Re: Silbo, a whistled language

I understand that African drum communication is based on imitating,
with drums, the tonal patterns of words.

Of course, that loses a lot of information, so in order to make up
for the lost information, you cannot use single words; each word is
replaced by a stock phrase, which is long enough that a series of
tones give one enough information to identify it.

The following is taken from:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/941118.html

"Many Bantu languages have drum equivalents, which work like Morse
code except that the fundamental message unit is words rather than
letters. Drum languages is based on the fact that a key determinant of
meaning in Bantu words is high versus low intonation. In the Bantu
language Kele, for example, liala means "fiance" if the syllables are
intoned low-high-low and "rubbish pit" if pronounced L-L-L. You will
appreciate therefore the importance of kepping Bantu intonations
straight.

     "Drum telegraphy is accomplished using tow-tone drums that
duplicate these tonal patterns. You are thinking you see a fatal flaw
in this approach: like there's only one three-syllable word in Kele
that's intoned L-H-L? Of course not. To provide unique tonal
combinations common words are replaced by stock phrases. Thus songe
(moon, H-H) is distinguished from kaka (fowl, also H-H) by stretching
out the former into songe ti tange la manga, "the moon looks down at
the earth," H-H-L-H-L-L-L-L, and the latter into kaka olongo la
boki-okio, "the fowl, the little one which says 'kiokio,'"
H-H-L-H-H-L-L-H-L-H-L.

     "This procedure gives drum messages a somewhat discursive
quality. The English sentence, "The missionary is coming upriver to
our village tomorrow. Bring water and firewood to his house," parses
out to the drummed equivalent of the foloowing: "White man spirit from
the forest/ of the leaf used for roofs/ comes upriver, comes upriver/
when tomorrow has risen/ on high in the sky/ to the town and the
village/ of us/ come, come, come/ bring water of lakaila vine/ bring
sticks of firewood/ to the house with shingles high above/ of the
white man spirit from the forest/ of the leaf used for roofs." Such a
message, combined wtih stop and start signals, repetition, parity
bits--wait a sec, wrong technology. Anyway, it might take 10 minutes
or more to pound this baby out, and the idea that Johnny Weissmuller
could get the drift in two seconds is strictly Hollywood. But
eventually the drift could be gotten, and in fairly precise terms. For
more, see J.F. Carrington's Talking Drums of Africa (1949), from which
all the above examples are drawn."


Ed Heil edheil@postmark.net
1999 World Champion
On the Edge Collectible Card Game

grandsir wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
>         Yesterday night I saw a programme on the RTBF about Silbo, a
whistled
> language used by the sheperds of the Gomera (in the Canary Islands) to
> to talk to others when they are at kilometers from one another (Silbo is
> still understandable at more than 2 kilometers far). The programme
> showed 2 scientists that were studying this language (dying because of
> the appearance of new technologies) who showed that the Silbo was not an
> unrelated language but a kind of whistled representation of the spoken
> language. Where the spoken language had lots of harmonics, the Silbo had
> only the fundamental curve of the speech plus a few harmonics, and so
> could be heard farther as the energy was put only in the fundamentals.
> It seems also that the Silbo originated in the tribes that were in the
> Canary Islands before the conquest by the Spaniards, and which were
> exterminated. But their whistled language remained and was adapted to
> Spanish.
>
>         Does anyone knows about Silbo or other whistled languages? Or about
> ther kinds of languages that are meant to be heard, but are not spoken
> (like Solresol, but here I'm talking about natural languages). Do you
> know other whistled languages that would not be related to spoken
> languages, unlike Silbo? And finally, did anyone of you make whistled
> conlangs or things like that?
>
> --
>         Christophe Grandsire
>
>         Philips Research Laboratories --  Building WB 145
>         Prof. Holstlaan 4
>         5656 AA Eindhoven
>         The Netherlands
>
>         Phone:  +31-40-27-45006
>         E-mail: grandsir@natlab.research.philips.com
>