Whistled Turkish

Time to break my blogging log-jam. I'm ba-ack! And I moved. Hooray! More about that later. For now, let us marvel at the existence of whistled Turkish. There actually is such a thing.

Generally speaking, language processing is a job for the brain's left hemisphere. That's true whether that language is spoken, written, or signed. But researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 17 have discovered an exception to this rule in a most remarkable form: whistled Turkish.

It seems like such a strange concept. I mean, what would whistled English sound like? I speak English yet I have no clue what this would mean.

Whistled Turkish is exactly what it sounds like: Turkish that has been adapted into a series of whistles. This method of communicating was popular in the old days, before the advent of telephones, in small villages in Turkey as a means for long-distance communication. In comparison to spoken Turkish, whistled Turkish carries much farther. While whistled-Turkish speakers use "normal" Turkish at close range, they switch to the whistled form when at a distance of, say, 50 to 90 meters away.

I love this but I wish I really understood what it's like. I assume you'd have to understand Turkish to grok it, but even Turkish speakers have problems understanding it if they haven't grown up hearing it.

"As a native Turkish-speaking person, I was struck that I did not understand a single word when these guys started whistling," he says. "Not one word! After about a week, I started recognizing a few words, but only if I knew the context."

The article goes on to recount how the existence of this language strand allowed them to test something, once and for all: whether language is primarily a left-brained or right-brained activity. Spoiler: we have a winner -- the left side won, which affirmed its long-supposed dominance of language.

Still, whistled Turkish. How cool is that?

Generally speaking, language processing is a job for the brain's left hemisphere. That's true whether that language is spoken, written, or signed. But researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 17 have discovered an exception to this rule in a most remarkable form: whistled Turkish.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-08-turkish-notions-language-brain.html#jCp