More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

Cool video in that article: https://youtu.be/MaIKWtSCx0M?t=110

It doesn't show them doing what you mentioned, but they all go into their coop on command

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.

Curious, any reason why you think it might be different later in life?

I think it just takes a lot of practice and patience

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?

I gradually lost the ability to whistle in my 30s. I never whistled very loud, but now it’s almost nothing.

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.

I would also happily go for that, but I suspect that most people do not want to learn a new way to communicate just to talk to their computers.

I'm not even a native Spanish speaker and I was surprised to find that I could follow along pretty well using the subtitles.

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…)

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.

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.

If anyone is interested, [0] is what OP is talking about I think

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URgdIAz4QNg

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...

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.

English does use clicks, as paralinguistic sounds. The first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant has a couple of examples.

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Whistled_language...

That sounds so interesting!

Do you still have a link to it? I wasn't able to find any examples by Googling.

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".

Sure there are: [s͎˩˧˥˧˨˦˥˧˥˧˨˦] and so on. But really I see no reason why musical notation wouldn’t be sufficient.

(I should note that’s not [s]; it’s [s͎] with an arrow below it. It’s hard to tell the difference with the font on my screen.)

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

>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.

Or you know... you COULD walk over to where she is.

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.

You didn't speak to someone with a whistle, you communicated to something with a whistle without using a whistle (or other human language).

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.

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:

https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/bad-linguistics/phonemi...

Your interpretation of the title is not supported by the article’s content. In fact, you’re agreeing with it.

Read the article and you’ll have a better idea how to preserve this form of communication.

Soon we will learn how to eradicate these so-called "whistlers".

If you read the article you would know.

"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."

For the same reason you don't see a lot of carrier pigeons anymore: it's been supplanted by something easier requiring less training.