[Opinion] Insight re: vowel chanting/veneration in PGM

[pixel_fortune]

Okay maybe this is obvious, but I only just thought of it. The PGM and some other places bloody love vowels. Like "calling the sevenths" where you vibrate a vowel to each quarter and those paragraph long strings of vowels etc, and this guy:

He loves those vowels!

Anyway I realised that where the written language has no vowels (eg Coptic, ye olde Hebrew & Arabic), then the difference between dead words on a sheet of papyrus and living words sung in ritual or spoken to a loved one, is the vowels have been inserted. So vowels are what bring the dead thing to life. They're put in the middle of consonant-only words and they're the breathiest part - it is almost is like breathing life into the word.

Or since speech comes before writing, written language is like the living word has been skinned and gutted, or had its breath of life sucked out of it so it can be pinned on the page like a dead butterfly.

I'm using melodramatic language to try and get into that headspace, but I can see how someone could view it that way, especially if literacy was more of a specialised art than a daily requirement. In that model, no wonder vowels would seem to have innate magical power

 

[Xenophon]

Excellent points. That's why tradition was so important. Try singing something from sheet music, then having a voice coach on hand. Big diff. All the more so where you have consonants written with no vowels. St. Jerome notes that he had to learn Hebrew secretly from a gent who would have been seen by his Jewish brethren as a renegade simply for teaching him the language.

The Chinese word for vowels uses the character for "music" as a component. So you're right about vowels being the life of the speech

 

[pixel_fortune]

The Chinese word for vowels uses the character for "music" as a component. So you're right about vowels being the life of the speech

Interesting!

 

[HoldAll]

They told us at school that non-Italian composers like Mozart used Italian for their operas because this language is so vowel-rich, which makes it more suitable for arias. In some languages you can form words without vowels, for example the Croatian island of Krk (which means 'throat') but how can you sing "Kkkkrrrrkkk"?

 

[Xenophon]

They told us at school that non-Italian composers like Mozart used Italian for their operas because this language is so vowel-rich, which makes it more suitable for arias. In some languages you can form words without vowels, for example the Croatian island of Krk (which means 'throat') but how can you sing "Kkkkrrrrkkk"?

Italian is great that way. In Mozart's day, pretty much all operas were written in Italian. However, he switched into German for "Entführung aus dem Serail," und "Die Zauberflöte." This was the beginning of opera in German.

"Krk"? You could just lengthen the "r" and take it through different pitches like Gregorian chant will do with a vowel. But, yeah. Try "Krk" for more than a couple beats and folks'll be doing a Heimlich maneuver on you. I've never understood the insistence that "r" is a consonant. In Sanskrit, and some Slav languages, it's definitely a semi-vowel. Errrrr: like a dog growling.

I've been experimenting lately with putting spells into ancient Greek and chanting them in some approximation to plainsong. With its inflections, Greek is a lot like Italian or Latin when it comes to generating rhyming final syllables. It works to heighten the emotions. (Mine, not yet the neighbors'.)

Post automatically merged: Feb 21, 2024

Interesting!

元音 (yuan-yin) is "vowel." 音乐 (yin-yue) is music. "Yin" by itself suggests sound, but it is mostly used for meaningful sounds like in compound characters meaning voice, music, tone. 元音 literally means “element of a sound.” 音乐 means "happy sound."

 

[HoldAll]

Or take the Czech tongue twister "Strč prst skrz krk":

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You can't chant plosives like 'p', 't' or 'k' but you can hum 'mmmmm', like in 'Ommmm'. There are various theories regarding the use of vowels in PGM texts (planetary correspondences of the seven Greek vowels, for examples) but not for consonants. Intriguing. What makes a word sound cool, awe-inspiring or ugly? Somebody must have a cogent explanation for this phenomenon.

 

[Xenophon]

Or take the Czech tongue twister "Strč prst skrz krk":

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You can't chant plosives like 'p', 't' or 'k' but you can hum 'mmmmm', like in 'Ommmm'. There are various theories regarding the use of vowels in PGM texts (planetary correspondences of the seven Greek vowels, for examples) but not for consonants. Intriguing. What makes a word sound cool, awe-inspiring or ugly? Somebody must have a cogent explanation for this phenomenon.

"Ugly" is the one there's most disagreement about, I'd reckon. People tell me French is beautiful and German "guttural." To mine ear, French sounds like an insincere apology stammered; German either vigorous or surpassingly poetic. Latin seems able to combine strong sounds and cadences with musical vowels, resulting in absolutely awesome pieces like "Dies Irae" or "Te Deum." I'm told the Quran brings tears to the eyes, but it does nothing for me. I guess I'm not privy to the unwrit rules of its aesthetic. But, yeah, a cogent explanation is to be awaited.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

There was a quote from some famous Spainard whose instructions on speaking English were "Thrust the jaw as forward as possible and clench the teeth; thus do the English produce the unpleasant mewing sounds that constitute their language"

 

[Xenophon]

There was a quote from some famous Spainard whose instructions on speaking English were "Thrust the jaw as forward as possible and clench the teeth; thus do the English produce the unpleasant mewing sounds that constitute their language"

Interesting aside here. In the 1930's Ortega y Gasset wrote that, "The Englishman of today mews; Falstaff bawled." To this I might add a fairly recent change in American English. I have not much spoken with American women for nigh onto a quarter century. An ex-colleague---Chinese---asked me to audit some VOA clip. Apparently the new speech style there is to caw racously like a crow.