71–80 of 119 posts
> "still speak in whistles" "still"? Why is having more degrees of expressiveness in a vocal language considered an anachronism?
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> Modernization is largely to blame I'd replace "blame" with "thank": the simpler languages can become, and the fewer of them in daily use we can get to globally, the better for the entire species. I'd love an expressive and terse baseline human language. No problem if people still use other languages too, for cultural or historical reasons.
more language diversity is more fun. common languages are boring. folks should learn more languages, rather than less. its good for your brain too. here's to another babel moment!
But having a multilingual globe comes at a massive, immeasurable cost.
One of the greatest forces to improve economic opportunity and equality in the history of the world would be if everybody suddenly agreed on one simple, terse, expressive human language and switched to it, in all contexts except home life and shared spiritual or community services.
No more IELTS tests, no more spelling bees, no more "why is 'wherefore art thou' not about Romeo's location?", no more notarized translation costs everywhere in the world... everybody gets equal access to all media created in all places (although of course there'll still be place-specific references in that media), etc
If you were designing an ideal human world, the last thing you'd want to do is build a Tower of Babel on it.
Not sure if it counts as a whistle but I always find it amusing how my wife, who's a Swedish speaking Finn, inhales sharply to say "yes".
I was just thinking about the 2-3 whistle communications common in the U.S. and I have no idea how one goes about transcribing them in text. How would one even generate a language to show whistle modes, you would almost have to use sheets of music :)
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The article actually says the exact opposite. Can you read? Here's the quote: "That doesn’t mean that modern whistled speech is a vestigial remnant of those protolanguages, Meyer cautions. If whistling preceded voiced speech, those earliest whistles wouldn’t have needed to encode sounds produced by the vocal cords. But today’s whistled languages do, which means they arose later, as add-ons to conventional languages,…
Yes, clearly they recognized the need to backpedal somewhat from their long string of intimations that these languages have savage and primal qualities. Did you think that passage was a total non-sequitur? Are they cautioning you from believing something you would have no reason to believe? Or do you think they were aware they had unduly created that impression.
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Yes, clearly they recognized the need to backpedal somewhat from their long string of intimations that these languages have savage and primal qualities. Did you think that passage was a total non-sequitur? Are they cautioning you from believing something you would have no reason to believe? Or do you think they were aware they had unduly created that impression.
On the contrary, they stress that using whistling to discover fundamentals of communication using sound does not imply that whistling was the original form of communication by sound.
I suppose if I say "we shouldn't assume people who comment on HN posts are sad, lonely, and grumpy" I'm not being offensive or disrespectful. After all, I never said outright that anyone was any of those things. On the contrary, it actually says the exact opposite
It's a trick of language called insinuation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, they stress that using whistling to discover fundamentals of communication using sound does not imply that whistling was the original form of communication by sound.
They could have achieved the same effect by never suggesting that whistling languages are primal or antiquated in the first place. I suppose if I say "we shouldn't assume people who comment on HN posts are sad, lonely, and grumpy" I'm not being offensive or disrespectful. After all, I never said outright that anyone was any of those things. On the contrary, it actually says the exact opposite It's a trick of language…
So identifying the minimum requirements for comprehensible, yet sophisticated, communication by sound would possibly shed light on what paleo-speech was like...
Its quite common in some hoods in South Africa to use whistling to communicate if the police or enemy gang are coming. Im pretty sure this isnt unique to South Africa though