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Comment by estebarb | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely cool!!! Also I find surprising that, as a Spanish speaker with no whistle-spanish training, I was able to understand most of the whistles.

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I'm not even a native Spanish speaker and I was surprised to find that I could follow along pretty well using the subtitles.

Interesting! Spanish isn’t a tonal language, so how do you ‘translate’ the words into whistles? (And do you think you could do it without subtitles?)

(I should note I haven’t actually managed to watch the video yet, because my audio seems to be broken. Perhaps it would be obvious if only I could hear the whistles…)

To me it literally just sounded like Spanish, but in a high pitched whistle. Some of the sounds don't reproduce 1:1 in a whistle, but the whistling is adapted to still sound similar and comprehensible. I thought I would be able to do this myself by whistling out Spanish words, but it appears that it takes some practice to make all of the correct sounds. I tried in English, Spanish and Hungarian and I'm only able to produce musical notes, not distinguishable letters.

Spanish speaker here. Also surprised that I understand the whistles, in particular the second video.

Does it happen to you that when you think of a word in English, even if you don't vocalize, some of your vocal cords become tense or move? Well, these whistles feel the same.

> when you think of a word in English, even if you don't vocalize, some of your vocal cords become tense or move

Oddly enough, I haven’t ever perceived this, but I can consciously trigger it, and I do think I understand what you mean.

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