Ben sent me this article about an entire language based on Whistling.

The language evolved as a means of communicating across the island's jagged terrain thousands of years ago. La Gomera, a lump of volcanic rock west of Tenerife, is riven by barrancos (ravines) that make communication of any kind arduous. Silbo is thought to have arrived with settlers from the Atlas mountains of North Africa 2,500 years ago and it is far more complex than a few simple signals.

Could this have anything to do with Silbo's native island group being named after a whistling bird? Apparently not, according to this CNN article. Here is a page with more interesting info on Whistled languages (apparently there are several). These whistled languages, according to my understanding of the definition of a language, are not true languages. They do not seem to have their own vocabulary or grammer, instead each phoneme in the local spoken language is given a whistled equivalent, more like a code than a true language on its own. Silbo though seems to be an actual language with only 4 "vowels" and 4 "consonants". Funnily enough the title of this post only uses 4 vowels and 3 consonants, coincidence? I don't think so.

Here is an example of how Silbo is used:

"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?"

I'm a bit curious as to how one would transcribe this language. Could it be done with musical notes? or would an 8 letter alphabet be more apropriate? For learning purposes I bet a mixture of both would be useful.

-----*-------
#
-----------&-

--*----------

--------+----

_____

On a completely different note (pun sadly intended) I'm glad to see that the memory of He-Man has not completely died.

"Perhaps an Egyptian priest or king broke the curse of the skeletons, either by defeating the head skeleton in combat or by discovering the magic words needed to send their spirits back to Hell," Edmund-White said. "In any case, there is strong evidence that the Power of Greyskull played a significant role in the defeat of the skeleton people."