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by shiplet
3912 days ago
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Three reasons I love this: 1.) It's Aristotelian mimesis made manifest AND practical. It does diverge from his linguistic ideas about syllable construction, etc., but that's fine because it's not about him. 2.) It's about communicating, clearly, across huge distances chock-full of interference. If you watch the video at the end of the article, the two guys are probably a quarter mile apart and having a perfect conversation: in my experience, not possible with just the human voice. I have a hard enough time talking to someone across the table in a noisy restaurant - and I've (at least socially) attributed that to the fact that my voice resonates at about the same frequency as background chatter. I either have to seriously amp up my volume, or raise the pitch of my voice, neither of which are comfortable for extended periods. 3.) It's weird and it's beautiful and it's man-made. It's like realizing the power of Lisp macros when you've only ever written JavaScript, or learning FP when you've only ever worked with OOP. It breaks down ideas of what a "proper" language is, and reconstructs them in a way that conveys an entirely different ideological purpose. I love it. |
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@shiplet I know turkish, but I was still amazed that I mostly understood what they whistled after reading your post (not sure why). I heard out some customizations to spoken turkish that I think are there to allow for a better distinction between similar sounding words. But I suspect that these are domain specific and have to be learned in order to fully speak and understand the whistled language.
Whistle-speaking in english is much harder, because you don't have enough syllables. One can't easily concatenate "meaning" to a word like in Turkish. That's why whistled-english words would sounds too similar and not harmonic enough to be distinguished.
For example try to say this loud: "I won't go to the school today." Now speak it in your mind, but with syllables. And now try to whistle that sentence (as if you were speaking, but without actually speaking). There are only single-syllable words and these sound all too similar when whistled.