On a small Greek island, practitioners of an ancient whistling language
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They made a big deal about the whistling language and even had several live demonstrations. The two I remember are:
1. They ordered drinks at a cafe, then one of the group added on an order for orange juice -- the owner brought out the complete order.
2. The host asked them to whistle some specific things to some people across a valley; when the host went over to question them about the things, they answered correctly.
But my impression of it on Swedish TV was completely different from yours.
Firstly when interviewing the whistlers you could tell that it wasn't a language. It was just a set of sounds they had taught each other for specific situations.
When they were standing 20 metres from each other and tried to say things like "take off your hat" or "pick up the shovel" they had to give visual cues after trying the whistle a few times and failing to get the message across.
So sure, they whistle across the valley, but just to get a very limited message across that concerns them and their daily work perhaps. Not to have conversations.
The swedish TV host tried to learn the language and also went to some bar to order. Maybe they do that as a standing gag there, with the ordering. But he didn't get it right until he played some school children whistling on his cellphone.
That's interesting -- the one situation I saw had the whistler specifically mention that they were Japanese. In hindsight, the listeners clearly could have figured that out from the camera crew and language...
The whistling is indeed word for word. In my village some of the over 40's still exchange whistles from time to time depending on their situation.
I am not the best at whistling, as I didn't have the nerve to learn it all, nor I communicated like that to my friends and family. Although I am able to understand some of it and get a few words depending on how clear the other person is when he is whistling. Some of the older folks whistle their words very fast, and the ones that can understand them are people that have been trained to listen to those whistles for most of their lives.
On the articles whistling on soundcloud I was able to understand 5/6 tracks. The alphabet both in the slow motion and in the fast version is pretty clear.
Disclaimer: I grew up partly in a village in Greece, where they do keep that form of communication. I recently returned to Greece and am permanently residing in that village. I am not fluent in the whistling language, but I know for a fact that there is an alphabet and proper words coming out of whistling.
Maybe those old folks grew up together so they have their own whistling dialect.
The report on Swedish TV did show school children learning the whistling language so I'd assume they'd all understand eachother. But even so, I just don't think whistling leaves room for enough nuances to carry on a normal conversation.
It seems to be more suited for commands or exclamations like "bring me a beer" or "rain coming".
> But even so, I just don't think rapidly moving air over skin to induce vibration leaves room for enough nuances to carry on a normal conversation.
Ultimately, whistling is just the emission of sound. Given that we get by with throat-sounds, I'd bet that whistling language could be sufficiently developed to be capable of expressing complex thought. Both speech and whistling are just moving air.
On a side note, whistling language and cetacean whistling are nice examples of convergent evolution, cetaceans also use whistles for long distance communication, and use other sounds like burst pulses for short distance comunication with animals nearby. Sociality is another common component.
Another amazing thing about whistled languages is that they are still closely linked to their language of origin. If the language is tonal, the whistle will follow their language melodic structure. If the language is not tonal , whistles will try to mimic vowel resonance and convey consonants via how they whistle, i.e abrupt changes.
You could also call it a register (as the article does) and group it with shouting and whispering, I don't completely agree with that assertion but either way it's most certainly not a language on its own, it's a way of speaking Greek.
> written language which is an encoding of language sounds
That is absolutely false. Written language is _not_ an encoding of language sounds. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is, but there's a pretty long way from written language to IPA. Written language is a beast of its own and it's lagging way behind spoken language, but it's not an encoding of language sounds. It's a way of encoding language, but phonetics and phonology has nothing to do with it.
> Sfyria, […] is not technically a language; linguists refer to it as a speech registrar, like shouting or whispering.
I've never heard the term registrar (in the linguistic sense), and Google doesn't find anything relevant either, so I wonder if this is the correct one.
eg. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XzzABgAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=... specifically calls whistled speech a speech register.
Similarly, this just seems to be taking the cadence of speech and whistling it. I listened to the proverb whistle, and it "clearly" says "η ζωή είναι πολύ ωραία όταν μπορείς να είσαι αυτάρκης", which I definitely wouldn't have gotten if I didn't know what they wanted to say, but which is different enough from the English translation to show that I could actually derive information from it.
Overall, I don't think you can actually hold a conversation in it, it's basically like taking speech and encoding it in low-bitrate audio. Lots of nuance gets lost and you're left with the low-entropy signals, which are hard to disambiguate unless you know what they're saying.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170731-greeces-disappearin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language#List_of_whis...