An Asian elephant called Koshik has astounded scientists with his Korean language skills.
Researchers report that the mammal has learnt to imitate human speech and can say five words in Korean: hello, no, sit down, lie down and good.
The zoo animal places the tip of his trunk into his mouth to transform his natural low rumble into a convincing impression of a human voice.
The study is published in the journal Current Biology.
Koshik's vocal abilities mean that elephants now join a growing list of animals that are able to mimic man, from parrots and mynah birds to more unusual animals such as sea lions or the recently reported case of a human-sounding beluga whale.The study's lead author Dr Angela Stoeger, from the University of Vienna in Austria, said she first came across Koshik after videos of the elephant, who belongs to Everland Zoo in South Korea, were posted on YouTube.
After making contact with the zoo, she went to South Korea to record the animal so she could study its unusual vocal talent.
Dr Stoeger said: "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.
"We found a high agreement of the overall meaning."
Dr Stoeger and her colleagues found that Koshik's calls correlated to five Korean words: "annyeong" (hello); "anja" (sit down); "aniya" (no); "nuwo" (lie down) and "choah" (good).
"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 told the BBC.
Usually, elephants produce much deeper sounds, sometimes of such a low frequency that they are outside the range of human hearing, and these calls can boom many miles away.
While Koshik was capable of producing these more typical elephant noises, he needed the help of his trunk to morph these into something far more human. The researchers said this was behaviour they had not seen before.
Culled from BBC
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