Silbo

Whistle
1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3241128.stm


Check this out. :sunglasses:

2

That is indeed cool. :slight_smile:

PhilO

3

That is fascinating stuff, Stacey. I looked around and actually found a small soundclip of it. Check it out. :slight_smile:

http://www.agulo.net/silbo/silbo1.htm

4

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~alistair/research/dphil/jckh/altcomm.html explains:

"The Silbo works by whistling whilst articulating as normally as possible as in speech. Due to the nature of the Spanish dialect found on La Gomera, the resulting pitch contour is sufficiently recognisable for non-native Spanish speakers to pick up the Silbo within a matter of months. As the whistling on La Gomera preserves the structure of the spoken dialect, it is powerful enough to allow whistlers to converse about any subject. "

The English portion at the bottom of http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/Membre.asp?Action=Edit&Proprietaire=Julien%20MEYERF says:

"Apart from the articulated vocalic language which is our classical mode of communication, there has been found, that some populations used, in many parts of the world and as a complement, a second system of acoustic communication which is very different and that is called whistled language because it is based on the modulations of whistlings.
Its existence seems to be mainly associated to special conditions of human communication which concern:

  • Long distance speaking of people living in places where the relief creates a contrast between the approaching distance and the visual distance and therefore a certain isolement of the individuals
  • Local secrecy speaking towards the environment (for hunting) or the others (love messages, religious, political or social messages).

Nowadays, ten whistled languages have been partially described and studied in a linguistic approach:

  • The silbo of the small island of La Gomera.
  • The whistled language of Aas in the french Pyrenees
  • The Turkish whistled language of Kuskoy
  • The Greek whistled language
  • The whistled Kickapoo
  • The whistled Tepehua
  • The whistled Spanish in Tlaxcala
  • The Mazateco whistled language
  • The whisled language of the H’mongs
  • The whistled language of the Chepang of Nepal
    Many others have been describded either by travellers, oppressors, anthropologists or by ethnomusicologists.
    There are approximately 70 indexed whistled languages. They are dispatched all over the world and represent most of the branches of the linguistic families. The south of China, Papua New Guinea and the south of Mexico concentrate most of these languages. They are generally of everyday use. "

And:

“They are far more than a code or conventional signalisation system with stereotyped sentences; they work exactly like the vocalic speaking, with the vocabulary, the grammar and in many cases, with the phonology of the local speaking especially at the level of prosody.”

5

“They are far more than a code or conventional signalisation system with stereotyped sentences; they work exactly like the vocalic speaking, with the vocabulary, the grammar and in many cases, with the phonology of the local speaking especially at the level of prosody.”



Wow I guess we will have to watch what we are saying when were playing! :laughing: