This is a fascinating part of linguistics that I never knew existed. I wonder if it would be possible to get a whistling system like this to work for English. I wonder if the feasibility of these systems to represent their respective languages is tied to how many sounds are in those languages. I looked it up, and both Spanish and Turkish have fewer sounds than English, but in the case of Turkish, it isn't too many fewer (36 vs 31 according to the source I found).
That doesn't sound right. English, being a Germanic language, has bizarre amounts of vowels. Some interpret English to have >20 vowels alone, up to low 30s, highly depending on the dialect. And then it has ~24 consonants.
English has all consonants Turkish has, except [1] /c/ and /ɟ/ (also the highly debated Turkish phoneme /ɰ/ which does exist in some English accents). But English has many more consonants such as 2 dental fricatives. There are some Turkish accents with velar nasal (ng in siNG) but most Turkish accents lost this phoneme (only some southeast ones have it). And Turkish has only 8 vowels.
But note that, I think this is a bad example. English is a language spoken in a large geography and thus has many dialects. Turkish has fewer accents and thus less variability in phonology.
[1] Note that even /c/ and /ɟ/ exist in some dialects. Such as k in 'keen' can be pronounced as /c/
> I wonder if it would be possible to get a whistling system like this to work for English.
I'd find it interesting for any language as it'd probably work just as well for people without a voice box - kind of makes you wonder why we evolved one. Speed?
The larynx allows us to firmly shut off our airway (far better than lips alone) in both directions (unlike the epiglottis that just prevents inhalation).
By firmly shutting off our airway, we can stiffen our bodies to facilitate lifting.
The larynx is also a secondary safeguard against things getting past the epiglottis.
It definitely isn't superhuman by any means, but I was deeply impressed when I learned about microchess, an early computer chess program that managed to run in 1K of ram in the KIM-1 microcomputer. It's a pretty easy program to beat if you play chess regularly. But if you are the kind of person that only plays chess sporadically and non-seriously, it can give a human a run for their money.
