Tim:

> I have wondered how lyricists writing in tonal languages fit the shapes
> of vowels to the shape of the melody, there must be musical effects


Along the same lines Jaime de Angulo once opined that the reason he was
unable to appreciate English verse was his intonation of the English
sentence.

"It might be due to my not having a good intonation in English-my
pronunciation is usually correct, and as far as 'quality' of vowels and
consonants is concerned it is hardly foreign.....My accentuation, i.e. where
I place the *stress*.....is usually correct--*But my intonation is utterly
wrong!!* It is very baffling...." page 415 of "The Old Coyote of Big Sur" by
Gui de Angulo.  (seeming ellipses and stress in above quote are in GdeA's
reproduction
of a letter from JdeA to Dorothy Pound in 1950)

On tonal languages:  My own experience with Vietnamese is that a person
speaking Vietnamese is continually making subconscious decisions of which
word to use and the word order to use based upon the tonal patterns of the
sentence.  The result is a
very lyrical normal sentence pattern.  Sentences with a lot of rhythm.  Word
order is not as mandated in Vietnamese as it is in English.
There were several lyrical patterns that seemed most common along with
several rhythms.  I think it is like our normally unconscious choice of the
iambic foot in English.  I was teased many a time by my counterparts about
the words I used.  My word choice and word order plus mispronunciation often
resulted in
some real belly laughs.   I got the impression that the rhythm or pattern
that I had come up with was totally inappropriate to the subject matter.

Jaime may have had the same problem with English that I had with Vietnamese.

Although I came to appreciate Vietnamese music, my language skills were too
basic for much critical thought and I gave the combination of music and
language little thought until much later.


Rick Seddon
McIntosh, NM