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Science

Whistle While You Work 520

Posted by michael from the whistling-dixie dept.
kukickface writes "Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying? An ancient yet almost dead language called Silbo Gomero seems to be reality's closest equivalent. Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?"
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Whistle While You Work More

Whistle While You Work

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  • Imagine this other African language..... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by i_want_you_to_throw_ ( 559379 ) * on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:45PM (#7504466) Journal
    as loud as that. The Ju/'hoansi language [palomar.edu] made famous by Nixau in the Gods Must Be Crazy [imdb.com]. Could you imagine that kind of clicking radiating for two miles?

    It's so nice that they are keeping it going. It was Stalin that said "Take away their language, take away their souls" [geocities.com]. Imagine the good that the Navajo talkers did in WW II. Would've been a shame if we didn't have them. The war would have been WAY tougher.
    • I wonder if the intro to the Andy Griffeth Show is really a secret whistling message.

      Maybe when Opie is walking by with the fishing pole the whistling code is saying "drugs, sex and rock 'n roll".

    • Imagine the good that the Navajo talkers did in WW II. Would've been a shame if we didn't have them. The war would have been WAY tougher.

      Off-topic, I know, but you can actually get some of the code via declassified [navy.mil] documents...

      From that page...

      NAMES OF COUNTRIES
      AFRICA...ZHIN-NI................BLACKIES
      CHINA....CEH-YEHS-BESI..........BRAIDED HAIR
      ITALY....DOH-HA-CHI-YALI-TCHI...STUTTER
      JAPAN....BEH-NA-ALI-TSOSIE......SLANT EYE

      Amazing how Native Americans were so politically incorrect then, no? (-;

      • how is this for insightful:

        this has nothing to do with political correctness. i has to do with having to come up with new nouns given a set vocabulary. not having seen white people or other people of african descent, the most logical way of describing them was of course, with descriptive words.

        the english translations of the words don't quite do the descriptions justice either. for instance, zhini or ZHIN-NI as the navy spells it does describe the color black, but calling them "blackies" is subjective
        • the english translations of the words don't quite do the descriptions justice either. for instance, zhini or ZHIN-NI as the navy spells it does describe the color black, but calling them "blackies" is subjective from an english translator's perspective.

          Good point. I had mistakenly assumed that because the English translator was doing it for a military web page, he/she didn't have a need to sugar coat the translation. I didn't think that he/she would have his/her own "us vs. them" bias creep into the tra

        • Re:polically correct navajo (Score:5, Insightful)

          by CODiNE ( 27417 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:47PM (#7506753) Homepage
          I know EXACTLY what you mean. I'm deaf and I get sick of all these hearing people who learn sign language WORDS and nothing at all of the grammar or culture that goes with being unable to hear.

          So they sign straight english which is exactly like reading anything that's been through Babelfish. (I actually use Babelfish to show them how it looks for us) Worse is since sign languages are visual the only way you CAN describe someone is by their physical appearance, unless they always have a skateboard with them or something...

          My name means tall, some of my friend's names are : black, mole, curly hair, big eyes, boy(he's older now but keeps it for sentimentality), long eyelashes(that's my girlfriend heh), blind(yup, he is), smile, laugh, frown, mustach and LOTS of asian people with signs connnected to their eyes.

          These names don't offend the deaf at all, and can be changed easily if for some reason the person doesn't want it anymore. Perhaps they stop skateboarding, grow up, move to a new town, do something famous, or get a really bad reputation somehow.

          So how do you explain someone who's name you can't recall? Well he's this tall, has glasses, he's black, he's bald, he limps... and he's sick a lot, RIGHT! That guy!

          We have problems with P.C. hearing people telling us how rude we are... trying to change people's names they don't like, spreading new P.C. signs they've invented for other countries or nationalities. It's funny since the new signs STILL describe those people, now instead of K on the eyes for Korean it's rice-paddy hats. Instead of C on the eyes for Chinese, it's the old style communist coats. Instead of mimicing the stereotypical Russian leg kicking dance it's now wiping Vodka off the chin...

          Why doncha guys go fix the english language first? Start calling Japan Nihon or Nippon, and Spain Espania... nobody has proven to me how open minded they are with all this P.C. crap... quite the opposite in fact.

          -Don.
          • The Greeks coined the term 'barbarian' simply as a way to say 'someone who goes bar bar' - that is, 'someone "I" cannot understand' - With a snooty disregard for the person's origins. Later, however, the terms took on its full perjorative meaning of 'uncouth'.

            From this site on Macedonian culture [mymacedonia.net]

            "That man Philip, not only he is not a Greek, but also he does not have anything in common with the Greeks. If only he would have been a barbarian from a decent country - but he is not even that. He is a scabb

      • Amazing how Native Americans were so politically incorrect then, no?

        No.

        You can thank the U.S. Military for those gems, as those were simply part of the code used.

        Word............Navajo......................Litera l Translation
        WHEN............GLOE-EH-NA-AH-WO-HAI........WEASEL HEN
        WHERE...........GLOE-IH-QUI-AH..............WEASEL HERE
        WHICH...........GLOE-IH-A-HSI-TLON..........WEASEL TIED TOGETHER


        Or do you think they went around saying 'weasel hen' every time they wanted to know what time

    • Re:Imagine this other African language..... (Score:4, Funny)

      by mantera ( 685223 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:05PM (#7506442)

      I have seen those africans who communicated through clicking sounds on a TV documentary; the most bizarre thing!... some standing elder was apparently lecturing almost 40 young men during some tribal ritual, and all he was doing was clicking... so bizarre...

      As for the link your provided, i couldn't easily find the thing you were referring to, but what attracted my attention was this...

      In Latin derived languages, such as Spanish, French, and Italian, the word order is not usually as important. Meaning is primarily determined by the endings of words (that is suffixes). In a very different kind of language, Mandarin Chinese, meaning is primarily changed by tone. The same word can mean radically different things depending on how it is pronounced. For instance, the word ma can have four distinct tones:...

      Now that might be true for written French, but i might be less inclined to agree for spoken French, at least for us non-native speakers who have a hard time with the subtleties of pronounciation; Those of you guys who have always thought of french as "the language of love" might be in for a surprise if you ever use it as such, as I discovered when I was courting my French ex-wife many years ago. For example, it appears that the French use the word "my chick" as a term of endearment both ways, male to female and female to male, so when i reciprocated its use i was taught the following ...

      poussin= chick
      boisson = drink
      poisson = fish

      Now imagine the following conversation, which actually happened....

      me filled with affectionate emotion, saying it in french :- "i love you, my chick"
      My French ex-wife :- "oh my god, you're calling me your fish!"
      - "stop spoiling the moment"
      - "i can't help it, you're calling me your fish, how romantic is that!"
      - "okay..." (me trying again to correct my pronounciation for the umpteenth time, in french)... "my chick..."
      - "argh, now you're calling me your drink!"

      There was also another word that was even worse; i can't remember it now now but it had 4 different meanings eventhough it sounded much the same to me when pronounced with only the most suble of differences, just one of them was a term of endearment and the 3 others were far less flattering... i just couldn't ever get it right...

  • -1 Flamebait (Score:2, Interesting)

    by anaphora ( 680342 ) *
    Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?

    No.

    Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?"

    No.

    However, I particularly liked the MP3.
    Hey, Servando!
    What?
    Look, go tell Julio to bring the castanets.
    OK.
    Hey, Julio!
    What?
    Lili says you should go get the kids and have them bring the castanets for the party.
    OK.OK.OK.
    Why is this funny? The MP3 is 57 seconds, that's why. Everybody wants s

    • Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:54PM (#7504579) Journal
      Everybody wants streamlined things, and that includes language.

      Well, most natural languages have built into them a great deal of redundancy. This is why you understand someone talking over static, even if some of the sounds are lost. Thus, streamlining language has the effect of cancelling out some of the inherent error correction.

      • Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:2, Informative)

        by defMan ( 175410 )
        Especially important in this case because it has to travel longer distances. It seems to be mostly used for longer distance which would give a lower signal/noise ratio.

      • Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Cow herd ( 2036 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @04:11PM (#7504776) Homepage
        A small quibble, but according to cognitive science, I believe that it's not actually redundancy built into language that allows us to pick out someone talking over static, but rather the sophisticated pattern-recognition mechanisms in the brain that compensate for this. This is also the reason that spotting typos can be tricky without careful reading... the brain tends to autocorrect for defects, so in effect you're "seeing" the correct word, in spite of the typo (a similar mechanism allows us to see a "complete" visual field in spite of the blind spots created on the retina where the optical nerve connects) However, IANAL(inguist) so I could be off on this. Interesting idea, though.

        • Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:3, Interesting)

          by RackinFrackin ( 152232 )
          I believe that it's not actually redundancy built into language that allows us to pick out someone talking over static, but rather the sophisticated pattern-recognition mechanisms in the brain that compensate for this.

          I agree completely with your point, but I'll add that redundancy plays a large part in being able to understand garbled or partially lost messages. The pattern-matching mechanism can decipher these damaged messages because it knows roughly what to expect. If it hears the phrase "give me al

        • Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:4, Interesting)

          by michael_cain ( 66650 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @06:51PM (#7506322) Journal
          but rather the sophisticated pattern-recognition mechanisms in the brain that compensate for this

          Humans are extremely good at extracting (and making sense of) frequency information. Here's an interesting experiment that I've seen performed.

          Start with a clip of someone talking, relatively slowly and clearly, digitally recorded with 8-bit linear samples and the MSB a sign bit (ie, the range is -128 to 127). Play that and, while there is audible static, the speech is still clear. Now replace the LSB with one, effectively converting to 7-bit samples. Play the modified clip, the static level has increased, but you can still understand the speech. Replace the next LSB with one, yielding 6-bit samples, play it again. Each time you replace another bit position with ones, the static level increases. At more significant bit positions, the total volume tends to increase as well, so you'll have to turn the volume on the playback device down, or scale things in some fashion.

          The amazing thing is that, when only the sign bit remains, most people can still make out what is being said. At that point, the only information present is the frequency data (zero crossings). OTOH, humans are miserably bad at hearing phase phenomena.

  • So which human could understand R2D2?

    • Re:Bad Reference (Score:2, Informative)

      by rjelks ( 635588 )
      Luke Skywalker did in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. In Star Wars he had to rely on C-3PO.

    • Re:Bad Reference (Score:2, Insightful)

      by nodwick ( 716348 )

      So which human could understand R2D2?

      That's a good point, I seem to remember most of the time they have C-3PO do the translating. The one actual "conversation" I can recall offhand is Luke talking to Artoo in the X-wing before going to Dagobah, and for that one he was reading the translation off his computer screen.

      There's probably a few common ones people could recognize, but given that you can't rely on your average person to distinguish tone and pitch reliably (ever been to a karaoke bar?), there'

      • Re:Bad Reference (Score:3, Insightful)

        by |/|/||| ( 179020 )
        From what I can gather about Silbo it's based on relative frequency. You don't have to have perfect pitch to speak/process it, you just have to be able to generate and identify changes in pitch.

        You can communicate anything with beeps and whistles - the trick is doing it efficiently. Heck, you could whistle morse code if you wanted to.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • One of my HS friend's brother was a comm. dude for the Army, and he claimed that the beeps actually meant something...he never said what though, so he could've easily been full of shit.

  • No (Score:2, Redundant)

    by Hamster Of Death ( 413544 )
    "Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?"

    Uhmm... No.
  • If we're whistling, then it wouldn't been natural would it?

  • I tried that Silbo Gomero on a co-worker (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hairy_Potter ( 219096 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:47PM (#7504488) Homepage
    you know, a friendly greeting that sounded like a wolf whistle when she walked by, and I got dismissed for sexual harassment. Thanks a lot.

  • Yeah, little Ewoks amazed me too (Score:5, Funny)

    by whoda ( 569082 ) * on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:47PM (#7504493) Homepage
    "Have you ever watched Star Wars and been amazed that Human beings could understand what R2D2 is saying?"

    You do realize that Star Wars was a movie, not a documentary, don't you?

  • Whistling? (Score:5, Funny)

    by macshune ( 628296 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:47PM (#7504498) Journal
    I for one, tweet, tweeeet, tweet, tweettweet, tweet tweet overlords!

  • Great idea to communicate by whistles, until (Score:5, Funny)

    by unassimilatible ( 225662 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:48PM (#7504504) Journal
    Someone starts eating crackers.

  • Puckers up (Score:5, Funny)

    by nacturation ( 646836 ) <nacturation AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:48PM (#7504506) Journal
    SAN SEBASTIAN, Canary Islands (AP) -- Juan Cabello takes pride in not using a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers up and whistles.

    Uh... which end?

  • So... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Reteo Varala ( 743 ) <reteo.lamprosliontos@com> on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:48PM (#7504507)
    Would this be considered Pigeon Pidgin?

  • Translation (Score:3, Funny)

    by kajoob ( 62237 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:48PM (#7504508)
    And what do R2's ramblings translate to?

    "Greetings Slashdotters. You have way too much time on your hands. That is all."

    Not worth the effort I guess.

  • Dumbfounded by the Feebleness (Score:5, Funny)

    by turgid ( 580780 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:49PM (#7504516) Journal
    Even as a small child when 8-bit micros had speech synthesizers, I wondered why, in the technologically advanced Star Wars society that damned robot couldn't speak in a human (or whatever) language. Look at C3PO. 3 million languages? They had space craft capable of superluminal travel, weapons the size of a moon, and a damned robot that sounded like a ZX Spectrum loading Manic Miner.

  • Used for future? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by t0ny ( 590331 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:49PM (#7504519)
    Of what use would learning a dead language be? I guess you can call it "language darwinism", to an extent. Even Latin really cant be considered a dead language, because it has spread out into French, Italian, Spanish, English, etc., and is therefore still of use to learn.

    Oh well, if people want to waste their time learning Klingon, I guess even R2D2 has its place.

    • Any language with documents written in it isn't truly dead. And no, translation is never good enough, because the nature of human languages is such that a 1:1 correspondence between (even two closely related dialects) is impossible.

    • Re:Used for future? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by torpor ( 458 )
      what use would learning a dead language be?

      As anyone with half a bit can tell you, language is useful for two reasons:

      1) because other people can speak it

      and

      2) because other people can not speak it
  • You insensitive clod!
  • Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?

    Ask Dylan [countrygoldusa.com]

  • Natural Language (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mopslik ( 688435 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:50PM (#7504529)

    Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?

    You mean like the roaring success of esperanto?

    Long-distance communication benefits aside, this is just another language that would have to be learned by two parties as a common basis. Any language, either English (which is rapidly dominating the globe) or Finnish (random choice) could be substituted given a significant number of interested individuals.

    It is impressive, though. Certainly must make good party tricks.

  • Beneficial for Many (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mlmitton ( 610008 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:50PM (#7504531)
    This was really interesting to me personally. I have a young nephew whose vocal chords don't work, and it doesn't look like he'll ever be able to talk normally. However, there's no reason to think that he won't be able to learn to whistle. He's still quite young, but he's already learned various clicks and pops that he can make with his mouth to get your attention. But if he could learn to whistle, and associate a vocabulary with that whistling, it would obviously help him communicate. I suppose there are quite a few mute people that could benefit from this. Who else could benefit?

    • Signing (Score:5, Informative)

      by kid-noodle ( 669957 ) <jono AT nanosheep DOT net> on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @04:01PM (#7504669) Homepage
      I'd suggest it would be more profitable for him to learn ASL, since that's a relatively widely used language - plus, he'll be able to communicate with deaf people.

    • Re:Beneficial for Many (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Gudlyf ( 544445 )
      One interesting observation I had is that I don't see how you could teach this language in a book unless it was sheet music. It realistically could only be taught via audible means, and forget lip reading for the deaf.

    • Re:Beneficial for Many (Score:3, Interesting)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) *
      My father and I can whistle very loud. When I was little I could hear him quite a distance. I had exactly 5 minutes to get home from when I heard that.

      So a) I better be in range to hear it and b) I better be back within 5 minutes.

      I have no problems attracting attention to those who I want to know where I am. Most of my friends know that I can make your ears ring for 5 to 10 minutes if I am close enough to you (5 to 10 ft) and I can quickly get them to notice me :)

  • why this language? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by nizo ( 81281 )
    Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?


    Why not esperanto [esperanto.org] instead? Certainly more intuitive than whistling!

  • Besides, says Cabello, it's good for just about anything except for romance: "Everyone on the island would hear what you're saying!"

    That's ok dude, this is Slashdot (if there ever was any, you'd just hear a bunch of crude metaphors about 'fingering' and 'fscking').

  • Have you ever watched Star Wars and wondered why R2D2 could understand speech, but could not speak?

    Even in the 70's it was blazingly obvious which one of these two tasks was easy, and which one was difficult.
    • Have you ever watched Star Wars and wondered why R2D2 could understand speech, but could not speak?

      Even in the 70's it was blazingly obvious which one of these two tasks was easy, and which one was difficult.

      Neither?

      Both are easy to do a 70%-80% job on. Both are freakishly hard to do 99.9% on. (Even we humans only clock in somewhere around 99.9%; your speech comprehension rate is not 100%, though some of that is because other people's speech production skills are also not 100%...)

  • People didn't understand R2. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lester67 ( 218549 ) <`ratels72082' `at' `mypacks.net'> on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:52PM (#7504560)
    C3PO was his interpreter. In the X-Wing, Luke had to read what he was saying from a screen in the cockpit.

    I feel all dirty and nerd-like for posting this. I hope you are happy.
  • Silbo is so unique and has many values: historical, linguistic, anthropological and aesthetic.
    Where do I sign up?
  • "Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?"

    No, of course not.

    -B

  • Putting sounds together to make words? (Score:3, Funny)

    by ajuda ( 124386 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:53PM (#7504570)
    Why didn't anyone ever think of that before? Oh wait, they did. It's called Morse Code [demon.co.uk].

    I know that this is a a little different -- morse code can be used to make any word, not just 400 as is the case with the language mentioned in the article, but still... What's the big deal?
  • quote: Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?

    i don't see how... can any linguist/CS person explain to me why this is not a bu%^&*)t question?

    (there we go again -1 flamebait)
  • This chirpy brand of chatter is thought to have come over with early African settlers 2,500 years ago. Now, educators are working hard to save it from extinction by making schoolchildren study it up to age 14.

    Wow I bet THAT's popular with the kids - I'm surprised spammers haven't started printing messages on ceiling tiles so that when children are told just how much time they are going to be wasting being forced to learn something pointless they have something to look at.

    As we all know the subjects we

  • Example (Score:5, Informative)

    by CowboyRobot ( 671517 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:55PM (#7504599) Homepage
    Here is an example of Silbo: http://www.agulo.net/silbo/silbo.mp3 [agulo.net]

    I can't tell which are the 8 language elements as described in the article, but they seem to use at least duration and rising vs. falling pitch as 'letters'.

  • Tone Deafness (Score:5, Funny)

    by merodach ( 630402 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:55PM (#7504600)
    Imagine unintentionally cussing out your boss, or worse spouse, because you were tone deaf.....
  • George Bush is already using this with Tony Blair. Interesting thing is that each whistled pattern ends with "Here, Boy!"
  • Although a whistle-based language is certainly possible, as the article proves, I don't think that producing sound is the challenge for computers or robots.

    Speech recognition is continuing to improve. Currently, computers can either recognize most speech from a single person or most people on a single topic. Speaker-to-speaker variations (that make fully automated ay-person, any-word recognition hard) would plague even a whistle language - people would whistle with an accent.

    The real challenge is in

  • Hah... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MoeMoe ( 659154 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:58PM (#7504628)
    I still think the White Space language is more dynamic...

  • Processing power is a constant (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @03:59PM (#7504638) Journal
    Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains?

    No, on two counts:
    1. It's hardly a breakthrough in natural language processing to shift load onto the human by making them learn a new language. What do you think "typing" is but a specialized sign language? Making them learn a new language defeats the whole purpose and makes for a rather hollow victory.

    2. While "word rate" varies somewhat from culture to culture, "information rate" is basically a constant. To express "The little boy was hit by a blue ball and started to cry, but his mother cheered him up with some cookies." will take about the same amount of time in spoken langauge in all languages (meant for face-to-face interaction).

      (It's actually somewhat surprising that there's as much varience as there is in the length of the written version of that sentence; you can see in many languages that speaking has been more importent then writing. I suspect over the next hundred years some of the more verbose letter-based written languages will start condensing down to be more like English, which is one of the more compact letter-based languages. Thank the Anglo-Saxons.)

      Creating an acoustically simpler language will necessarily mean that artificial language will be slower to communicate with. (If you could communicate at the same rate as English, then by pretty much by definition it would as complex.) Again, "reducing" the problem like this isn't so impressive and doesn't really solve the problem.
    And that's assuming what you really meant was "speech recognition pains". The real problem with "natural language recognition" is the stupifyingly complex sentences we utter, with their amazing context-sensitivity and ambiguities. NLP isn't a solved problem even on plain text which removes the vast majority of acoustical ambiguities that speech recognition has to deal with. (You still have problems like "ram" (verb, noun), but that's part of NLP.)

    Basically, this is not useful for human-computer interaction. Limited forms of it have been useful in the other direction, though, but I don't know how the sounds mapped to information. AFAIK jet-fighter cockpits use acoustic signals, but they aren't used to convey digital information like words, they convey analog information like distances or speeds.
  • Have you ever watched Star Wars ?

    -1 Redundunt , shall we say

  • 1. No mention of SW in CNN link.
    2. No mention in CNN link of using it to communicate with computers/AI/natural language processing.
    3. From the CNN link:

    "I use it for everything: to call to my wife, to tell my kids something, to find a friend if we get lost in a crowd," Cabello said."

    Yelling works this way too.
  • When I played the sample conversation from the site, our two cockatiels really reacted. I don't know whether the Silbo speakers would have understood the tiels' replies, though.

    There have been a few other highly-tonal languages described in the linguistics literature, for which such whistled conversations are possible. I recall one from Mexico that was described (with recordings) in a linguistic class that I took once. I don't remember how large the vocabulary was; Silbo may well have more morphemes.

    On
  • Doing a direct translation from say, Japanese to English has been giving linguists and translators a lot of head aches. Things like "out of sight, out of mind" come out as "Blind insanity" What looks promising is a third language, like Esperanto [esperanto.com] have more promise as a "middle ware" language. Japanese Esperanto English, for examples. Whistles, just don't have the vocabulary.

  • Lost in Translation.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by l0ungeb0y ( 442022 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @04:03PM (#7504683) Homepage Journal
    Could this type of language be used in the future to ease natural language processing pains

    Ermmm..... NO.
    The problem with natural language processing is mainly understanding the human voice, dialect, vocabulary and context. The only possible use I see is that these sounds have less overall tonal and frequency variance, so compression should be much more efficient than normal speech.

    But still, it would not replace the need for speech recognition/processing unless you expect everyone to learn this language of whistles, which I can safely say will never happen.

    At best this could be used either as a computer generated hash of the original processed speech or as a user created "secret code" to replace mouse gestures and the like... but both ideas seem very impracticle.

  • Is there a dictionary yet? (Score:4, Funny)

    by MrEd ( 60684 ) <<tonedog> <at> <hailmail.net>> on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @04:07PM (#7504731)
    What's the Silbo Gomero for "Madam, I must admire your sublime and wonderful buttocks" [livejournal.com]?


    Enquiring minds want to know...

  • Good summary (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bartash ( 93498 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @04:22PM (#7504889)
    Quote from an intersting summary [linguistlist.org]:

    "My brother was once hiking around Gomera with a friend. They ran out
    of drinking water and asked a local person for some. This person said
    she didn't have any (it was a very dry area!) but her neighbor up the
    mountain could help. "I'll let her know you're coming" she said, and
    whistled up the mountain. They walked up the mountain. My brother
    walked ahead and arrived first. When he got to the house, a stranger
    sitting there said: "Ah, there you are. The water's right around the
    corner there; but where is your friend?"

  • The Clangers! (Score:3, Informative)

    by wackybrit ( 321117 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @04:26PM (#7504926) Homepage Journal
    I was surprised to see The Clangers weren't mentioned yet. The Clangers were little aardvark looking creatures that live on the moon and communicate by whistling. It was a kids' TV program in the UK, but became a typical 'cult' thing with students watching, etc.

    The whole program was just these weird puppet things whistling at each other, with some guy narrating over it. Really creepy, but it was quite big at the time.

    See pictures of the Clangers. [clangers.co.uk]

    Lots of other samples, pictures, and bits and bobs at http://www.clangers.co.uk/home.htm [clangers.co.uk]

  • Um... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GMFTatsujin ( 239569 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @04:30PM (#7504951) Homepage
    The reason we can have R2D2 in a conversation is that there's someone else in it too, interpreting the negative linguistic space. Ditto with Chewie.

    e.g.:

    R2: Beep beep beepledee boop!
    C3PO: What do you mean, I prance around like a gay frenchman at a Ren fair?

    Chewie has the additional advantage of being a biped with mobile arms and facial features, capable of exhibiting body language.

    "Rawwwwrararar" + hug == "I am happy to see you out of carbonite encasement!"
    "Rawwwwrararar" + flailing arms == "I am angry at this negative power coupling!"

    Other cues include voice pitch, speed, and inflection. Situational context helps too.

  • Too Specified (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ammie ( 614071 ) <amanda,campbell&cecomifs,hua,army,mil> on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @04:45PM (#7505109)
    I'm surprised that someone has brought it to light. The people who know silbo usually kept it to themselves, and were not fond of sharing the language with others.

    La Gomera is the last of the Canary islands, one that has no access to the rest of the world save by ferry. The island is (not very well) known for a number of peculiar traits. The natives are not a fishing society despite living on an *island*, and they are known for a very very particular type of pottery they make there. (When asked if there were many who knew how to make pots in this fashion, a native answered "Oh yes, lots of us" and explained that at least 10 or 12 in the village knew the art.)

    Barbara Kingsolver is an author who traveled to the island to escape the frenzy of the gulf war in the early 90's, and stumbled over the culture quite by accident. After some time there, she found that the language was designed to travel the great distances *that had nothing in between*. From one hilltop to another was fine, especially when there weren't many people in earshot, but in a building it would have no application, and we have a hard enough time hearing someone right next to us on the street. Imagine trying to listen to them around eighty others all whistling out to each other.

    For great distances in hiking parties, or feild workers perhaps, but this has almost no application in a society that has already been *built* around the communication methods that we already have established.

  • Man! this stuff really carries! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lobsterGun ( 415085 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @06:55PM (#7506348)
    It was fun to hear the whistling across the office as one person after another clicked on the link [agulo.net] to the mp3 of the language.

    I heard it from up the aisle and went to investigate. It was coming from a guy's headphones, and he was wearing them. They guy that was wearing the headphones didn't even think he had the volume up particularly loud. The guy across from him said he could hear it over the music he was listening to.

    I greatly desire to see an English text to Silbo translation engine. It would be kind of cool to hear the classics in Silbo.

  • Scientific American's article on Silbo in 1957 (Score:4, Informative)

    by geoswan ( 316494 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:24PM (#7506580) Journal
    Scientific American had an article on Silbo in 1957. One of their full length articles. And it contradicts the CNN article, and the expert it quotes on several important points.

    The Scientific American article said that Silbo was not an indigenous language that preceded the Spanish colonization of the Canary Islands. It said that Silbo was a dialect of Spanish. It said that Silbo whistlers used the same vocabulary, syntax and grammar as the local dialect of Spanish. It said that Silbo whistlers mouthed the same words that they would be using if they were speaking Spanish, except that they were doing whatever they needed to do with their lips to whistle. But the movement of their tongues, teeth etc were all as if they were speaking Spanish.

    As the CNN article said, this resulted in a reduced number of phonemes, and they were different from those of Spanish. But a practiced listener could still understand what was being said by recognizing the rythym of the speech and by mapping the Silbo words onto their equivalent in Spanish.

    The Island is volcanic, with one central conical caldera. The surface of the is scored by deep valleys radiating from the caldera. The Scientific American article explained that Silbo was much better than regular Spanish for communicating from one valley to the other. Whistles carried farther than regular speech. And all the phonemes carried equally well. So, either the whole message got through, or no message got through.

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