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I"m not sure this is completely related, but every time I think about Chomsky and language and universal grammar, this comes to mind and still leaves me baffled

I"m not sure this is completely related, but every time I think about Chomsky and language and universal grammar, this comes to mind and still leaves me baffled and amazed. This is a short 5 minute video on whistling Turkish. In a village in Turkey, they uphold the tradition of communication by whistling phonemes. It is a direct mapping of Turkish to Whistling Turkish, where every phoneme in Turkish has a whistling equivalent. The difference is it uses pitch changes as phonemes. It blows my mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQf38Ybo1IY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQf38Ybo1IY

mbrock 11y ago
There's a similar tradition of whistled Spanish on the Canary Islands. It was used to talk across mountain valleys and stuff. UNESCO designated it as some kind of cultural heritage, I think.
- panglott 11y ago
  Whistled language isn't all that uncommon: it also happens in some Inuit languages and tonal languages. The even have different airstream mechanisms IIRC: Inuit whistled languages use palatal whistling, whereas on Silbo Gomero (pardon the spelling) you whistle into your hands. Check out the Piraha channls, where they also have "hum speech", "yell speech", "musical speech". http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003175.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003175.h...