Introduction and Historical Sketch

Abstract

In 1948 Language published an article by COWAN [25] of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in which he explained how the Mazateco Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, communicate both at close quarters and at a distance by means of modulated whistles, with the same ease, speed, and intelligibility as when using speech in the ordinary manner. The account he gave of the technique employed showed it to be a very simple matter indeed. Mazateco is a tone language, that is to say, one in which the fundamental frequency of the glottal waveform, which at the auditory level is associated with the sensation of pitch, plays a role no less important than do the factors of phonation and articulation in all tongues, whether or not these utilize the feature of tone. Now, in the whistled form of Mazateco the sender extracts from all the parameters of the speech continuum the prosodic¹, i.e., musical features of tone and duration, thereby converting the speech signals as we generally know them into a kind of tune that can be whistled and used either as a secret language or as means of communication, with a range greatly in excess of that of the human voice, however stentorian.