Are there any languages that could not be understood if whispered?

Are there any languages that cannot be whispered comprehensibly?

I don’t know, but African click languages seem like a possibility.

I’d be interested to know whether tonal languages can be whispered clearly.

Voiced vs. unvoiced consonant pairs is probably one phonemic contrast that is found to one degree or another in almost all languages. Whispering will make THOSE phonemes a bit ambiguous, but context almost always makes things clear (we fail to make all kinds of other contrasts in normal speech which are actually present in the language, and understand each other fine).

I doubt that languages which happen to, in addition, use tone for vowel phonemic contrasts, or have clicks in their consonant inventory, will be any more or less likely to suffer from unusual ambiguity or clarity when whispered – they have some voiced/unvoiced contrasting pairs too, you know.

I can’t speak for Thai or Tibetan, but Chinese is definately a lot harder for me to understand when whispered.

The game isn’t called Chinese whispers for nothing

And which game would that be?

Joe

i think he said Lychee Twisters?

Possibly relevant: my Chinese friends tell me they don’t really understand the lyrics of canto-pop songs unless they’re really obvious from context (e.g. “I love you baby”) due to the music’s imposition of its own tone onto the syllables.

Okay, I forgot this was an international board… Chinese whispers is a game where a group of people get in a circle, someone starts by whispering a phrase or word (in English) to the person next to them, and that next person quietly relays it on and so on. By the time the message gets back to the original person, it is often greatly distorted.

Ah. I know of that phenomenon, but have never heard of it framed as a game…

Joe

I know that as Telephone.

(The incident that sparked this question was actually a whispered conversation I overheard between two speakers of some dialect of Chinese (I do not know which one). It struck me that I had heard that Chinese, or at least some forms of it, had tonal elements, and I wondered how difficult their communication was.)

But if they whisper the phrase in English, why would that tell us anything about whispered Chinese?

Well, it’s non-competitive and relies on the cooperation of all participants, so some might not class that as a game.

What country/state do you live in? I’m British/Aussie.

You know, I have literally thousands of Chinese friends online, so I’ll go and ask them.

Yes, but at least it shows an attitude (justified or otherwise) towards the Chinese language.
Checks Wikipedia
Oh! other countries call it “Russian scandal” and “Arab phone”, so I guess it’s more a case of Chinese being an incomprehencible language to most British people.

Hmm. As a native speaker of both, I can’t say I agree that whispered Chinese (at least Mandarin) is any more difficult than whispered English.

Johnny and the Mothers are playing Stompin’ at the Savoy in Vermont tonight?!

ASL can’t be whispered.

I stand corrected

You win the internet

It’s just one perspective; others may disagree :slight_smile:

Here in America I’ve always heard that game called “Telephone”

Actually I’m sure I read somewhere (quite possibly on the SDMB) that ASL does have the equivalents of whispering and shouting - using small restrained gestures or big expansive ones as appropriate. Or did I make that up?

True, according to John McWhorter in “The Power of Babel”.