get a load of this guys and gals ... wht do yas think Amusement park boasts talking elephant : Art & Entertainment : Home Amusement park boasts talking elephant Experts examining prolix pachyderm A 16-year-old elephant living at Everland, South Korea’s largest amusement park, has begun talking. Kim Jong-gap, 39, a breeder at Everland’s zoo, had a strange experience two years ago. He heard a human voice coming from the elephant enclosure. Kim at first thought he was mistaken. But the sound continued, too vivid to not be real. When he approached the cage, to his astonishment he found that the voice was coming from an elephant named Kosik. A male Asiatic elephant, Kosik can pronounce eight words: "good," "lie down," "no," "sit down," "not yet," "foot," "turn," and "turn around," in a voice nearly human. It has been thought impossible for elephants to talk because they lack an organ similar to the human tongue. However, an elephant in Kenya was confirmed to be able to imitate the sound of a truck. Zoologists have since accepted that some elephants can mimic what they hear. But Kosik is the world’s first elephant that can imitate a human voice. "In general, elephants communicate with each other in very low, deep sounds, which humans cannot readily hear. But unlike these sounds, it seems Koshik can make his voice audible through a system of air control, acheived by placing his trunk into his mouth," according to an Everland official. In March, Everland Zoo asked Bae Myeong-jin, a professor of sonic engineering at Soongsil University, to scientifically analyze Kosik’s voice. Professor Bae recently released his results, which conformed that the elephant’s vocalizations nearly match the voice of his breeder, who has worked with Kosik for 10 years. The zoo said that it could be made a laughingstock if it claimed outright that it has a talking elephant, which is why it is continuing to conduct scientific studies on the phenomenon. "In order to find out if Kosik knows the meaning of the words he is saying," a zoo official said, "we will continue to perform research after forming a team of experts including zoologists and veterinarians."
I've heard about Kosik many times. There was a documentary about the intelligence of animals, I don't know if the footage is accurate but they played words that Kosik apprently said, the words are extremly muffled though barely making them out like ghost audio, Its hard to explain. Elephants are no doubt intelligent animals though, at Toledo zoo Ohio an elepahnt named Donna took a tes where she had to place her trunk on either pole meaning yes or no, and the detections were through vibrating sounds in the ground. Elephants can detect these sounds apparently based on the tes that Donna did that she got 90% correct. Ever since quizzes have been given to elephants through vibration in the ground and even thorough verbal as well, this is different from the coxing commands in Asian Countries. Though all in all it is kinda hard to believe that an elephant can actually talk, then again birds can, and they aren't even loosely similiar to us. An elephant vocal box could have something similiar to a birds in which it can be picked up in, ?
Hear it from the elephant's mouth This story has just reached BBC radio. I thought that the sounds made by the elephant matched his keeper's words quite accurately, but I don't speak Korean so I can't really judge. A video and recordings at BBC News - Elephant mimics Korean with help of his trunk There are some other videos around and there is an interesting summary of the first studies on him at Koshik the elephant can speak Korean | Running Ponies, Scientific American Blog Network Alan
