Yeah, I fear the sounds are always going to be a mystery to us. The reconstructions are far from settled science, and even if we knew in theory what the phonemes were, that still doesn't always tell you what it *felt* like. I was watching the Crystals (linguist and actor father and son) talking about using original pronunciation for Shakespeare, and even with a dialect of English that close to the present, they were saying they discovered new levels of nuance and meaning when they ran whole performances - things that just aren't apparent until you speak it. But we're really not in a position to be speaking Tang poetry with any level of assurance yet.
And the music adds a whole new level of complexity. One of the reasons for the revolution in literature in the Tang was a revolution in music. I think it was essentially the introduction of more rhythmical music from central Asia. You can see that in the form of the poems - almost all Tang poems, including this one, are in common time. The rhythm of the five syllable line is two bars: ONE two THREE four ONE TWO THREE four, with words on the capitalised beats. But how closely did they stick to those rhythms when declaiming? Were poems always sung, or did they often speak them? We just don't know any of this.
That's my next project. I live in Fujian, and my wife speaks Hokkien, so I'm determined to learn it sometime. Picking up new languages doesn't come easily to me, though, so it's going to be a long-termer...
Awesome to hear the poetry too--I wish I could grasp more of the prosody of it.
Yeah, I fear the sounds are always going to be a mystery to us. The reconstructions are far from settled science, and even if we knew in theory what the phonemes were, that still doesn't always tell you what it *felt* like. I was watching the Crystals (linguist and actor father and son) talking about using original pronunciation for Shakespeare, and even with a dialect of English that close to the present, they were saying they discovered new levels of nuance and meaning when they ran whole performances - things that just aren't apparent until you speak it. But we're really not in a position to be speaking Tang poetry with any level of assurance yet.
And the music adds a whole new level of complexity. One of the reasons for the revolution in literature in the Tang was a revolution in music. I think it was essentially the introduction of more rhythmical music from central Asia. You can see that in the form of the poems - almost all Tang poems, including this one, are in common time. The rhythm of the five syllable line is two bars: ONE two THREE four ONE TWO THREE four, with words on the capitalised beats. But how closely did they stick to those rhythms when declaiming? Were poems always sung, or did they often speak them? We just don't know any of this.
Wonderful! Ah, the reconstructed pronunciation sounds so much like Hokkien at times.
That's my next project. I live in Fujian, and my wife speaks Hokkien, so I'm determined to learn it sometime. Picking up new languages doesn't come easily to me, though, so it's going to be a long-termer...