whistle-talk (was: My new conlang)

Christophe Grandsire :
>> Aren't there a few languages (Amerindian, African?)
>> that use whistles as phonemes or phones?
Adam Walker wrote:
> The closest I've been able to find is a couple of "codes" one used
> for Spanish in the Canaries and one used by one of the Zapotec(???)
> langs in Mexico which are whistled versions of the standard tongue
> used for long distance communication.
I wonder ...

The African `talking' drums mimic the tones of spoken language, not the
phonemes; this requires elaborate periphrastic formulae to reduce
ambiguity.

Whistling has more symbols to choose from, but I can't imagine enough
distinguishable whistles to encode the entire Spanish phoneme set.

Does Canarian whistling also use a special vocabulary,
or am I merely insufficiently imaginative?


--
Anton Sherwood  --  http://www.ogre.nu/

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