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 long stick in his hand with a black or white piece of cloth on its tip, waving it, as if telling the flying swarm to fly higher or fly down towards him, often with a “whistle” https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2016/08/mysterious-w...
Anyone learn to whistle, in any way or form, later in life? I've always wanted to but never been able to. I've tried a few types of whistles. The closest I've gotten is some quasi duck calls using my hands and whistling with the help of an acorn.
I actually did, from a Reddit thread that guided me through the process step by step. I’m having trouble finding the exact link at the moment, but it starts with slowly breathing out the letter “Q”.
It’s not a loud, booming sound or anything, but I went from blowing soundless air for 20-odd years to actually whistling.
If you can't whistle, there's a way to use an acorn or a bottle cap to do so. I can whistle, but not that loud, and often use a bottle cap to whistle loudly at venues.
https://youtu.be/tydJLavu8Fc
I can whistle 3 ways: the typical pucker you lips whistle, use your fingers whistle, and a third that I’ve only seen my brother and I do. For the third curl your upper lip towards your nose, bring the bottom lip up flat, move your tongue all the back and down, and try and direct the air into the split part of your inner upper lip. It’s a very loud piercing whistle that can be heard much farther than the typical finger whistle.
Don't forget that you have to repeatedly do it so much you feel like you're going to faint from lack of oxygen! Remember that when learning to whistle as a youngin :)
I cannot. I did practice on my commute for two years and still cannot whistle. People tried to teach me and that failed. From time to time a get a note but not very loud and I cannot make it last.
I was never able to whistle well until I learned to do it while inhaling which came out much louder and helped me learn a better mouth shape for whistling while exhaling.
Like everything else, practice. When I learned it, first few days no sound would come out. Then the occasional "accidental" half-whistle. Now I can whistle songs.
Here's how I whistle. Suck in your cheeks, like you're puckering for a kiss. Make sure the lips are a tad moist. Blow through the lip hole. It helps if you keep a tightness, or ambiture (sp?) which is how a horns or winds player would describe lip/cheek tightness. Inside, the tongue is resting against front teeth and a very light stream of abdominal air is supplying the whistle. Any luck?
> It helps if you keep a tightness, or ambiture (sp?) which is how a horns or winds player would describe lip/cheek tightness.
Yea I went from being a mediocre whistler to crazy good at it when I played wind instrument seriously for a decade. But that was decades ago so now I'm back to mediocrity.
I lost that ability in my 30s thanks to Bell's Palsy. I mostly recovered, but the nerves on the right side didn't completely recover enough for me to seal my lips well enough to do it anymore. After I wasted $35 on a chanter, my wife and neighbors were relieved to find out that I won't ever be able to play the bagpipes, either.
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.
This is extremely cool!!! Also I find surprising that, as a Spanish speaker with no whistle-spanish training, I was able to understand most of the whistles.
Interesting! Spanish isn’t a tonal language, so how do you ‘translate’ the words into whistles? (And do you think you could do it without subtitles?)
(I should note I haven’t actually managed to watch the video yet, because my audio seems to be broken. Perhaps it would be obvious if only I could hear the whistles…)
To me it literally just sounded like Spanish, but in a high pitched whistle. Some of the sounds don't reproduce 1:1 in a whistle, but the whistling is adapted to still sound similar and comprehensible. I thought I would be able to do this myself by whistling out Spanish words, but it appears that it takes some practice to make all of the correct sounds. I tried in English, Spanish and Hungarian and I'm only able to produce musical notes, not distinguishable letters.
Spanish speaker here. Also surprised that I understand the whistles, in particular the second video.
Does it happen to you that when you think of a word in English, even if you don't vocalize, some of your vocal cords become tense or move? Well, these whistles feel the same.
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
You're probably right. I've just started watching The Wire and in season 2, the loading dock workers whistle to each other to let them know cops are around.
If you find the notion of whistled languages fascinating, as do I, there is an app on the Play Store for Whistled Turkish: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ec.self.whistl... . Last time whistled languages came up, someone else here dropped a link to this app.
That is a regional peculiarity specific to the northernmost parts of Sweden, and, I guess, the northernmost Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. Note: Sweden is very unevenly populated; the overwhelming majority of the population lives in the south half of the country, where also its three major cities are located. The northern parts of Sweden mostly consist of vast stretches of wilderness, forests, mountains, and people who talk funny.
I think it's a little more common purely for fun, almost like slang, among some Swedish-speaking Finns in Helsinki (where she's from)."Ja" is still more common, but it's fun to inhale sometimes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingressive_sound gives some details about that. I knew that some Irish English speakers inhale when saying "yes", but it seems fairly widespread across Europe...
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.
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.
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.)
Not the same as emulating vowels and consonants, but my dad used to whistle by with two fingers on his lips and making the loudest whistle. Either to get the dog's attention or my attention as a child.
It was a rural area and he used it to communicate (come back home, usually) and as a child I could tell by the sound if it was a normal 'come home' or one where I was in trouble 'come home right now!'
I now have a child of my own and kind of wish I could whistle like that, though the utility would be much less living in a city with endless forms of electronic communication.
Apparently that sort of whistling is also used for communication, at least if Wikipedia is to be believed [0] (or if I could track down the source, which I don’t feel like doing just right now):
> Sochiapam Chinantec has three different words for whistle-speech: sie³ for whistling with the tongue against the alveolar ridge, jui̵³² for bilabial whistling, and juo² for finger-in-the-mouth whistling. These are used for communication over varying distances.
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.
Elsewhere in the thread, someone used 'high low high' to mean the whistle you use to get someone's attention, and 'low high low' meaning "I'm over here".
I use whistling daily. I discovered my dog responds best to whistling, whenever he hears my whistle, he knows it's me and comes running. Now, I use that to my partner ironically, if I don't want to shout and hurt the vocal cords, just whistle and she knows her presence is requested.
If you want to see some fun dog training with whistles search for videos of sheep dogs or waterfowl retrievers.
My cousin trained a couple of black labs to be waterfowl retrievers. I saw him in training throw out a training "duck" and hold the labs at this side with just a look. Then he whistled and they took off. About 5 feet from the "duck" he whistled again and they stopped. The dogs wanted to get to the "duck" so bad they looked like they were vibrating. He kept them there for a good 30 seconds before whistling again to signal for them to retrieve it. It was pretty cool to watch.
Not quite as cool but we have a "shock" collar on our cat to keep him off the neighbor's porch furniture. Our neighbor is very, very allergic to cats. It is activated by a 10' diameter transmitter placed under their furniture and beeps like crazy for 10 seconds before it does anything - a couple of beeps sets my cat running.
For some reason (maybe after seeing my cousin do it?) I started doing a specific whistle pattern when the cat comes in the house with the collar on. That will now stop the cat dead in his tracks and he will wait for me to take it off. The reverse is true also - if he sneaks out of the house without it on I can do the same whistle and he will stop and wait for me to put it on him.
I whistle at my SO all the time in the grocery store etc. Nobody else does it so if we're a few aisles apart usually i can just do the whistle and then we find eachother. Beats yelling like a moron
My mom had a special whistle she'd use to call us when it was time to come back to her at the store or wherever. Now I'm wondering how she got started with that.
This made me realize that my dad has a specific whistle that he would use throughout my childhood and even today as an adult, to get the attention of my brother and myself if we were out somewhere. Like a "Hey, we're leaving. Let's go"
My parents had a 'if you hear this whistle, come here', which, depending on the sequence of tones, meant anything from '5 minute heads up before it is time to go' to 'literally drop what you are doing and run to this position'.
It wasn't disrespectful at all. It was a great way to communicate over wider distances than is possible with regular voice, and in retrospect it was impressive how little translation it took for all of us kids to understand which meaning was being conveyed.
My dad used to whistle at us all the time as children and he probably still does when I see him. I probably picked it up from him.
I whistled to an ex SO and they considered it disrespectful. I'm not sure I yet understand why it's disrespectful, not that I consider either opinion more or less correct. I just don't really understand that opinion.
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 whistle wasn't a regularly used and defined "word" per se, but it was a clear and complete conversation.
Now that I think about it, I have different whistles depending on the situation. A high-pitched short whistle is usually "watch out". A short high-low-high whistle is usually reserved for friends to say "Hey, dude, look over here, I have something to say to you" usually followed by a non-verbal sign language, like pointing somewhere - "go over here" or "check that out". A low-high-low is for friends to more get their attention and let them know "I'm over here." The super loud whistle with your fingers in your mouth is "F-ing awesome" when you're in a crowd and the music group is playing a great song. It also has other uses. But mostly when there's a big crowd or the person you want to talk to is a long distance away. A bunch of high pitched whistles in a row usually means "danger/watch out."
There are other whistles, too. Just giving a few to illustrate how whistles are used right here in the good ole USA for communication purposes.
These are used infrequently, but I find most people understand what I'm whistling about and the different meanings of each whistle.
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 around a year on the small island of La Gomera, where Silbo Gomero comes from. All kids have it in school as an attempt to preserve it.
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 entire conversations conveyed by hitting that little whistle.
This happens exactly the same in volleyball. There are the almost perfunctory whistles for all the regular things like out of bounds. Then there are the stronger whistles for when someone makes a net fault and it interrupts the game flow. The quick double whistle to get the attention of the players. Then there is the boldness and the number of whistles which signal the seriousness of the infraction. Or the “come on, quit stalling” whistle.
It is such an awesome compact language.
I’m still sad I never learned to use my fingers to whistle.
Probably they worded it this way (assuming good intentions, of course) because whistle-based language forms were created as a tool to combat communication hurdles in a challenging terrain. With the development of long-range communication, I would dare to say it is amazing that there are still practitioners of whistled speech.
I remember walking in Andalusia an coming across a shepherd sitting on a grass bank, holding his head in his hands, talking to his sheep. It seemed I had stepped back in time and felt it was a very special moment.
Looking back I saw he was actually on his mobile phone.
Because languages gradually lose phoenetic features over time. Phonetic diversity is a primary method for determining the age of a language. Hawaiian is a recent language with just 8 consonants and !Kung is ancient with over 50 consonants. The same phenomenon occurs with DNA diversity. Here is an article with explanation:
> Because languages gradually lose phoenetic features over time
I don't think this is accurate. While it certainly does happen, new phonemic distinctions can certainly arise as languages change.
The article you link to does not support the idea either, in fact it explicitly contradicts it:
"Moreover, there is no bias towards decreasing the size of phonemic inventory over time as human populations moved out of Africa, as phonemes may be added as well as eliminated."
They call whistling languages "vestiges," a "protolanguage," and baselessly speculate that they originate from less-evolved primates. The writer's tone keeps reverting to subtly dismissive and colonialist.
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, not forerunners of them, Meyer says."
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.
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
I think the point they are trying to make is that proto-language spoken by our ancestors would likely have had fewer components and reduced sophistication, as does whistling.
So identifying the minimum requirements for comprehensible, yet sophisticated, communication by sound would possibly shed light on what paleo-speech was like...
In NYC construction workers are having their whistling curbed because most of it was the of sexist kind or at least a sufficient number of recipients didn’t want them.
"Despite their interest to both linguists and casual observers, whistled languages are disappearing rapidly all over the world, and some — such as the whistled form of the Tepehua language in Mexico — have already vanished. Modernization is largely to blame, says Meyer, who points to roads as the biggest factor. “That’s why you still find whistled speech only in places that are very, very remote, that have had less contact with modernity, less access to roads,” he says."
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!
Learning a lot of complicated things is good for your brain, like programming in various languages or playing various musical instruments. It's fun too.
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.
This person would be carrying a long stick in his hand with a black or white piece of cloth on its tip, waving it, as if telling the flying swarm to fly higher or fly down towards him, often with a “whistle” https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2016/08/mysterious-w...