Mr Happy, what you were given is called a zurna in Turkish or Bulgarian and a mizmar in Arabic; the Breton bombarde is almost the same thing. It makes a ferocious noise and is mainly used for outdoor dance music. Tip: if you can't get a sound out of it, try soaking the reed in water for a few minutes. Oggie - thanks for the reminder, I'd seen that link before but hadn't noticed the Related links about how meys and their reeds are made.

The mey is almost the same as the Armenian duduk or Azeri balaban - acoustically it's an oboe but it sounds like the low register of a clarinet, a gentle vocal sound. It has an enormous reed and you only put the tip of it in your mouth. Some players double on mey and zurna but they have quite different functions.

PMB: I'm not dissing Irish whistle tradition (*is* there a distinctively identifiable national English one?) but deflating a bunch of quite unnecessary mythology that has been imposed on it, sometimes for mercenary motives by whistlemakers, sometimes out of misdirected political ideology. When people's ideas about an instrument are as irrationally quasi-religious as what you get on the Chiff and Fipple forums, you have to ask what's going on.

I have a guess as to some of what may be behind this. The English recorder revivalists made a big deal about its link to the culture of Elizabethan England. To almost any Irish nationalist, that was like telling a Palestinian Muslim that the Crusaders were envoys of civilization - as seen from Ireland, Elizabeth's England was simply a gang of colonialist thugs who were in no way excused by Byrd, Dowland and Holborne. So Dolmetsch and friends simply ended up persuading most of the Irish that the recorder was the enemy's instrument and its music was anthems of mass murder.

Outside of Eastern Europe, the recorder is a relatively recent addition to the folk musician's toolkit, only widely available for about 80 years, but that's still a lot longer than most other instruments accepted as traditional in the British Isles. Acoustically it can do the business and it's just silly to let taboos of long-forgotten origin get in the way of using it.