Language Observations (1)
Our colleague, GW, made a very interesting observation about the Chinese language the other day. In most indo-european languages that are non-tonal, musical singers can add their own embellishments and emphasis to the pronounciation of the words in the lyrics. This makes it fun to listen to a song even if it has simple lyrics because a lot of emotion and passion can be conveyed.
The question is: how can you sing like this in Chinese? Any small change in tone will result in a completely different word that would easily garble the lyrics. You can't add rising/lowering tones to the vowels nor can you stretch out sounds without affecting the word you are trying to say. Any ideas on the matter would be great appreciated.
On a related note, how do you whisper in Chinese?
The question is: how can you sing like this in Chinese? Any small change in tone will result in a completely different word that would easily garble the lyrics. You can't add rising/lowering tones to the vowels nor can you stretch out sounds without affecting the word you are trying to say. Any ideas on the matter would be great appreciated.
On a related note, how do you whisper in Chinese?
posted by agoel at
11:04 PM
6 Comments:
You don't whisper in Chinese and most deinately don't in Cantonese. It has 9 tones! There was a girl in my house senior year of college from Hong Kong, she never heard the phone ring but it was always for her and you could hear her talk from one end of the house to the other.
Okay, I'm trying not to be a smarty pants but I have asked this question to several friends in the past, I think it has something to do with context when you are singing in Chinese. I asked my friend to explain again so I will send an answer when I know. Also you shouldn't be listening to pop music, it'll rot your brain, too sappy sweet! That's the great thing about pop music, it's univerally bad.
Yep, I was right about the singing thing, it's all in context since a melody might sound terrible if you had a sentence that went all over the place tonally. Also tied into my memory on that is that idioms/handy sayings usually come in 4 character blocks. It might be a way to learn more language since you'll see those a lot...
When I first started thinking about this, I thought, "how the heck is it even possible to sing in tonal languages?" I mean, Cantonese uses more tones for meaning (9) than we have in the western diatonic scale (7). It seems like it would be impossible to have melody.
But then it occurred to me that tonality is just another constraint. Like meter and rhyme. Someone unfamiliar with a strong word-order language like English might wonder how we manage to write songs with rhyme and meter, because they would seem to constrain the word order so much, but somehow we manage... That's what makes songwriting an art!
I usually can't understand what people sing anyways. Haven't we all looked up lyrics and gone, "is THAT what he/she said?"
Hey, as long as it sounds good... right?
Vietnamese has 5 tones (or 6 if you count no tone). I really don't have the insight into an explanation, but here's my experience: I can understand songs in my dialect and the words don't necessary depend on context (as in, the words are pronounced correctly and you know what the word means for the most part). The songs are also harmonic (at least to my ears). I know this isn't much, but that's my 1 cent.
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