More than eighty cultures still speak in whistles

[Teracotage]

In Syria, whistling has been essential to those hobbyists who raise birds, to communicate and command them "“Hemeimati (Pigeon fancier)” If you have ever visited Damascus and its countryside, Homs, Aleppo or any other Syrian city, you should have noticed swarms of pigeons hovering over the city, swaying right and left, up and down responding to the signs of a person standing on a roof.

This person would be carrying a long stick in his hand with a black or white piece of cloth on its tip, waving it, as if telling the flying swarm to fly higher or fly down towards him, often with a “whistle” https://english.enabbaladi.net/archives/2016/08/mysterious-w...

[yellow_lead]

Cool video in that article: https://youtu.be/MaIKWtSCx0M?t=110

It doesn't show them doing what you mentioned, but they all go into their coop on command

[eatonphil]

There's an episode of one of my favorite anthropological tv series (In the Americas with David Yetman) on the Chinantecan people in Oaxaca, Mexico.

All of the episodes in this series are freely available online and on Amazon Prime.

https://intheamericas.org/works/210-whistles-in-the-mist-whi...

[AlwaysRock]

Anyone learn to whistle, in any way or form, later in life? I've always wanted to but never been able to. I've tried a few types of whistles. The closest I've gotten is some quasi duck calls using my hands and whistling with the help of an acorn.

[mypastself]

I actually did, from a Reddit thread that guided me through the process step by step. I’m having trouble finding the exact link at the moment, but it starts with slowly breathing out the letter “Q”.

It’s not a loud, booming sound or anything, but I went from blowing soundless air for 20-odd years to actually whistling.

[bynkman]

If you can't whistle, there's a way to use an acorn or a bottle cap to do so. I can whistle, but not that loud, and often use a bottle cap to whistle loudly at venues. https://youtu.be/tydJLavu8Fc

[jbluepolarbear]

I can whistle 3 ways: the typical pucker you lips whistle, use your fingers whistle, and a third that I’ve only seen my brother and I do. For the third curl your upper lip towards your nose, bring the bottom lip up flat, move your tongue all the back and down, and try and direct the air into the split part of your inner upper lip. It’s a very loud piercing whistle that can be heard much farther than the typical finger whistle.

[qnsi]

Curious, any reason why you think it might be different later in life?

I think it just takes a lot of practice and patience

[hycaria]

I cannot. I did practice on my commute for two years and still cannot whistle. People tried to teach me and that failed. From time to time a get a note but not very loud and I cannot make it last.

[indrax]

I was never able to whistle well until I learned to do it while inhaling which came out much louder and helped me learn a better mouth shape for whistling while exhaling.

[lexapro]

Like everything else, practice. When I learned it, first few days no sound would come out. Then the occasional "accidental" half-whistle. Now I can whistle songs.

[Dumblydorr]

Here's how I whistle. Suck in your cheeks, like you're puckering for a kiss. Make sure the lips are a tad moist. Blow through the lip hole. It helps if you keep a tightness, or ambiture (sp?) which is how a horns or winds player would describe lip/cheek tightness. Inside, the tongue is resting against front teeth and a very light stream of abdominal air is supplying the whistle. Any luck?

[onionisafruit]

I gradually lost the ability to whistle in my 30s. I never whistled very loud, but now it’s almost nothing.

[mr-wendel]

If you can find it, this documentary is a lot of fun:

  Pucker Up - The Fine Art of Whistling

There is a short, but great segment where this is demonstrated with two men whistling across mountain tops to communicate.

The film is filled with gems like one guy explaining as a compulsive whistler he got in trouble once for whistling a tune at a funeral.

[question000]

I honestly would love if we stopped trying to square the circle with speech recognition and just built a phonetic signal based system for computer interaction. Words are overrated, I'd rather whistle at my speakers like I'm R2D2.

[jobigoud]

I was also thinking about this, in the context of silent speech, trying to recognize phonemes directly from muscle activation on the throat. Instead of trying to pattern match an existing language, which is too complicatex/ambiguous, we should construct a language dedicated to that, that is easy to recognize from the EMG. Then we can have the software 'translate' the message.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I would also happily go for that, but I suspect that most people do not want to learn a new way to communicate just to talk to their computers.

[estebarb]

This is extremely cool!!! Also I find surprising that, as a Spanish speaker with no whistle-spanish training, I was able to understand most of the whistles.

[citrus1330]

I'm not even a native Spanish speaker and I was surprised to find that I could follow along pretty well using the subtitles.

[bradrn]

Interesting! Spanish isn’t a tonal language, so how do you ‘translate’ the words into whistles? (And do you think you could do it without subtitles?)

(I should note I haven’t actually managed to watch the video yet, because my audio seems to be broken. Perhaps it would be obvious if only I could hear the whistles…)

[yoloyoloyoloa]

Its quite common in some hoods in South Africa to use whistling to communicate if the police or enemy gang are coming. Im pretty sure this isnt unique to South Africa though

[allenu]

You're probably right. I've just started watching The Wire and in season 2, the loading dock workers whistle to each other to let them know cops are around.

[sweettea]

If you find the notion of whistled languages fascinating, as do I, there is an app on the Play Store for Whistled Turkish: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ec.self.whistl... . Last time whistled languages came up, someone else here dropped a link to this app.

[bitdivision]

Does anyone know if there are any examples of people whistling English? I'd find it fascinating to see if I could understand anything intuitively.

[exdsq]

Not sure if it counts as a whistle but I always find it amusing how my wife, who's a Swedish speaking Finn, inhales sharply to say "yes".

[teddyh]

That is a regional peculiarity specific to the northernmost parts of Sweden, and, I guess, the northernmost Swedish-speaking minority of Finland. Note: Sweden is very unevenly populated; the overwhelming majority of the population lives in the south half of the country, where also its three major cities are located. The northern parts of Sweden mostly consist of vast stretches of wilderness, forests, mountains, and people who talk funny.

[ithinkso]

If anyone is interested, [0] is what OP is talking about I think

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URgdIAz4QNg

[iandioch]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingressive_sound gives some details about that. I knew that some Irish English speakers inhale when saying "yes", but it seems fairly widespread across Europe...

[0xdeadb00f]

Slightly related: I've always loved the clicking sounds used in a number of (South) African languages. Xhosa for example has 6 different clicking sounds [0].

It's so surprising to me that English and most other languages don't make use of any clicking sounds whatsoever.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language

[bradrn]

Yep, this is a really interesting question. I had a long discussion about this on another forum, and it turns out linguists really have no idea why clicks are restricted to African languages. The best we could come up with was that click sounds are just too difficult to evolve — there’s no easy way for some random English sound (for instance) to turn into a click. On the other hand, if a neighbouring language has click sounds, that can start to provide almost a ‘pathway’ for clicks to come into the language.

[gfaure]

English does use clicks, as paralinguistic sounds. The first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant has a couple of examples.

[Igelau]

I love the lilt of that whistled buenoooo.

[strict9]

Not the same as emulating vowels and consonants, but my dad used to whistle by with two fingers on his lips and making the loudest whistle. Either to get the dog's attention or my attention as a child.

It was a rural area and he used it to communicate (come back home, usually) and as a child I could tell by the sound if it was a normal 'come home' or one where I was in trouble 'come home right now!'

I now have a child of my own and kind of wish I could whistle like that, though the utility would be much less living in a city with endless forms of electronic communication.

[bradrn]

Apparently that sort of whistling is also used for communication, at least if Wikipedia is to be believed [0] (or if I could track down the source, which I don’t feel like doing just right now):

> Sochiapam Chinantec has three different words for whistle-speech: sie³ for whistling with the tongue against the alveolar ridge, jui̵³² for bilabial whistling, and juo² for finger-in-the-mouth whistling. These are used for communication over varying distances.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Whistled_language...

[peter303]

The version I read on Pocket had several audio clips of whistled English. It is understandable. Once you learn the conventions for representing fricatives as whistles, you can pretty much whistle English.

[nate00]

That sounds so interesting!

Do you still have a link to it? I wasn't able to find any examples by Googling.

[mensetmanusman]

I was just thinking about the 2-3 whistle communications common in the U.S. and I have no idea how one goes about transcribing them in text.

How would one even generate a language to show whistle modes, you would almost have to use sheets of music :)

[etskinner]

Elsewhere in the thread, someone used 'high low high' to mean the whistle you use to get someone's attention, and 'low high low' meaning "I'm over here".

[coatdoor]

Eighty-one cultures if you include the Clangers' planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOK1YdWalOw

[dcolkitt]

The biggest downside I see is that it makes language much harder for young children. It’s rare to see someone under 6 be able to whistle.

[chansiky]

I’ve always wondered if two Morse code experts could talk to each other in beeps.

[JoeAltmaier]

Maybe an app that changes any spoken recording into a whistled one?