Whistle Speech
Most Mazatec communities employ forms of whistle speech, in which linguistic utterances are produced by whistling the tonal contours of words and phrases. Mazatec languages lend themselves very well to becoming whistling languages because of the high functional load of tone in Mazatec grammar and semantics. Whistling is extremely common among young men who often have complex conversations conducted entirely through whistling. Women on the other hand do not generally use whistle speech, just as older males use it more rarely than younger ones. Small boys learn to whistle simultaneously with learning to talk. Whistling is generally used for communicating over a distance, to attract the attention of passersby or to avoid interfering with ongoing spoken conversations, but even economic transactions can be conducted entirely through whistling. Since whistle speech does not encode information about vowel or consonants but only tone, it is often ambiguous with several possible meanings; however since most whistling treats a limited number of topics it is normally unproblematic to disambiguate meaning through context.
Read more about this topic: Mazatecan Languages
Famous quotes containing the words whistle and/or speech:
“The bud of the apple is desire, the down-falling gold,
The catbird’s gobble in the morning half-awake
These are real only if I make them so. Whistle
For me, grow green for me and, as you whistle and grow green,
Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin
And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)