who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

319whistle with a whistle. The interchange was repeated several times with differentwhistles. Finally the man turned around, retracted his steps a short way and came up thefootpath to Eusebio’s hut. Without saying a word he dumped his load on the ground.Eusebio looked the load over, went into his hut, returned with some money, and paid theman his price. The man turned and left. Not a word had been spoken. They had talked,bargained over the price, and come to an agreement satisfactory to both parties – usingonly whistles as a medium of communication. (Cowan, 1948:280).”Here is the “transcript” of the conversation that took place in the abovementioned“whistle dialogue”:“What did you bring there?”“It is a load of corn.”“Well, where are you going with it?”“I am taking it to Tenango.”“Are you going to sell it then?”“I am going to sell it.”“How much will you take then? Sell it to me here.”“I will take 2.50 a box” [pesos]“Won’t you take 2.25? I will give that to you”.“Three pesos are given to me where I am going with it”“But that is far you are going with it then.”“I will just drop the matter now”.“Well, you sure want a lot” (G. M. Cowan, 1948:286)This is quite extraordinary for us, but quite mundane for the mountaineers of theMexican village of Mazateco. The Indians’ story is a case of using a whistle language, orpurely pitch language as part of normal everyday human communication. The samephenomenon can be encountered in a few other countries and regions of the world: inBrazil, Bolivia, Alaska, Nepal, Myanmar, New Guinea, France, Greece and most of all –in many West African peoples. This kind of communication generally occurs among theusers of tone languages, and it is based on the use of a tone element without thearticulated component of speech. There are very interesting cases also where in ahandful of isolated villages the whistle language is used in non-tone languages as well, asin Spanish, Turkic, or Greek villages (Busnel & Classe, 1976). Interestingly, WestAfricans sometimes whistle other, non-tone languages as well (for example, French). Ofcourse, the “only pitch” communication severely constrains the content of messages thatcan be unambiguously transferred and received, but in evolutionary terms, even thisrelatively limited ability of precise information transfer via pitch-only medium couldhave crucial importance for the earlier stages of language development. Besides, it isimportant to remember that speakers of tone languages never speak without the use ofthe tone element, whereas, as we can see, they can successfully communicate (and dothis naturally in many parts of the world) with the use of the pitch element only,without the articulated component of language.As readers might remember, Roger Wescott even suggested that hominidsinitially communicated via whistling, instead of vocalizing (See Wescott, 1973). I do notthink whistling would be so dominant over the vocal language at any point of hominid