Talk:Whistled language

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Carpathian whistled language[edit]

I my youth I've seen a TV program about a whistled language language in Carpathian Mountains. I am a bit feeble-minded now and don't remember, whether it was of Ukrainians or Hutsuls (Rusyns). Any info? Mikkalai 01:41, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It might be the one that I recall from my youth as well, and a bit of google-fu tells me it was Season 5, Episode 1 of 3-2-1 Contact airing on September 22, 1986. --206.74.156.164 (talk) 20:09, 6 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whistled Nahuatl?[edit]

I am skeptical about Nahuatl as a whistled language. The clear cases of Mexican whistled languages are related to tonal languages (often highly tonal, as Mazatec and Chinantec). I know that some bilinguals whistle non-tonal languages, including Spanish, and perhaps Nahuatl is so treated. In any case, this is not a prominent or well-known and widespread feature of Nahuatl. Anyone have documentation?

--Lavintzin 20:51, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

HILL, Kenneth. 1984. A Mexicano (Nahuatl) whistled language surrogate. Ms. Presentation to the Annual Congress of the American Anthropological Association, November, Denver. Tepehua and kickapoo which aren't tonal also has it according to Suaréz "Mesoamerican Indian languages" (1983). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Maunus (talk • contribs) 16:24, 29 December 2006

Article Structure?[edit]

Umm.... what exactly is going on with the introduction section? It's really long, confusing, refrenced wrong, and looks like it was plagiarized from another source. I had to read almost a page of text to get an idea of what exactly a Whistled Language is.... Ahudson 21:29, 1 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Development[edit]

This article doesn't really address the question of how whistled languages develop. I mean, do a bunch of people just suddenly say, "Hey, you know what? We should start whistling our speech today"? In the case of tonal languages it's not so hard to imagine, but otherwise... Or is it simply that not much is known about that? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.67.178.229 (talk) 01:04, 1 March 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Audio request[edit]

The idea of including a recording is a good one. I do not have a recording of my own, nor do I know of one in the public domain or under one of the approved licenses. There is an off-site link included in the article to an on-line recording, from Sochiapam Chinantec. --Lavintzin (talk) 22:52, 20 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The NPR interview on Yupik (off-site link) includes a good audio selection of 2 women whistling a conversation in Yupik. Also a selection in whistled English that exploits the vowel formants (since it is a non-tonal language.) 206.117.3.2 (talk) 00:28, 11 July 2009 (UTC)LMP-UCLA[reply]

Needs Fixing[edit]

The following sentence needs fixing:

Discussing Shona, describes “whistling,” which is not heard in Northern Ndebele, which instead has a unique trademark of click-sound consonants found in all Nguni languages.

Anyone who has any idea what this is supposed to mean, please fixit. Anonymous User, 79.180.107.176 (~~talk~~ Random IP, this link is uesless) 14:18, 28 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed Change to Text to fix tagged problem[edit]

The follow part of the text is tagged for "weasel words", presumably due to the author's back-and-forth statements.

"The expressivity of whistled speech is likely to be somewhat limited compared to spoken speech (although not inherently so), but such a conclusion should not be taken as absolute, as it depends heavily on various factors including the phonology of the language."

I have an idea of how this could be corrected, but am not a SME, and as such I want to float it here rather than edit the text directly. My proposed change is:

"The expressive power of a whistled language can vary greatly, in relation to both the spoken languages they are associated with and other whistled languages. This variation depends heavily on various factors, including the phonology of the language."

I realize that it is still indecisive, but I do think this version is less evasive. I am not sure if it is entirely accurate, however, and I gather from the evasiveness of the original that this is a topic of some controversy. I would appreciate some feedback on this from a few SMEs, and perhaps some discussion. Schol-R-LEA (talk) 13:40, 1 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]