ThatOwlWoman (10-13-2021)
IIf you are ever lucky enough to visit the foothills of the Himalayas, you may hear a remarkable duet ringing through the forest. To the untrained ear, it might sound like musicians warming up a strange instrument. In reality, the enchanting melody is the sound of two lovers talking in a secret, whistled language.
Joining just a handful of other communities, the Hmong people can speak in whistles. The sounds normally allow farmers to chat across their fields and hunters to call to each in their forest. But their language is perhaps most beautifully expressed during a now rarely-performed act of courtship, when boys wander through the nearby villages at nightfall, whistling their favourite poems between the houses. If a girl responds, the couple then start a flirty dialogue.
The couple may create their own personal code, adding nonsense syllables to confound eavesdroppers
It’s not just the enticing melodies that make it the perfect language of love. Compared with spoken conversations, it is hard to discern the identity of the couple from their whistles – offering some anonymity to the public exchange. The couple may even create their own personal code, adding nonsense syllables to confound eavesdroppers – a bit like the Pig Latin used by English schoolchildren to fool their parents. “It gives them some intimacy,” says Julien Meyer, at the University of Grenoble, France, who visited the region in the early 2000s.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...ak-in-whistles
ThatOwlWoman (10-13-2021)
tomimn2233
1 year ago
Tourist: the birds are lively this morning
Local guide: oh that's the baker arguing with his wife again.
ThatOwlWoman (10-13-2021)
No phones needed.
In the Greek island village of Antio, home to the world's most endangered language, aging residents communicate across hillsides through whistles, a specific system of communication believed to date back to Ancient Greece. Special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports on how they hope to save their language from extinction and what it has in common with Twitter.
AProudLefty (10-13-2021)
Those whistling languages are vital to save especially when SHTF.
One of the reasons I created this thread was because we were talking about Indigenous Day.
It has many uses. Especially for the military. Nobody knows who's who's and what they are communicating to each other, that is if they even know they're humans.
ThatOwlWoman (10-13-2021)
If they whistled "Chalupa Supreme" from Taco Bell, I'd be a running. Meximelts too.
AProudLefty (10-13-2021)
They're all going out of there way just to make me scratch my head, I think.
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Samuel Johnson, 1775
Religion....is the opiate of the people. Karl Marx, 1848
Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose. Kris Kristofferson, 1969
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