This whole project originally began with my wanting to have an audio-visual means of learning the language and in so doing enable others to do the same.

The most "audio-visual" of all media is a motion picture. Having read every anecdote of Gomera's colorful history, it was easy to see that the extremely bloody nature of the conquest of La Gomera, along with Columbus' alleged romance with the Countess of La Gomera, and its incredible scenic beauty made for great cinema and was the most obvious way to promote interest in Gomera's whistling language.

I also realized that in order for the movie to coincide with "Columbus Year" (1992) that I had to get to WORK! It takes a couple of years to make a film, and so I set my deadline for completion of the filmscript for 1990.

After a few very intense years of hard work, by 1990, the filmscript was all polished and ready to go. I had my people in Los Angeles shop it around, National Geographic initially expressed a great deal of interest for their Explorer Series, and since I was living in the Canary Islands in 1990, I also shopped it to some local film producers who also expressed interest.

Filmscripts sell for about $35,000.00. With that money, I was going to finance the development of my new music notation software (which appears prominently in the film) and be able to record the coursebook that I had written to document the whistling language.

While still living in the Canary Islands, I set about translating Ramón Trujillo's scientific book "EL SILBO GOMERO: análisis lingüístico" [1978] into English. ("The Gomeran Whistle: Linguistic Analysis" -English translation by J.Brent [1990]). There are only two extant copies of this translation: The original is in Professor Trujillo's possession and the other copy is in the Library of Congress.

Consequently, Prof. Trujillo visited me at my office in Santa Cruz de Tenerife where I was currently the director of a language school and also invited me to his offices at the University of La Laguna. We had some very interesting conversations concerning his conclusions.

The coursebook was finished before my leaving Switzerland in 1989 and moving to the Canaries. This was and remains the original focus of the entire project.

When writing the coursebook, it was decided early on that it was to reflect the nature of the whistling language itself. Since the whistling language is largely used outdoors, the vocabulary and verb choices were limited to "exterior" verbs and nouns. Since the language is almost always used in a rural setting, every attempt was made to have the situational settings conform to the types of things that the Gomerans themselves would actually converse about in the open air.

The advice and assistance of the language experts Dr. Allan Dalcher and Señora Pilar Fernandez in the writing of this coursebook was invaluable.

Linguistically speaking, it contains every grammatical structure and every permutation of every structure in all persons (1st, 2nd & 3rd persons sing. & pl.), all of the most common verbs (in all conjugations) and all of the most common and relevant vocabulary.

As such, this coursebook would not only enable anyone to become proficient in the whistling language, it would also be entirely possible to reconstruct the whistling language should it ever become extinct (as many have predicted).

Furthermore, it would represent an enormous body of empirical data that could be used to prove or disprove anyone's theories of how it actually works.

As can be seen in my "Preface to the Compilation: Phonetic Table, there are a several areas of controversy between André Classe (co-author of "Whistled Languages") and Trujillo as regards certain consonants. In fact, Trujillo's 1978 work is almost entirely a refutation of Classe's conclusions as presented in his 1956 article "The Phonetics of the Silbo Gomero".

In addition, I myself have some areas of divergence with Trujillo's assertions concerning certain vowel issues.

In the final version of the coursebook, I would naturally be obliged to write up my own conclusions about the characteristics and structures of the Gomeran whistle, based on the empirical data as recorded in the coursebook.

My "Compilation of Selected References to the Gomeran Whistling Language" was really the last work that I put together regarding the whistling language. It is something that I did for the people of La Gomera themselves.

The last time I was in the tiny public library in the Gomeran capital of San Sebastián there existed only ONE reference to its whistling language -Trujillo's book.

It seemed odd that there was no copy of "Whistled Languages". How strange that Classe and his co-author Busnel would go to all the trouble to write a book with its main focus being Gomera's phenomenal form of whistled communication and then NOT make it available to the Gomerans themselves!

During my research at the European libraries, it was exceptionally difficult to track down many references - even when I knew they were there. So now once and for all, future researchers could find everything that had been written on the Gomeran whistling language up until that point in time, without having to travel as far or work as hard as I did.

There are only two extant copies of my compilation in existence: One in the Library of Congress and the other one in the library in San Sebastián de La Gomera. I did not make a copy for myself, because I still have all the original photocopies. Besides everything you need to know is in the filmscript anyway.

The only portions of the "Compilation of Selected References to the Gomeran Whistling Language" included on this website are my preface and its two bibliographies. You'll see that the bibliographies in the compilation are very similar to the bibliography of the filmscript, however the chronological bibliography in the compilation has some very interesting comments for scholars.

The copy of my compilation in the Library of Congress is not the same as the one on La Gomera. There is no need to duplicate any materials in that copy with materials that you can easily find in Washington, DC, so I left them out.

The Gomeran compilation contains everything that can't be found in Sebeok's incredibly comprehensive book "Speech Surrogates", including a copy of my heavily annotated "Whistled Languages".

As of this writing (2005), nothing of my "whistling language project" has ever come to fruition. The movie was never made, so I never had enough money to either develop the music notation software or record the coursebook.

If I were ever to rewrite the filmscript (I have left it in its original 1990 form here), I would almost certainly delete any scenes involving animals. The trainers have their own systems which work well for them, and I'm sure they're very happy just the way they are.

I would also delete all the scenes involving whistled control of electronic devices. Voice recognition has come a long way in the last fifteen years, and shortly it will be completely perfected.

AND I would definitely scrap the Construction Workers scenes!

Nonetheless, the central body of the film is the exceptionally accurate dramatization of the most important historical events in the Gomerans' extremely colorful past. This island may be small, but its story is as fascinating as any great nation's!

I hope you will read the script, and may the movie that plays in your mind while reading it both entertain and educate.

I would recommend that you read the "Preface to the Compilation of Selected References to the Gomeran Whistling Language" first. It's not very long, and it'll give you a better view of what I was thinking about while writing the filmscript.

When launching into reading the filmscript, you'll naturally want to start with the Proposal first and then the Treatment. For the filmscript itself, use the "Guide to Master Scene Script" as the Table of Contents to the filmscript. Since it's all hyperlinked you can go directly to those portions of the script which interest you the most.

The coursebook is included here for posterity. It might be of interest to a linguist or other scholar, but it's not really something that I believe the general public would enjoy reading.

In 1992, I retraced Columbus' voyage of almost exactly 500 years earlier, travelling from the Canary Islands to the Americas.

As I sat in the plane high over the mighty Atlantic Ocean, I thought about what I had done in the more than fifteen years that I'd been gone: I'd circumnavigated the globe, traveled all over Western Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and the Far East. I'd mastered several languages (French, German, Swiss German, Spanish), and become familiar with a few more (Arabic, Italian, Dutch, Silbo Gomero). I'd mastered several musical instruments (piano, guitar, flute, saxophone). I'd played music for hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes as many as 10,000 at once. I'd recorded a few of my original songs. I'd written seven books, translated an important scientific work, written a filmscript and invented a better system of music notation.