Funny, I just watched an episode of the Outer Limits ("Tourist Attraction") in which a biologist proposed communicating with a strange sea creature by decoding its vocalizations and synthesizing messages in its language, the same way people talked to dolphins. I didn't realize the part about dolphins was fiction, not science, and my reaction was, "Of course! If we know what the sounds mean, then obviously we can synthesize our own messages. Huh, if people have been doing it since the sixties, I wonder why I've never read about it...."
Now I'm wondering why it has taken us so long to do something that science fiction predicted fifty years ago and which wasn't blocked by any technological limitations.
[John Lilly] studied other large-brained mammals and in the late 1950s he established a centre devoted to fostering human-dolphin communication: the Communication Research Institute on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. In the early 1960s, Lilly and co-workers published several papers reporting that dolphins could mimic human speech patterns.[7][8] Subsequent investigations of dolphin cognition have generally, however, found it difficult to replicate his results. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly
Interesting guy but with a tendency to... go off at the deep end.
Now I'm wondering why it has taken us so long to do something that science fiction predicted fifty years ago and which wasn't blocked by any technological limitations.