BY KEHINDE OLALEYE

Visitors to a zoo in South Korea now have the opportunity not only to observe the various creatures housed within the confines of the facility, but may also actually be able to converse with one of the animals residing therein. An elephant by the name of Koshik, which for the past nineteen years has resided at South Korea’s Everland Zoo, is said to be able to Koshik speak five words in Korean, which include  annyong (hello), anja (sit down), aniya (no), nuo ( lie down), and noah (good). Due to this peculiar knack for imitating human speech patters, Koshik had attracted tourists from all over the world, and has become something of a celebrity within the zoo in which he is housed.

Scientists say that when Koshik makes humans noises, he places his trunk in his mouth so as to ensure proper pronunciation, in a manner quite similar to how humans use their tongues and lips. To demonstrate that the noises being made by the pachyderm were more than unintelligible gibberish, and could actually be considered to be genuine Korean, scientists staged multiple tests, one set of which involved inviting Korean native-speakers to listen to the vocalizations of the creature, and to record the what words they believed they heard. Other tests involved the use of complex computational analysis of the auditory patterns of Koshik’s “words”. In the case of both experiments, Koshik’s noises were recognized as being distinctly Korean, with the computational analysis revealing the sound patterns of Koshik’s noises to be identical to those made by his human counterparts. The scientists emphasize the point, however, that though the elephant is capable of imitating a number of words in a recognizably Korean dialogue in Korean, it is not likely that he actually understands what he is saying, and thus cannot be described as “speaking” by scientific Standards.

Scientists hypothesize that Koshik’s unusual abilities are the product of his upbringing, in which the elephant was housed primarily in the contact of humans, in the form of his handlers and zoo visitors, rather than other members of his species, as since being transferred to Everland Zoo as a juvenile,  Koshik has been housed in an enclosure in all to himself. Zoologists state that elephants are one of the few species in the world that are capable of mimicking sounds they hear, and that Koshik’s unusual speech patterns can likely be attributed to his attempts to mimic the noises made by his handlers. Other, similar cases of mimicry carried out by elephants include a number of African elephants that reputedly learned to imitate the engine sounds of passing vehicles, and a male elephant living in a zoo in Kazakhstan, that has been said to be able to say words in both Russian and Kazakh, though neither case has yet been formally investigated by scientists.