👍"A GOOD FRIENDSHIP IS FOREVER".
👌 That's what ADOLESCO does for you finding a friend of your age in ITALY, SPAIN, FRANCE or GERMANY.
🇮🇹 🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇩🇪
🙌 SHARE FAMILY and enjoy an amazing adventure!!!
#joungadventure
#internationalexchange
#familyadventures
#travelspain
#travelfrance
#travelgermany
#travelitaly ...
Photo
"Special and beautiful" whistled language echoes around this island by Raphael Minder © The New York Times Co. | 740 words
LA GOMERA, 🇪🇸Spain —Sitting atop a cliff in the Canary Islands, Antonio Márquez Navarro issued an invitation —"Come over here, we're going to slaughter the pig"—without speaking a word: He whistled it. In the distance, three visiting hikers stopped dead in their tracks at the piercing sound and its echo bouncing off the walls of the ravine that separated them.
Márquez, 71, said that in his youth, when local shepherds rather than tourists walked the steep and rugged footpaths of his island, his news would have been greeted right away by a responding whistle, loud and clear. But his message was lost on these hikers, and they soon resumed their trek on La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic that is part of Spain. Márquez is a proud guardian of La Gomera's whistling language, which he called "the poetry of my island."
And, he added, "like poetry, whistling does not need to be useful in order to be special and beautiful." The whistling of the Indigenous people of La Gomera is mentioned in the 15th-century accounts of the explorers who paved the way for the Spanish conquest of the island. Over the centuries, the practice was adapted to communicating in Castilian Spanish. The language, officially known as Silbo Gomero, substitutes whistled sounds that vary by pitch and length for written letters.
Unfortunately, there are fewer whistles than there are letters in the Spanish alphabet, so a sound can have multiple meanings, causing misunderstandings. The sounds made for a few Spanish words are the same —like "sí" (yes) or "ti" (you) —as are those for some longer words that sound similar in spoken Spanish, like "gallina" or "ballena" (hen or whale). "As part of a sentence, this animal reference is clear, but not if whistled on its own," said Estefanía Mendoza, a teacher of the language.
In 2009, the island's language was added by UNESCO to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity; the United Nations agency described it as "the only whistled language in the world that is fully developed and practiced by a large community," in reference to La Gomera's 22,000 inhabitants. But with whistling no longer essential for communication, Silbo's survival mostly relies on a 1999 law that made teaching it an obligatory part of La Gomera's school curriculum.
On a recent morning at a school in the port town of Santiago, a classroom of 6-year-olds had little difficulty identifying the whistling sounds corresponding to different colors, or the days of the week. "The only rule is to find whichever finger makes it easier to whistle, and sometimes unfortunately nothing works at all," said Francisco Correa, the coordinator of La Gomera's school whistling program. "There are even some older people who have understood Silbo perfectly since childhood, but never got any clear sound to come out of their mouth."
As is the case in many languages, whether whistled or not, there is a generation gap on La Gomera. Ciro Mesa Niebla, a 46-year-old farmer, said he struggled to whistle with a younger generation trained at school because, he said, "I'm a mountain guy who learned at home to whistle the words our family used to farm, but I don't have the vocabulary of these kids who learn salon whistling, which is a bit too fancy for me." With its distinct geography, it's easy to see why whistling came into use on the Canaries; on most of the islands, deep ravines run from high peaks and plateaus down to the ocean, and plenty of time and effort are required to travel even a short distance overland.
Whistling developed as a good alternative way to deliver a message, with its sound carrying farther than shouting —as much as two miles across some canyons and with favorable wind conditions. However much she is attached to her cellphone, Erin Gerhards, 15, sounded keen to improve her whistling and help safeguard the traditions of her island. "It is a way to honor the people that lived here in the past," she said. "And to remember where everything came from, that we didn't start with technology, but from simple beginnings."■ ...
Message Page
Photo
