How can people understand songs in languages with tones?(e.g. Vietnamese, Mandarin)
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I’m not personally familiar with contour-tone languages like Mandarin, but some Japanese songwriters do a really good job of avoiding clashes between the song’s melody and spoken intonation. Kanzaki Iori for example is scarily good at this – when he wants a song to sound like a poetry reading *it does.*
This isn’t universal and because pitch isn’t super-important in Japanese you can muddle through it just fine. It’s no more confusing than listening to an unfamiliar dialect.
Extrapolating from that, I’m sure that if Chinese lyrics sound like nonsense to proficient Chinese speakers then they either won’t use those lyrics or they will because sounding clear isn’t the point. Surely you’ve heard mumbly emo or punk or butt-rock in which understanding the lyrics isn’t the point.
If tones are needed for clarity *and* the melody gets in the way, they’ll make it fit. I’m sure this is a huge challenge for translation, but that’s part of the fun.
This is less of a thing in English, but even English stress is related to both pitch and rhythm. If a songwriter decides to make them clash badly they can actually get a joke out of it, like [Monty Python’s “Camelot”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9wdYy3tCm4) – notice how it’s actually kind of hard to understand and *definitely* kinda screwed up.
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