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Re: Musical conlangs

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Thursday, October 17, 2002, 8:04
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.