Re: Help? Asciification of musical language

Philippe Caquant said:
> There exists at least one musical natlang. It's a
> whistled one, and if I'm not mistaken, its is used on
> Canarias Islands. It nearly died, but I heard that by
> now, it's taught again in schools over there. The
> initial purpose was for the shepherds to communicate
> from hill to hill, I believe.
AFAIK, all the whistled languages *except* the one from the Canary Islands
are known to be derived forms of a local tone language. They're not
particularly uncommon in Mexico and Central/South America. I think we have
to assume that the Canary whistles were derived the same way, but that the
underlying language has since become extinct.

Some of the links on this page are broken, but it's a reasonable starting
point:

    http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/ask/whistle.html


-- Mark