"Either you're off-key, or you just called me a dog."

September 10, 2006 9:00 AM

How do speakers of tonal languages sing without losing the meaning of their lyrics?

My girlfriend brought this up while we were watching a subtitled Cantonese film, and I'm stumped. How would speakers of a tonal language (something like Chinese or Thai where pitch is vital to understanding) be able to sing and still make sense? I'm sure I'm overlooking something, but it seems to me that having to modulate pitch beyond the language's three or four pitches (and slides between) would make a mess of one's lyrics.

posted by Schlimmbesserung to Writing & Language (18 answers total)

In chinese, the music trumps the tones, and the meaning is discerned from context.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:13 AM on September 10, 2006

Best answer: I'm speaking for Chinese here. Context and good lyric-writing. Context is the bigger one. To take the standard Chinse tonal example, whereas "ma" can mean mother, hemp, horse, or to yell depending on your tone, if someone says "qi ma" without any tones, the first thing that comes to mind is " to ride a horse" because there isn't really a common meaning for this combination of characters with mother, hemp, or yell. Of course, this doesn't eliminate all ambiguity, but within a larger context, usually there is little confusion. My friends and I can send instant messages in "Chinese" but typing only stuff like "qi ma" with no accents to indicate the tones, and we can mostly understand everything.

Also, a decently well-written song wouldn't have the note-to-note variation progress oppositely of the correct tone-to-tone variation. Like if a word has 2 characters, with A a low tone and B a high tone, in general you would avoid putting A on a note much higher than B.
posted by bread-eater at 9:19 AM on September 10, 2006

Actually, the second comment about lyric-to-music matching is only about contemporary music. I don't know about Chinese opera or anything traditional.
posted by bread-eater at 9:20 AM on September 10, 2006

So you can't write lyrics independently of the music, like you can in English (most of the time)... that's really interesting.
posted by phrontist at 9:51 AM on September 10, 2006

Best answer: Asked already by me, and well-answered. Check it out.
posted by abcde at 9:54 AM on September 10, 2006

Response by poster: Damn. I didn't spot that one when I searched. Thanks, abcde.
posted by Schlimmbesserung at 10:07 AM on September 10, 2006

This is the subject of a great deal of research in ethnomusicology and linguistics. The classic work is George List's on Thai melody. But it's a large literature.
posted by fourcheesemac at 11:28 AM on September 10, 2006

breadeater,i.: if someone says "qi ma" without any tones, the first thing that comes to mind is " to ride a horse"

I'd probably think "eat a horse", but then I'm still struggling with that /q/ vrs /ch/ thing. ;)

Seriously, though -- I just started listening to mandapop recently and was amazed how much I could understand. For the most part, they keep the songs uncluttered and sing with remarkable clarity (I'm comparing this to my anguished attempts to study German by listening to THEIR stuff, hehhe-he). Lotsa stock (Wo ai ni) phrases and simple vocab to boot.

Now if I could just get that blasted "Ringa-linga-ling Ding-dong" song out of my mind.
posted by RavinDave at 11:35 AM on September 10, 2006

qi(2) ma(3) vs chi(1) ma(3). Chi/shi/zhi etc often have a slight 'r' in them. Qi/ti etc don't. So, yes, I'd agree that 'to ride a horse' is the mostly likely option.

Anyway, I believe it is mostly context, as people have said. This is why Chinese is hard to understand while being sung.

For example, my teacher (native speaker) has trouble understanding certain Chinese rap artists. I believe this is because the tones are missing somewhat, and the increased speed makes it more difficult to understand purely out of context.
posted by Camel of Space at 12:20 PM on September 10, 2006

Well, he did say "without tones" ... but I gotta admit, that "Chi/shi/zhi etc often have a slight 'r' in them. Qi/ti etc don't." is a pretty handy observation. I'll hafta give it a whirl. Xiexie.
posted by RavinDave at 12:27 PM on September 10, 2006

Can I totally hijack this thread, as it's been totally asked and answered and "previously'd"?

• It's a cliché that "Asian kids are good at math"*
• I often read that math and music skills are related in some kind of psychological way
• Is it possible that learning a tonal language, with its musical qualities, actually does make you good at math?

_{* I hope that doesn't sound crass. And yes, I know that it's probably more about culture than Asian people being all that "different".}
posted by AmbroseChapel at 2:11 PM on September 10, 2006

AmbroseChapel: Probably unrelated. Japanese kids are generally good at math, but Japanese is not a tonal language.
posted by Bugbread at 2:27 PM on September 10, 2006

Nor is Korean.

I've been planning to write about this for my new site, but the Myth of The Asian Uberstudent is spurious. Unmystical nutshell reason for better performance: they work harder.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:05 PM on September 10, 2006

Ditto. In my experience, the Asian kids did better at math at school. And history. And English. And pretty much every other academic subject. And, surprise surprise, they also studied a hell of a lot harder.
posted by Bugbread at 5:31 PM on September 10, 2006

Is it possible that learning a tonal language, with its musical qualities, actually does make you good at math?
I don't know, but I have heard that children who speak tonal languages are way more likely to have perfect pitch.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 5:49 PM on September 10, 2006

I don't know, but I have heard that children who speak tonal languages are way more likely to have perfect pitch.

I suspect this is not true. From a cognitive point of view it is counterintuitive. Perfect (absolute) pitch and skil at manipulating *relative* pitch (a la any tonal language) use different areas of the brain, certainly since the latter is implicated in processing grammatical structures that are highly localized and specialized.

Tonal languages are not structurally different from any other language. The brains of tonal language speakers are unlikely to differ in any significant way from any other human brain.
posted by fourcheesemac at 6:41 AM on September 11, 2006

Sorry, fourcheesemac, but a study says otherwise -- not about brain organization, but about perfect pitch in speakers of tonal languages.
posted by booksandlibretti at 9:56 PM on September 16, 2006

The Diana Deutsch study is hardly conclusive, and contradicts a lot of other evidence.
posted by fourcheesemac at 7:55 AM on September 18, 2006