Posted by Dave Thewlis on May 17, 2001 at 00:58:29 from 199.106.221.47:
In Reply to: Re: Ransome's Art of Secure Communications posted by Jon on May 15, 2001 at 13:50:20:
While I hold no particular brief for Morse, it's worth noting that whistle signalling exists
in a number of cultures including in South America. I seriously doubt they use Morse and even more
used it when the technique was developed a good many hundreds of years ago. Whether they are using
an enciphered form of their language I have no idea -- it is easier to imagine a real code as suggested
earlier. But I'm pretty sure that whistle signalling generally relies on producing a continuous sound
and varying the pitch as needed to convey the information, rather than any sort of start/stop affair.
Finally I have no idea whether the whistles were conveying the tones of positional Mandarin (which has several)
but I could be talked into subscribing to the notion that a continuous whistle signal, regardless of how the
information was transferred, would be relatively "natural" to speakers of a positional language such as Chinese.