Name the Animal with a Man like Tongue? Answered

Anthropoglot

An animal (such as a parrot) with tongue similar to humans allowing human-like speech.

Q. Animal with a Man like Tongue

Answer Hint: __N__H__O__O__L__T

Anthropoglot, a word that is usually defined as “an animal with a tongue resembling that of a human”. Puzzlingly, the illustrative example always given is a parrot. Now, parrots’ mouths do contain something that looks like a rather wizened and discoloured human tongue, but many mammals do a better job in that regard.

What’s different about a parrot’s tongue is that it uses it to produce speech, in much the same way a human does. (See, for example, the splendidly named paper Vocal-Tract Filtering by Lingual Articulation in a Parrot, in Current Biology of September 7, 2004.) So I do believe that the real and original nineteenth-century meaning of this rare word was “an animal capable of speaking like a human”.

An anthropoglot is an animal with a tongue like a human, meaning it can mimic human speech (one dictionary I looked at said it was an ‘animal with a tongue like that of man’ which sounds gross, and a bit sexist). So, that’s parrots and that dog off the telly who can say ‘sausages’.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun An animal which has a tongue resembling that of man, as the parrot.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun (Zoöl.) An animal which has a tongue resembling that of man, as the parrot.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun an animal with tongue similar to humans allowing human-like speech