
The Whistled Language of Northern Turkey - shiplet
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-whistled-language-of-northern-turkey
======
cjhveal
It seems obvious, even to those unfamiliar with phonetics, how tonal languages
are transformed into whistled languages by whistling the underlying tone
contours.

However, even languages with no phonemic tonality are able to be whistled
because we distinguish vowels almost entirely by the volume of the harmonic
frequencies produced by changing the shape of the resonating chamber of the
mouth. Musicians often call this "color" or "timbre". Jaw aperture roughly
corresponds to the volume of the first formant produced, and how the tongue is
raised or retracted within the mouth roughly corresponds to the second formant
produced.

Even the surrounding consonants leave their mark on the surrounding vowels.
For instance, sounds produced with the lips, (like English "b"/"p"), tend to
lower the formants of the surrounding vowels. Consonants produced with the
back of the tongue against the soft palate (c.f. English "k"/"g") tend to
"pinch" the second and third formants of the preceding vowel closer together.
Collapsing and merging consonant clusters while bringing the tonal variation
into the fundamental pitch is one of the most common theories of tonogenesis,
or how tonality evolves in languages.

Whistled languages based on non-tonal languages tend to whistle the patterns
of the second formant, which captures subtle information about what the vowel
and surrounding consonants would have been in the underlying spoken language.

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shiplet
Three reasons I love this:

1.) It's Aristotelian mimesis made manifest AND practical. It does diverge
from his linguistic ideas about syllable construction, etc., but that's fine
because it's not about him.

2.) It's about communicating, clearly, across huge distances chock-full of
interference. If you watch the video at the end of the article, the two guys
are probably a quarter mile apart and having a perfect conversation: in my
experience, not possible with just the human voice. I have a hard enough time
talking to someone across the table in a noisy restaurant - and I've (at least
socially) attributed that to the fact that my voice resonates at about the
same frequency as background chatter. I either have to seriously amp up my
volume, or raise the pitch of my voice, neither of which are comfortable for
extended periods.

3.) It's weird and it's beautiful and it's man-made. It's like realizing the
power of Lisp macros when you've only ever written JavaScript, or learning FP
when you've only ever worked with OOP. It breaks down ideas of what a "proper"
language is, and reconstructs them in a way that conveys an entirely different
ideological purpose.

I love it.

~~~
ALLTaken
Since Turkish is a highly agglutinative language, copulas are rendered as
suffixes, albeit with a few exceptions See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_copula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_copula)
and
[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Turkish/Present_Tense](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Turkish/Present_Tense)

@shiplet I know turkish, but I was still amazed that I mostly understood what
they whistled after reading your post (not sure why). I heard out some
customizations to spoken turkish that I think are there to allow for a better
distinction between similar sounding words. But I suspect that these are
domain specific and have to be learned in order to fully speak and understand
the whistled language.

Whistle-speaking in english is much harder, because you don't have enough
syllables. One can't easily concatenate "meaning" to a word like in Turkish.
That's why whistled-english words would sounds too similar and not harmonic
enough to be distinguished.

For example try to say this loud: "I won't go to the school today." Now speak
it in your mind, but with syllables. And now try to whistle that sentence (as
if you were speaking, but without actually speaking). There are only single-
syllable words and these sound all too similar when whistled.

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canjobear
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language)
for more instances of this phenomenon and a good discussion. My understanding
is that whistled languages often arise on top of tonal languages where tones
carry a lot of information. The Turkish example is interesting since Turkish
is not a tonal language but they still figured out how to do it.

~~~
shiplet
The tonal aspect makes a lot of sense, and in the case of Turks applying it to
a non-tonal language, I'd love to learn how they did it. Maybe it'd be
possible to apply to English?

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eveningcoffee
It sounds similar to Chinese.

~~~
devmach
As a native Turkish speaker: It actually sounds.. Turkish... They replaced
clear words with their corresponding tones. I think with a little training, a
native speaker can understand what he hear. It feels like listening a karaoke
version of a well known song.

~~~
lsb
In James Gleick's The Information, the first chapter is about a West African
culture, turning phonemes, stressed and unstressed, into drumbeats, for
conveyance over longer distances than one could shout, and needing to
compensate for the information-loss of sound into drum pulse by using longer
and longer "phrases".

