8 ms·

I got curious about something with tonal languages: how are song melodies written for them. For some, the melody matched the tones of the word. Then there's Man

I got curious about something with tonal languages: how are song melodies written for them. For some, the melody matched the tones of the word. Then there's Mandarin. Mandarin just follows the melody, and you can figure out the word by context. As an English speaker, this makes ~cents~ sense. Homophones aren't a big deal. If Mandarin doesn't need tones in lyrics, why does it need them normally?

Gigablah 3y ago
Just because you can figure it out by context in songs (rarely upon the first listen, mind you), that doesn’t mean the added cognitive load isn’t excessively burdensome in everyday speech.
- dumbotron 3y ago
  Realizing no one's going to change a language with 900 million speakers, do you think it's because there's a lot of ambiguity, or is it because it's a cognitive load people aren't used to? Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese, and it has fewer tones. Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. Edit: About languages losing features, English used to be declined like German or Latin. Only pronouns are declined in modern English, and we don't usually teach it as "pronouns are declined."
  - kadoban 3y ago
    I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. How many songs do you misunderstand the lyrics for on the first few listens, in your native language? For me, in English, I either can't tell exactly what they're saying for some proportion of lyrics, or just totally mishear them _quite_ often (especially depending on the genre). Music doesn't require every word to be perfectly understandable. Communication does, ideally.
    - dumbotron 3y ago
      > I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. So there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM and more interestingly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
  - hashmush 3y ago
    From my understanding Mandarin has a lot of two-syllable words and in many of the words the second syllable doesn't add much, if any, additional meaning. Contrast that with Cantonese, which I believe still uses a single syllable for most words. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong) So it makes sense with less tones, because you have more syllables to disambiguate.
    - hnfong 3y ago
      > which I believe still uses a single syllable for most words Not sure about "most" (depends on the sample distribution I suppose), but single syllable (i.e. character) words are used much more often relative to Mandarin. So in general you're probably right. Not sure whether that is a cause of more strict adherence to tones in songs though. It could be alternatively argued that the more complex syllable (due to more tones among other things) in Cantonese allowed it to retain single syllable words without having to add extra syllables to clarify any ambiguities.
      - hashmush 3y ago
        > It could be alternatively argued that the more complex syllable (due to more tones among other things) in Cantonese allowed it to retain single syllable words without having to add extra syllables to clarify any ambiguities. Yes, pretty much.
  - Umofomia 3y ago
    > Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese Both languages descended from a common ancestor, so you can't necessarily say that one is newer than the other. However, it is the case that Cantonese preserves several features that Mandarin has lost, in particular the complete inventory of final consonants and all of the tone categories of Middle Chinese, which makes it seem better suited for reciting 1000+ year old Tang dynasty poetry where rhyming and tones were especially important. On the other hand, Cantonese has lost other features that Mandarin has preserved (such as medial vowels and the three-way distinction of initial sibilant consonants), but these features aren't as critical with respect to reciting Tang poetry. For this reason, Cantonese may seem "older" than Mandarin, even though in reality, it's simply that they each have preserved different features and the features that Cantonese preserved happened to make it better for reciting old poetry. > Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. All languages change and will continue to change over time, and while laziness may drive changes in some features of a language, often times other parts of the language become more complex to compensate. This process is called grammaticalization, and is thought to occur in cycles: http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/TheGrammaticalizationCycle.pdf http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/TheGrammaticalizationCycl...
    - ngcc_hk 3y ago
      Just like human are newer than, say, some monkey because it comes later, even we evolve from same ancestor, is a matter of fact. The recitation of tang poetry and more complicated speak a lot of this. Mandarin is later.
      - weregiraffe 3y ago
        Stop embarassing yourself in public.
  - mchaver 3y ago
    Languages often lose features but they also gain features. Complexity of language is hard to compare, but we can still find many examples. Modern English has less complex verbal morphology and noun declension (as you mentioned, only in pronouns). But the set of vowels in Modern English is more complex than that of Old English. Also the vocabulary of Modern English has two main sources: Germanic words (native) and French/Latin/Greek words where a single idea can be expressed in either vocabulary source with different nuances. Old English was mostly comprised of Germanic words with some words borrowed from Latin. Another interesting thing to note is that languages without tones can gain tones (tonogenesis) and in Old Chinese tones played a much smaller role than the modern descendants. This is often the result of syllables/sound systems becoming less complex and losing contrast so the tone of the word becomes contrastive to maintain a distinction between words.
Umofomia 3y ago
Interestingly, Cantonese songs tend to preserve tone better than songs sung in Mandarin. The paper "Tone and Melody in Cantonese" by Marjorie K.M. Chan [1] mentions the following: > 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. In modern Mandarin songs, the melodies dominate, so that the original tones on the lyrics seem to be completely ignored. In Cantonese songs, however, the melodies typically take the lexical tones into consideration and attempt to preserve their pitch contours and relative pitch heights. [1] https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/BLS/article/download/1828/1600 https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php...
ddeck 3y ago
It needs them because there are too few unique syllables in Mandarin. I'm sure a linguist can provide the proper terminology, but there are only around 400 unique sounds in Mandarin, ignoring tones. Even adding five tones still only increases this to ~1500 (not all are used). Compare this to English, where estimates are in the 10-15k range. There are therefore an enormous number of homophones in Mandarin, which makes it very challenging to comprehend without context. I've often had native speaking friends eavesdrop on a conversation, only to tell me that they're not sure what is being discussed. It also means that the language cannot be usefully written phonetically, and thus unique characters are required. some discussion here: https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/40574/why-does-mandarin-chinese-have-a-smaller-inventory-of-unique-syllables https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/40574/why-does-m... https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/39695/does-chinese-require-more-context-to-avoid-ambiguities-than-english https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/39695/does-chine... https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/14596/how-many-syllables-does-chinese-have https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/14596/how-many-s...
- yorwba 3y ago
  Having few unique syllables doesn't mean tones are required, since syllables can be combined. Most Mandarin words are disyllabic or longer, and 400×400 = 160k is enough combinations for a quite large vocabulary. Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.) If there had been no preexisting writing system and written Mandarin was a simple transcription of spoken Mandarin, introducing characters would be about as helpful as indicating the Indo-European roots of words in English writing, which is to say that some people might get a feeling of epiphany after realizing the connection between seemingly disparate words, but it would hardly be practical for everyday use.
  - Umofomia 3y ago
    Evidence that Chinese can be perfectly understandable written without the use of characters can be seen in the Dungan language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language), which can be considered a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, but is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. > Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.) Indeed, because of the way Dungan is written, it ended up evolving differently with respect to how new vocabulary is derived, often borrowing words phonetically from Russian instead of constructing them from Chinese morphemes that might otherwise be considered ambiguous when used individually.
hnfong 3y ago
Tangential fact - while, as you described, most popular songs in Cantonese have tones matching the melody (usually the melody is written first, then lyrics are filled in), many songs from Christian churches don't follow this practice. (I don't know why, maybe a lack of lyricists for translation from English/Latin to Cantonese during earlier years?) So, in Hong Kong, when somebody writes a song/lyric that doesn't quite have matching tones, we ask "which church are you from?" to make fun of it.
- ackfoobar 3y ago
  > many songs from Christian churches don't follow this practice. (I don't know why, maybe a lack of lyricists for translation from English/Latin to Cantonese during earlier years?) If you want the Cantonese lyrics to be translations of English lyrics, it severely limit the words you can choose, to the point it is impossible to fully match the melody.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Gigablah 3y ago

Just because you can figure it out by context in songs (rarely upon the first listen, mind you), that doesn’t mean the added cognitive load isn’t excessively burdensome in everyday speech.

dumbotron 3y ago
Realizing no one's going to change a language with 900 million speakers, do you think it's because there's a lot of ambiguity, or is it because it's a cognitive load people aren't used to? Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese, and it has fewer tones. Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. Edit: About languages losing features, English used to be declined like German or Latin. Only pronouns are declined in modern English, and we don't usually teach it as "pronouns are declined."
- kadoban 3y ago
  I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. How many songs do you misunderstand the lyrics for on the first few listens, in your native language? For me, in English, I either can't tell exactly what they're saying for some proportion of lyrics, or just totally mishear them _quite_ often (especially depending on the genre). Music doesn't require every word to be perfectly understandable. Communication does, ideally.
  - dumbotron 3y ago
    > I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. So there's this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM and more interestingly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8
- hashmush 3y ago
  From my understanding Mandarin has a lot of two-syllable words and in many of the words the second syllable doesn't add much, if any, additional meaning. Contrast that with Cantonese, which I believe still uses a single syllable for most words. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong) So it makes sense with less tones, because you have more syllables to disambiguate.
  - hnfong 3y ago
    > which I believe still uses a single syllable for most words Not sure about "most" (depends on the sample distribution I suppose), but single syllable (i.e. character) words are used much more often relative to Mandarin. So in general you're probably right. Not sure whether that is a cause of more strict adherence to tones in songs though. It could be alternatively argued that the more complex syllable (due to more tones among other things) in Cantonese allowed it to retain single syllable words without having to add extra syllables to clarify any ambiguities.
    - hashmush 3y ago
      > It could be alternatively argued that the more complex syllable (due to more tones among other things) in Cantonese allowed it to retain single syllable words without having to add extra syllables to clarify any ambiguities. Yes, pretty much.
- Umofomia 3y ago
  > Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese Both languages descended from a common ancestor, so you can't necessarily say that one is newer than the other. However, it is the case that Cantonese preserves several features that Mandarin has lost, in particular the complete inventory of final consonants and all of the tone categories of Middle Chinese, which makes it seem better suited for reciting 1000+ year old Tang dynasty poetry where rhyming and tones were especially important. On the other hand, Cantonese has lost other features that Mandarin has preserved (such as medial vowels and the three-way distinction of initial sibilant consonants), but these features aren't as critical with respect to reciting Tang poetry. For this reason, Cantonese may seem "older" than Mandarin, even though in reality, it's simply that they each have preserved different features and the features that Cantonese preserved happened to make it better for reciting old poetry. > Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. All languages change and will continue to change over time, and while laziness may drive changes in some features of a language, often times other parts of the language become more complex to compensate. This process is called grammaticalization, and is thought to occur in cycles: http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/TheGrammaticalizationCycle.pdf http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/TheGrammaticalizationCycl...
  - ngcc_hk 3y ago
    Just like human are newer than, say, some monkey because it comes later, even we evolve from same ancestor, is a matter of fact. The recitation of tang poetry and more complicated speak a lot of this. Mandarin is later.
    - weregiraffe 3y ago
      Stop embarassing yourself in public.
- mchaver 3y ago
  Languages often lose features but they also gain features. Complexity of language is hard to compare, but we can still find many examples. Modern English has less complex verbal morphology and noun declension (as you mentioned, only in pronouns). But the set of vowels in Modern English is more complex than that of Old English. Also the vocabulary of Modern English has two main sources: Germanic words (native) and French/Latin/Greek words where a single idea can be expressed in either vocabulary source with different nuances. Old English was mostly comprised of Germanic words with some words borrowed from Latin. Another interesting thing to note is that languages without tones can gain tones (tonogenesis) and in Old Chinese tones played a much smaller role than the modern descendants. This is often the result of syllables/sound systems becoming less complex and losing contrast so the tone of the word becomes contrastive to maintain a distinction between words.

Umofomia 3y ago

Interestingly, Cantonese songs tend to preserve tone better than songs sung in Mandarin. The paper "Tone and Melody in Cantonese" by Marjorie K.M. Chan [1] mentions the following: > 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. In modern Mandarin songs, the melodies dominate, so that the original tones on the lyrics seem to be completely ignored. In Cantonese songs, however, the melodies typically take the lexical tones into consideration and attempt to preserve their pitch contours and relative pitch heights. [1] https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php/BLS/article/download/1828/1600 https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php...

ddeck 3y ago

It needs them because there are too few unique syllables in Mandarin. I'm sure a linguist can provide the proper terminology, but there are only around 400 unique sounds in Mandarin, ignoring tones. Even adding five tones still only increases this to ~1500 (not all are used). Compare this to English, where estimates are in the 10-15k range. There are therefore an enormous number of homophones in Mandarin, which makes it very challenging to comprehend without context. I've often had native speaking friends eavesdrop on a conversation, only to tell me that they're not sure what is being discussed. It also means that the language cannot be usefully written phonetically, and thus unique characters are required. some discussion here: https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/40574/why-does-mandarin-chinese-have-a-smaller-inventory-of-unique-syllables https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/40574/why-does-m... https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/39695/does-chinese-require-more-context-to-avoid-ambiguities-than-english https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/39695/does-chine... https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/14596/how-many-syllables-does-chinese-have https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/14596/how-many-s...

yorwba 3y ago
Having few unique syllables doesn't mean tones are required, since syllables can be combined. Most Mandarin words are disyllabic or longer, and 400×400 = 160k is enough combinations for a quite large vocabulary. Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.) If there had been no preexisting writing system and written Mandarin was a simple transcription of spoken Mandarin, introducing characters would be about as helpful as indicating the Indo-European roots of words in English writing, which is to say that some people might get a feeling of epiphany after realizing the connection between seemingly disparate words, but it would hardly be practical for everyday use.
- Umofomia 3y ago
  Evidence that Chinese can be perfectly understandable written without the use of characters can be seen in the Dungan language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language), which can be considered a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, but is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. > Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.) Indeed, because of the way Dungan is written, it ended up evolving differently with respect to how new vocabulary is derived, often borrowing words phonetically from Russian instead of constructing them from Chinese morphemes that might otherwise be considered ambiguous when used individually.

hnfong 3y ago

Tangential fact - while, as you described, most popular songs in Cantonese have tones matching the melody (usually the melody is written first, then lyrics are filled in), many songs from Christian churches don't follow this practice. (I don't know why, maybe a lack of lyricists for translation from English/Latin to Cantonese during earlier years?) So, in Hong Kong, when somebody writes a song/lyric that doesn't quite have matching tones, we ask "which church are you from?" to make fun of it.

ackfoobar 3y ago
> many songs from Christian churches don't follow this practice. (I don't know why, maybe a lack of lyricists for translation from English/Latin to Cantonese during earlier years?) If you want the Cantonese lyrics to be translations of English lyrics, it severely limit the words you can choose, to the point it is impossible to fully match the melody.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]