# On the intriguing beauty of whistled languages

I have always found intriguing how humans have found literally thousands of
different systems to communicate their thoughts. We call those systems
"languages", and when we talk about them we probably think of the fact that each
language uses a different word to denote the same object or concept. But there
is one aspect that (almost!) all the languages on Earth have in common: they are
"spoken", which means that they consist of combinations of sounds made by
modulating the flow of air through the mouth, and by movements of our tongue and
lips. This is how we get vowels and consonants: leave your mouth wide open and
you get an "a", stretch your lips in a smile and you get an "e", blow into your
closed mouth for half a second and then release the air by suddenly opening your
lips, and you get a "p". And so on.

But "speaking" is not the only possible manifestation of a human language. The
strangest kind of languages I have bumped into are the so-called "whistled
languages" [1], which are exactly what they sound like: languages consisting of
combinations of tones that are whistled by the "speaker". You might be surprised
to discover that there are literally hundreds of known whistled languages. One
example is "Silbo Gomero" [2] (literally, "Gomeran whistle"), a whistled
language used by the inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canary Islands. Most of the
people in La Gomera can still speak the language today, thanks to a program to
revitalise its usage, but all of the inhabitants understand it.  Linguists
believe that whistled languages are connected to the necessity to communicate
over long distances and across impervious terrains, and in fact La Gomera is
known for its deep valleys and canyons. And this same pattern seems to be shared
by most of the whistled languages still in use today, from Asia to central
America: the terrain of a region forced its inhabitants to whistle their
thoughts, in order to be heard more easily and more efficiently.

Some recent studies have even shown that the speakers of "whistled" languages
actually process whistles using the same regions of the brain that other humans
use to process words in the usual "spoken" languages.

But why am I telling you about "whistled" languages? Well, because I recently
started learning an artificial language that resembles "whistled" languages a
lot. I am talking about Morse code [3]. Yes, the one used back in the days for
telegraphy, where each letter of the alphabet consists of a short series of dots
and dashes, or dits and dahs, and so on. It turns out Morse code is far from
extinct, as it is currently in use by radio amateurs around the globe to
communicate in the so-called "Continuous Wave" mode, normally abbreviated "CW"
[4]. Basically, you send your message as a concatenation of long and short tones
or pulses, which are then decoded by the person at the other end of the contact.

If you ever try to learn Morse code (it is totally doable in a few weeks, or
even less) you will be told that you must not think of each letter as consisting
of a certain sequence of dots and dashes, but rather as a "sound", a new way to
"pronounce" and "perceive" the same letter you are used to reading and writing
[5]. The aim is to force your brain to think of "A" whenever you hear the sound
"di-daa" and to think of "R" whenever you hear the sound "di-daah-dit", without
having to double-translate the sound to dot-and-dashes and then back to the
images of letters that our brain constructs and keeps.

And how different is this from teaching your brain that a certain whistle, with
a certain tone, must be associated with "A", while another whistle, with another
tone, shall be associated to "R"?

I really think learning CW is indeed not too different from learning a whistled
language. You forget quite soon about dots and dashes, and only hear "the sound
of T", and then start putting together individual sounds into words, to
recognise "the sound of 'THE'".  Obviously, this process requires a certain
amount of time and effort, but it is not much different from learning any other
language. The words are still in English, or Spanish, but they are articulated
in a totally different way.

Coincidentally, CW (i.e., Morse code over radio) is often one of the few
transmission modes that can successfully "get through" long distances or bad
propagation conditions, when all the other voice modes cannot.  Exactly as the
whistling patterns of Silbo Gomero get through the valleys of La Gomera, while
most of your shouting would not be intelligible at all. Obviously, there are
several more efficient transmission modes available nowadays, mostly digital
ones, which do not require much human intervention, if any at all. But I like to
think that the deep reason why Morse code is still in wide use in ham radio is
that hams like to "whistle" their thoughts, and find pleasure in putting some
concrete effort to "copy" the whistled thoughts of their correspondents.  Like
the Gomerean have been doing for hundreds of years.

## References

[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Whistled language
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Silbo Gomero
[3] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Morse code
[4] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Continuous wave
[5] http://www.tasrt.ca/bookdown.html

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