![]() ![]() Hymns are a particular difficulty – the potential for “re-interpretation” of the text is huge, and the knowledge of what is meant does not necessarily alleviate any of the awkwardness. In singing environments where melody is not as flexible, it can be a bit more… awkward. There’s a fascinating description and analysis of this phenomenon in Cantonese opera 粤剧 (yuèjù / yuhtkehk, jyut6kek6) at īell Yung, Creative Process in Cantonese Opera I: The Role of Linguistic Tones, Ethnomusicology, Vol. The traditional melodies as set by the scriptwriter are meant to be modified and ornamented upon in performance, including tone considerations. The status of melody in Chinese opera is quite interesting, as it is allowed to be changed within an intricate system of musical constraints to fit the tones. But traditionally, the tones are very much based on poetic 平仄 (píngzè) tone patterns rather than the actual contour tones of any Mandarin dialect (stage or otherwise), though that has been changing. On the classical, “high art” side, the consideration of tones is highly important even in the Mandarin-based 京剧 (jīngjù) and 昆曲 (kūnqǔ) operas. 的 is a modern invention in Chinese language. He actually followed the style of classical literature. 黄霑 wrote many lyrics without using a single 的. Older Cantonese lyrics don’t use that many 的 anyway. The more important issue is how the characters sound in a song. Colloquial Cantonese are mostly used when the melodies are more playful or when the lyrics talk about very local topics and phenonmena. 玩下啦,鬼马双星 and 半斤百两 are just some of the examples. ![]() 黄霑 and 许冠杰 wrote many lyrics in colloquial Cantonese. Lyrics in colloquial Cantonese (口语) are not rare in Cantonese songs since the early 1970s although formal written Chinese (书面语) is the norm. The Mandarin lyrics are almost certainly not usable for singing in Cantonese simply because of the tones. You may also check a song having both Mandarin and Cantonese lyrics, e.g. If you study the Cantonese lyrics written by the really good lyricists like 黄霑 or 林夕, they never take the issue lightly. Mandarin lyrics may be less problematic because it only has four tones. The so-called new lyricists in Hong Kong are disasters. Like all other have said here, a really good lyricist does take tones into consideration. 128-144.įor any linguists out there who might actually want to read it, it’s accessible at: Wee, Lian Hee (2007) Unraveling the Relation between Mandarin Tones and Musical Melody. It would be interesting to repeat it with pop songs, or in Cantonese. That study was done by looking at the melodies of Mandarin folk songs. So it makes the song more understandable as a whole, but it won’t actually tell you the tone of an individual word if you have no guess as to what word it is. And it doesn’t apply to every single syllable. But the tone information is incomplete, for instance it mostly just distinguishes “high” tones 1 & 2 from “low” tones 3 & 4. “how is it that listeners can understand most song lyrics despite the apparent absence of linguistic tones?”.īasically, they conclude that the syllables that are most prominent in the melody almost always do preserve some indication of their tone, either in the contour or in the relationship to neighboring syllables. I just found a recent article about Mandarin that tries to answer this question from the perceptual side, i.e. Chan has lots of articles available on her website’s Publications page. ![]() If you’re interested in this kind of thing, Professor Marjorie K. This would suggest that studying songs would be more beneficial to acquisition of tones for the student of Cantonese than for the student of Mandarin. I can’t say I’m fully convinced by the pitch contour graphic that the Cantonese songs “take the lexical tones into consideration,” but it’s an interesting argument. Here’s a graphical representation of Cantonese tones, with and without music: In Cantonese songs, however, the melodies typically take the lexical tones into consideration and attempt to preserve their pitch contours and relative pitch heights. In modern Mandarin songs, the melodies dominate, so that the original tones on the lyrics seem to be completely ignored. > For Chinese, modern songs in Mandarin and Cantonese exhibit very different behaviour with respect to the extent to which the melodies affect the lexical tones. I recently discovered a paper called “ Tone and Melody in Cantonese” which asserts that Cantonese tones are set to music in a somewhat different way: I’ve been asked a number of times: if Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language, what happens when you sing in Mandarin? Well, the answer is the melody takes over and the tones are ignored. ![]()
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