How can they sing if changing a tone might change the meaning of a word? Doesn’t the “tonal direction” upward/downward of a word affect a melody?
How do those systems combine?
In: 48
Native Cantonese speaker. Cantonese has 6 tones (9 if you count the 3 “stopped” tones that have different endings but are covered tonally by the first 6 tones). Tones in Mandarin/Cantonese constrain how natural lyrics might sound in a song–i.e., if you use a word with an inappropriate tone in the melody, it just sounds weird and less natural, although people will usually figure out the word in the context. Tones are always relative–e.g., you can increase the pitch in spoken Mandarin/Cantonese to sound sarcastic, but the relative pitch of the words in your sentence are the same. So it’s not that there’s an absolute tone that fully constrains lyrics, but it is more restrictive than writing lyrics in English (for example). Or to answer your question more directly, lyricists need to choose words that follow the relative pitch pattern of the melody to make the lyrics sound natural. And conversely, any spoken Cantonese sentence has an inherent melody to it already.
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