> In article <199505081153.IAA05186@warp.atcon.com>, Blain A. Checkley
> <checkley@WARP.ATCON.COM> wrote:
>
>> Navajo is unique in that words or phrases can change meaning with the
>> pitch of the voice (this according to my cousin who is fluent in
>> Navajo). For example words for related concepts such as: face, eyes, nose,
>> mouth, etc, are the same word just spoken with a higher or lower voice.
>>
>> For this reason it is very difficult to sing Navajo in the usual western
>> musical sense, since rises or drops in the melody line will alter the
>> meaning of the lyrics. It does however have chants.
Navajo is far from unique in being a tone language. There are a lot of
tone languages and pitch accent languages in the world, and, as far as
I am aware, there are no non-musical cultures.
I don't actually know what Navajo does about the clash. I've read that
Chinese loses its tone in at least some styles of song, but I'd be
interested to hear something about this problem.
The tern "chant" is like the term "dialect." It tends to be used in
discussions of this sort to mean "something less than a "proper" "song" or
"language." For example I noticed recently in the paper that some notice
concerning the viral outbreak in Zaire was being published in French and
three "dialects," i.e., African languages.
I do know a little about Plains music and I can assure you that if the
canons are rather different from those of most European musical styles they
are just as musical. Stress accented languages like Dakota, pitch-accented
languages like Omaha-Ponca, and tone languages like Kiowa all manage to
share many of the Plains song genres, e.g., Hethushka/Grass Dance songs. It
is true that the scales, musical phrasing, vocal stylings, etc., are quite
different from, say, Swedish folksongs, but each song has its own particular
immutable tune and words (which can be reused by less imaginative or more
admiring composers), etc., etc.
> For the past few days, listmembers of DEAF-L have been discussing the Navajo
> language. They were discussing translating spoken sounds into Sign
> Language. (Sign Language is the native language of the Deaf. There are
> many dialects such as American Sign Language (ASL), Maritime Sign Language
> (Canada) MSL, etc.) The question was how do you translate tonal sounds.
You don't. It would be like translating vowels or consonants. Tones or
accent patterns in pitch accent languages have nothing to do with emotive or
syntactic meaning. They're simply a part of the phonology or morphology of
the words. This is quite different from the situation in English with, say,
contrastive word stress in a sentence. That might require translation, if
there is a comparable focus-marking system to translate to.
John E. Koontz
NIST:CAML:SCED 883.04 Boulder, CO
koontz@boulder.nist.gov