Re: Musical conlangs

En réponse à Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>:

> I remember - dimly to be sure - reading a while back about the use of
> different-pitched drums in Africa to "speak", the change in pitches and
> the
> general rhythm following speech rhythms so people could reportedly hold
> a
> "conversation" via the drums.
>
> I wish I knew just where I read that, though.
>
Indeed the so-called "drum-languages" of Africa use different-pitched drums to
send messages kilometers away. The people who use them have tone languages, and
basically what the drummer does is sending only the pitches and syllable
lengths of a sentence. But since tones alone are not enough to disambiguate all
possible meanings, they resort to stock phrases and proverbs to describe what
in speech would be a single word, all that in order to diminish ambiguity. For
simple conversations it is a very effective medium (I wonder if it would be
possible to adapt it for English. French's stress patterns are too monotonous
to allow it, but English?).

See for instance:
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~alistair/research/dphil/jckh/altcomm.html

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.