
This work solely focuses on an abridged system.

To distinguish speech surrogate systems that represent the phonemic aspects of a language from those that represent meaning without reference to phonemic inventories, Stern (1957) refers to the former as “abridged” and the latter as “lexical ideogram”. Cultures around the world communicate through musical instruments by transposing linguistic features to music melodies (e.g., Bradley, 1979 on the Sino-Tibetan gourd organ, Poss, 2005 Poss, 2012 on Hmong raj in Southeast Asia, Kaminski, 2008 on Asante ivory trumpet in Ghana, Winter, 2014 on the Sabar of Senegalese, McPherson, 2018 on the balafon of the Sambla people in Burkina Faso, Seifart et al., 2018 on Amazon Bora).
