The name of the elephant is Koshik ans so far the elephant speaks 6 words :
annyong (“hello”), aniya (“no”), anja (“sit down”), and choah (“good”), they dnt mention what the other 2 words are.
I am not surprised at the choice of words that they elephant has learnt as am sure these are words used frequently by the trainers or care takers…
“So the team played 47 recordings of the imitations to native Korean speakers who’d never heard the elephant before, and instructed them to simply write down whatever they heard. “They knew they were listening to an elephant, but they didn’t know what they were supposed to hear,” explained Stoeger, whose study appeared recently in the journal Current Biology.”
“To ensure these weren’t variants of natural elephant calls, the researchers also compared Koshik’s words to typical Asian elephant sounds, and found that they were completely different. However, they were dead ringers for the intonations and frequency of the commands of his trainers, whom the researchers believe are the subjects of Koshik’s imitations.”
Source : Elephant “Speaks” Like a Human
