aren't the only species to propose new English words.

There are many examples of non-human animals who learned complex, human language-based forms of communication.

But my personal favorite is Alex, a parrot who learned how to speak English.

Not just parroting words, not just mimicking them, but learning the names for various objects and abstract concepts and referring to them in their proper context.

Sometimes, when Alex was introduced to an object he didn't know the word for,

he would invent a new compound word to describe it.

According to the economist, when he wanted to refer to an apple, he described it as a

binari, combining banana and cherry.

I assume he got cherry from the exterior color of an apple.

I'm not sure why he went with banana, maybe the interior color of an apple, I'm not sure why he went with banana,

maybe the interior color of the apple or the texture, or maybe the taste is similar to him,

or maybe it's just the concept of a large fruit. Who knows?

More intelligibly, when he first tried cake, he called it yummy bread, quite obviously combining the concept of yummy with the known texture of bread.

Some of you are going to be impressed by this, but others will see it as a caveman way of coming up with new name.

Alex didn't produce something new. He just squashed some

words together to apply to a new concept, right? But the truth is, a lot of the time when we humans

come up with a new word, we do the exact same thing. Duck bill, fish tail, jellyfish, leapfrog.

We combine words all the time, not just with animals, but this is species podcast, so those are my chosen examples.

We've got plenty of new words that are just made of other words.

These things are all over the English language.

And they're even more common in some other languages.

Today, we're going to talk about a creature who, as far as I can find, has the longest one-word

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