Summary Details
| Query: |
Whistling Language ( Canary Islands )
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| Author: | Bruce Downing | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Phonetics
Typology |
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| Summary: |
This summary is being forwarded, as with the original query, for my colleague, Judith Zaimont. --Bruce Downing ================== I have received a fair number of replies to my original query - many, many thanks. Some of the key references follow: (1) From Dr. Patricia Kilroe, Dept. of English, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana and Doreen Klassen, Indiana University East: The classic work on Mazateco whistle speech (Mexico) is George Cowan (1948): "Mazatco whistle speech" in Language 24:280-286. (2) From Elisabet Eir Cortes, an Icelander studying general linguistics and phonetics at the University of Stockholm: David Crystal (1987):"The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language" pp 400 which includes a transcription of a conversation in whistled speech between Mazateco speakers, members of a tribe that lives in and around the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. It also says that whistled speech is found in some Central and South American tribes, as well as in the occasional European community (e.g. in Turkey and the Canary Islands, based on Turkish and Spanish respectively). Furthermore, Crystal gives a short description on how the tunes are based on the patterns of tone and rhythm used in the spoken language. (3) From Dr. Steven Bird, Assoc Director, LDC; Adj Assoc Prof, CIS & Linguistics, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania: I seem to recall that John Laver's phonetics book [www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052145655X] has a discussion and references on a S American language where whole sentences can be communicated through whistling. Dr. Bird also wrote about his own fieldwork in Cameroon on some tone languages. A description of the fieldwork and lots of online recordings are available from [www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/fieldwork]. The site contains some carefully selected examples to illustrate the function and patterning of tone. These people have a 6-tone xylophone and some people can play the melody of their sentences on it. Traditionally, the chief had a special kind of 2-tone drum that could also be used to approximate the melodies of phrases. This could be used to send messages over long distances. In addition to the above citations two correspondents wrote about examples of whistled speech captured on film/video: >From Mel Sanchez, a student in Santa Ana, CA: In the Mexican movie with the famous singer and actor Pedro Infante entitled Tixoc, there is even an enactment of a Mexican trader and an Indian bargaining using whistling which in this case, accoring to the trader, is a lingua franca amongst the different Mexican languages. And finally from Dr. Ioana Chitoran, Linguistics & Cognitive Science, Dartmouth College, comes the information that Professor Annie Rialland from CNRS - Paris has been studying the whistling language of the Canaries, and is working on a documentary on it for French TV. It is my intent to use excerpts from actual whistling languages within a new musical work. It has been done effectively with whales' communications, so why not with another, intrinsically musical, form of human language? - --- Judith Lang Zaimont Professor of Composition School of Music - University of Minnesota WEBsite: http://209.46.94.163/jzaimont/ |
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| LL Issue: | 10.490 | |
| Date Posted: | 03-Apr-1999 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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