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More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#101

Post by frosted-flakes »

yellow_lead wrote: post #84
Teracotage wrote: post #33

In Syria, whistling has been essential to those hobbyists who raise birds, to communicate and command them "“Hemeimati (Pigeon fancier)” If you have ever visited Damascus and its countryside, Homs, Aleppo or any other Syrian city, you should have noticed swarms of pigeons hovering over the city, swaying right and left, up and down responding to the signs of a person standing on a roof. This person would be carrying a…

Cool video in that article: https://youtu.be/MaIKWtSCx0M?t=110 It doesn't show them doing what you mentioned, but they all go into their coop on command

Here's a guy who trained his chickens to come on command, using a bell: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbaY5mbhQZE

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#102

Post by tingletech »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #101
yellow_lead wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool video in that article: https://youtu.be/MaIKWtSCx0M?t=110 It doesn't show them doing what you mentioned, but they all go into their coop on command

Here's a guy who trained his chickens to come on command, using a bell: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YbaY5mbhQZE

the fish in my great grandmother's coy pond were trained to come when you clapped. It was considered rude to call them and not give them any food.

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#103

Post by jobigoud »

question000 wrote: post #11

I honestly would love if we stopped trying to square the circle with speech recognition and just built a phonetic signal based system for computer interaction. Words are overrated, I'd rather whistle at my speakers like I'm R2D2.

I was also thinking about this, in the context of silent speech, trying to recognize phonemes directly from muscle activation on the throat. Instead of trying to pattern match an existing language, which is too complicatex/ambiguous, we should construct a language dedicated to that, that is easy to recognize from the EMG. Then we can have the software 'translate' the message.

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#104

Post by citruscomputing »

nate00 wrote: post #83
peter303 wrote: post #74

The version I read on Pocket had several audio clips of whistled English. It is understandable. Once you learn the conventions for representing fricatives as whistles, you can pretty much whistle English.

That sounds so interesting! Do you still have a link to it? I wasn't able to find any examples by Googling.

https://soundcloud.com/knowable-magazine/sets/whistle-langua...

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#105

Post by bradrn »

bitdivision wrote: post #42
bradrn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure there are: [s͎˩˧˥˧˨˦˥˧˥˧˨˦] and so on. But really I see no reason why musical notation wouldn’t be sufficient. (I should note that’s not [s]; it’s [s͎] with an arrow below it. It’s hard to tell the difference with the font on my screen.)

That's interesting thanks! There's not much on wikipedia [0] about that character, but it does appear to be for whistled speech! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%CD%8E

You’re welcome! I first saw it on the Wikipedia page for Shona, which has several whistled consonants within its inventory.

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#106

Post by bradrn »

0xdeadb00f wrote: post #94

Slightly related: I've always loved the clicking sounds used in a number of (South) African languages. Xhosa for example has 6 different clicking sounds [0]. It's so surprising to me that English and most other languages don't make use of any clicking sounds whatsoever. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language

Yep, this is a really interesting question. I had a long discussion about this on another forum, and it turns out linguists really have no idea why clicks are restricted to African languages. The best we could come up with was that click sounds are just too difficult to evolve — there’s no easy way for some random English sound (for instance) to turn into a click. On the other hand, if a neighbouring language has click sounds, that can start to provide almost a ‘pathway’ for clicks to come into the language.

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#107

Post by bradrn »

gfaure wrote: post #97
0xdeadb00f wrote: post #94

Slightly related: I've always loved the clicking sounds used in a number of (South) African languages. Xhosa for example has 6 different clicking sounds [0]. It's so surprising to me that English and most other languages don't make use of any clicking sounds whatsoever. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language

English does use clicks, as paralinguistic sounds. The first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant has a couple of examples.

But English clicks are not phonemic consonants in the same way they are in Xhosa and Khoekhoe — that is, clicks are not part of words in English, whereas they are in those languages. (Even the language name Xhosa begins with a click.)

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#108

Post by anthk »

France_is_bacon wrote: post #92
nathias wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't speak to someone with a whistle, you communicated to something with a whistle without using a whistle (or other human language).

You say potato, I say potato. You say tomato, I say tomato. If you never heard it, this is where it came from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sbncTUZiGk or this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRrw2hDjnl4 actually.

No.

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#109

Post by France_is_bacon »

wheels wrote: post #99
France_is_bacon wrote: post #57

Here in the USA, just this past weekend, I spoke in a whistle to someone. They had their driver's side car door open, and they were in a parking space in a parking lot. Someone drove up and wanted to park in the open space next to them. The person with the open car door didn't see them. I whistled. They looked at me and I pointed with my chin to the waiting car. The person waved at me and closed her door. Maybe my wh…

That's very, very different from whistled languages. In Silbo Gomero, one of the main examples here, there's a whistled equivalent to each sound in Spanish. The difference is approximately as far as waving-hands-to-indicate-something vs. full-on sign language (though sign-languages are genuinely separate languages, whereas this is just a different register of an existing language). As it were, I've actually spent aro…

You're just too strict for me. Spank me.

Re: More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

#110

Post by girvo »

dylan604 wrote: post #82
France_is_bacon wrote: post #57

Here in the USA, just this past weekend, I spoke in a whistle to someone. They had their driver's side car door open, and they were in a parking space in a parking lot. Someone drove up and wanted to park in the open space next to them. The person with the open car door didn't see them. I whistled. They looked at me and I pointed with my chin to the waiting car. The person waved at me and closed her door. Maybe my wh…

As someone that's been a soccer referee, you can tell a lot by the ref's whistle. Just a short hit is usual for an obvious start or restart. For a serious foul, it's a long hard hit. Just from the whistle, you can tell the ref has intentions of issuing a card. My favorites are when the player refuses to acknowledge the ref to "come get your card" whistle calls when the ref is also "I'm not chasing you down". There's…

I used to referee rugby union, at a quite high level, and we had whole classes where we were taught the "language" of our whistle :)
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