From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Dec 05 2003 - 17:37:07 EST
At 13:13 -0800 2003-12-05, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>On the other hand, if you asked him nicely, Mark might find the more
>marked form, NFD, to his liking, especially since it is likely to
>contain more combining marks. Mark is definitely in favor of
>markedness. I, on the other hand, am definitely in favor of
>kennings, but we have found little practical or architectural use
>for them in the Unicode character-sea.
Zihai! Such kennings abound in our work; Lee Collins and I were only
yesterday discussing the Wenhai dictionary of Tangut.
====
From http://www.mirabilis.ca/archives/2003_11.html
Whistling language on the Canary Islands
Near-Extinct 'Whistling Language' Returns. From an Associated Press
article at Yahoo:
SAN SEBASTIAN, Canary Islands - Juan Cabello takes pride in not using
a cell phone or the Internet to communicate. Instead, he puckers up
and whistles.
Cabello is a "silbador," until recently a dying breed on tiny,
mountainous La Gomera, one of Spain's Canary Islands off West Africa.
Like his father and grandfather before him, Cabello, 50, knows "Silbo
Gomero," a language that's whistled, not spoken, and can be heard
more than two miles away.
This chirpy brand of chatter is thought to have come over with early
African settlers 2,500 years ago. Now, educators are working hard to
save it from extinction by making schoolchildren study it up to age
14.
Silbo - the word comes from Spanish verb silbar, meaning to whistle -
features four "vowels" and four "consonants" that can be strung
together to form more than 4,000 words. It sounds just like bird
conversation and Cabello says it has plenty of uses.
=====
It is sad to hear that such wonderful forms of communication are
waning. But an appropriate kenning for someone who works against the
Silbo's saggings might be "Keen Sing Bearer".
(ducks)
-- My Clever Son * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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