Re: Tonal language and western music expression
- From: John Nguyen <johnnguyen5337@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:28:27 -0700 (PDT)
On Mar 30, 11:35 am, ktaylor <childbl...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Here is a hypothesis that I recently posed to a Chinese native
speaker. The hypothesis was confirmed in that one instance.I would
like to know if the hypothesis is correct, plausible or wrong.
In tonal languages such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and others, the
meaning of words are determined by the tones involved while speaking
them. ex. the word "mai" in Mandarin can mean either "buy" or "sell"
depending on the tone. Westerners imbue words with tone to modify the
emotional context of words - not to change the meaning. "Go to the
store." Can be said in a number of ways to indicate various emotion
content: impatience, resolution, panic, question, etc. This means
that vocal tonal gestures Westerners transpose to music such as
crescendo/decrescendo, accelerando/ritard, etc., and which are natural
to the western language idiom and carry emotional meaning are not
naturally understood by one who comes from a tonal tradition, where if
you change the tone, you change the actual meaning of the words.
It seems to me that tonal speakers would have to learn the emotional
content of western music which is natural to western children. I know
it is a common myth that Asian players are great technicians but are
"dry" and lack emotional understanding of western music. I have heard
cases where that is undeniably true and cases where it is obviously
false. So the question I present this hypothesis to the readers of
this newsgroup who happen to come from tonal first language traditions
to discuss, verify or deny this phenomenon in their own study of
music.
Kevin Taylor
This hypothesis made the assumption that tone changing ONLY used to
change the meaning of the word in some Asian countries. This is
actually could not be further from the truth.
In Vietnamese language, there are several diacritical makings to
modify the pronounciation of a word.
Five tonal accents include cute accent, grave accent, tidle accent,
question accent and agonek can be placed on a, i, o, u, e, y.
Caret can be placed on a and o in addition to the five tonal accents.
Caron ( facing up cresent moon shape) can be place on a in addition to
five tonal accents.
Apostrophe can be place on o and u in addition to the five tonal
accents.
There are some exception where a vowel followed by a p can only be
used with accute accent or ogonek (a dot underneath the vowel), but we
are not going to get in there.
Now that for the meaning of the words.
There are tone changes and inflection which can be applied to the same
sentence to express fellings of anger, surprise, sadness, happiness,
disappointment, you name it! This is somehow missed by western
perception of asian language.
So we, the Vietnamese and the Chinese (my wife is fluent in Chinese),
do use tonal variation to express feeling in dialog.
What you don't find is that they, the asian people, express the
feeling much less from their faces while speaking compared the their
western counterparts, except in some extreme situation in happiness or
sadness (crying).
My hypothesis is that somehow the fact that asian people express less
feeling from their face were wrongly percieved by western civilization
as non-expressiness, but of course I could be death wrong here,
too :-)
Cheers,
John
.
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