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Lodestar

(2,388 posts)
Sat Aug 22, 2015, 05:16 AM Aug 2015

The Whistled Language of Northern Turkey

New Yorker
Aug 2015 - with photos and video of whistle language:

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-whistled-language-of-northern-turkey

The small town of Kuşköy, which is tucked into an isolated valley on the rainy, mountainous Black Sea coast of Turkey, looks much like the other villages in the region. Houses balance on steep hillsides beside tea fields and hazelnut orchards. A narrow white minaret and a small domed mosque stand beside a noisy creek. Kuşköy is remarkable not for how it looks but for how it sounds: here, the roar of the water and the daily calls to prayer are often accompanied by loud, lilting whistles—the distinctive tones of the local language.

Over the past half-century, linguists and reporters curious about what locals call kuş dili, or “bird language,” have occasionally struggled up the footpaths and dirt roads that lead to Kuşköy. So its thousand or so residents were not all that surprised when, a few years ago, a Turkish-born German biopsychologist named Onur Güntürkün showed up and asked them to participate in a study.

//

For Güntürkün, whistled Turkish was not only a fascinating cultural oddity but also an exciting natural experiment. How, he wondered, does the brain handle a language that renders words as something like music? Although neuroscientists have long understood that brain functions do not divide cleanly between the left and right hemispheres, the left hemisphere appears to play a consistently dominant role in our understanding of language—regardless of whether the language is tonal or atonal, spoken or written, signed with the hands or clicked with the tongue. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, seems to govern our understanding of pitch, melody, and rhythm. In Kuşköy, Güntürkün tested this cranial division of labor by recruiting thirty-one volunteers, all fluent in both spoken and whistled Turkish, to listen to pairs of different syllables played simultaneously through headphones, one in each ear. When he gave them spoken Turkish, the participants usually understood the syllable played through the right speaker, suggesting that the left hemisphere was processing the sound. When he switched to whistled Turkish, however, the participants understood both syllables in roughly equal measure, suggesting that both hemispheres played significant roles in the early stages of comprehension.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-whistled-language-of-northern-turkey

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The Whistled Language of Northern Turkey (Original Post) Lodestar Aug 2015 OP
those that have pictographic languages have mopinko Aug 2015 #1
Hmmm ... this seems to contrast with "speakers" of Silbo Gomero .... eppur_se_muova Aug 2015 #2
Fascinating to see what humans are capable of. nt Bonobo Aug 2015 #3

mopinko

(69,803 posts)
1. those that have pictographic languages have
Sat Aug 22, 2015, 09:24 AM
Aug 2015

a similar division of hemispheres. always found that fascinating.

eppur_se_muova

(36,227 posts)
2. Hmmm ... this seems to contrast with "speakers" of Silbo Gomero ....
Sat Aug 22, 2015, 10:10 AM
Aug 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero#Cognitive_features

Is the difference due to overly brief press summaries, differences of interpretation or methodology, or is it real ?
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