Thread by @ZevHandel

👋 Hey-hey! After a long summer delay, it’s time for Part 2 of this 🧵 on how medieval Chinese linguistic structure interacts with Tang poetic form — and on how an understanding of that structure can deepen our appreciation of the poetry.

Let's talk about meter! 👏👏👏👏

2/ (The first part of the 🧵, on the interaction between tone and rhyme, is here:

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1424613117917425665

)

3/ One of the most commonly employed poetic devices around the world is meter, or rhythmic structure. Like rhyme, this is an inherently acoustic property of poetry: meter depends on the prosodic elements of pronunciation, such as stress, pitch, loudness, and length.

4/ The specifics of how meter works in different poetic traditions depends in part on the prosodic features of the spoken language, and in part on how those features have been incorporated through culturally-determined formal structures.

5/ Let’s take a quick look at some examples outside of China before we turn our attention to meter in ancient Chinese poetry.

6/ Meter in much of the English poetic tradition is based on prosodic units called feet, which in turn are defined by the patterned alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.

7/ Most portions of Shakespeare’s plays are famously written in “iambic pentameter”.

This is just a fancy way of saying that each line has five feet, and each foot has the structure unstressed+stressed:

ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM.

8/ From Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, Act III, Scene I (with ´ marking stressed syllables):

To sléep: perchánce to dréam: ay, thére's the rúb;
For ín that sléep of déath what dréams may cóme
When wé have shúffled óff this mórtal cóil …

9/ Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is in trochaic octameter: each line consists of eight feet, each foot has the structure stressed+unstressed:

DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da DUM-da.

Opening line:
Ónce upón a mídnight dréary, whíle I póndered wéak and wéary

10/ The feeling conveyed by this meter is essential to the emotional impact of the poem. You can look at it on the page all you want, but you won’t really understand it, and why it makes the poem great, until you recite it aloud and feel the rhythm pulsing in your body. (Try it.)

11/ Because of the complex stress patterns of English words, many types of feet exist, making it possible to manipulate them into a variety of poetic meters that create distinct aural effects. It's a feature of English linguistic structure that enriches poetic form.

12/ Meter is almost always syllable-based. This is not surprising, because syllables are the basic timing units of languages. But many other factors can contribute to it. The English pattern is by no means universal.

13/ Greek and Roman epic verse was typically in dactylic hexameter. To greatly over-simplify, this consisted of six feet, each made up of one heavy syllable followed by two light syllables.

(An example of a dactyl in English is “móckingbird”.)

14/ But in Greek and Latin, unlike in English, the distinction between heavy and light was not based on stress, but on syllable length: long vs. short.

15/ As I understand it, the Classical Sanskrit poetic meter known as varṇavṛtta involves fixed patterns of alternation between heavy and light syllables; but the distinction is more complicated than in Latin, as one factor is how many consonants are at the end of the syllable.

16/ In English, “sit” and “sits” are metrically equivalent syllables, but they would not be in Sanskrit.

Regardless of how meter manifests in different poetic traditions, it always has aural and embodied qualities that are inextricable to the emotional impact of the poem.

17/ Meter also provides a formal structure that constrains the poet. Creating with originality within the confines of that formal structure is one way a poet can demonstrate technical skill.

18/ Formal metrical structures also create opportunities for expression and impact because the poet can focus attention and manipulate responses by selectively bending or breaking the structural constraints.

19/ Okay, you were promised some Chinese, and you're getting impatient for some Chinese.

That's my excuse to post this gif that I like so much.

Chinese is coming up.

20/ Classical Chinese poetic meter was at its core no different from the constrained metrical structures of these other traditions, except that the feature of pronunciation that created metrical rhythm wasn’t syllabic stress, or length, or weight … but tonal contrast.

21/ This poetic feature—tonally determined meter—seems to have arisen soon after tone itself came into existence as a feature of spoken Chinese, in the centuries immediately preceding the Tang dynasty.

(Old Chinese was non-tonal.)

22/ Metrical effects were achieved through the formalized alternation of two pitch contours: level and non-level. Scholars today tend to map out these alternations as abstract patterns. But they were originally based on the specific aural qualities of those tonal pronunciations.

23/ We know that Middle Chinese had four distinct pitch patterns, named by the Chinese people of that time as:
píng 平 ‘level’
shàng 上 ‘rising’
qù 去 ‘departing’
rù 入 ‘entering’

(I’ve given the Mandarin pronunciations of the tone names, in pinyin, for convenience).

24/ The names of the tones not only impressionistically describe the pitches (flat, rising, falling, and abrupt), they also are directly illustrative of the tones.

The word píng was a Level-Tone word; the word shàng was a Rising-Tone word, and so on.

25/ While the precise pitch values of the tones can’t be reconstructed with complete accuracy, we know that the basic distinction in pronunciation between the level tone (平) and the three non-level tones (上去入, collectively zè 仄 ‘oblique’) persisted for a long time.

26/ And it is the patterned alternation between the two — level vs. oblique, flat vs. contoured — that generated the rhythmic impact of so-called “regulated verse” (近體詩), the style of poetry most closely associated with the great masters of Tang verse.

27/ During the period in which tonal prosody first became a formalized poetic tradition (around the turn of the 6th century), it’s quite likely that the distinction between Level and Oblique was not solely a distinction of pitch contour.

28/ There is good evidence that at this time Level-Tone syllables were not just level but also long, while Rising-, Departing-, and Entering-Tone words were short. The Level/Oblique two-way contrast was therefore not just a contrast of pitch shape, but also one of length.

29/ Even as the tonal values shifted somewhat over the following centuries, available evidence suggests that the Level Tone remained level (and low) through the high Tang. There is more tenuous, but still suggestive, evidence that it remained longer than the other tones as well.

30/ (The evidence we have comes primarily from contemporary descriptions, which are unfortunately rather subjective and impressionistic, and from transcriptions of Sanskrit long and short vowels using Chinese characters.)

31/ That bipartite distinction — long and level syllables vs. short and oblique syllables — provides the rhythm of Tang poetry, its ebb and flow, its push and pull.

32/ Contemporary listeners could hear it. They could feel it. And that effect is lost in all modern Chinese poetic reading traditions.

All of them. Really.

33/ For example, consider Cantonese. Some of the ancient Level-Tone syllables are now pronounced with a falling tone (including 平 itself: ping4 [pʰɪŋ²¹]); all of the ancient Departing-Tone syllables are now pronounced with a level tone (including 去 itself: heoi3 [hɵy³³]).

34/ Let’s take a look at some lines of our poem — the one I used as an example last time — to observe the patterns of alternation. A key feature of poetry of this period is the juxtaposition of opposite tonal patterns across the two lines of a couplet.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1424613117917425665

35/ Here’s the full poem again. It's a five-character-per-line 律詩.

送友人

青山橫北郭，白水遶東城。
此地一為別，孤蓬萬里征。
浮雲游子意，落日故人情。
揮手自茲去，蕭蕭班馬鳴。

36/ English translation:

Seeing off a friend, by Lǐ Bái (701–762)

Green hills cross past the northern outer walls;
Clear waters circle ’round the eastern inner walls.
This is the place where we part,
Lone tumbleweeds on a journey of ten thousand miles.

37/

Like the drifting clouds are the traveler’s intentions;
Like the setting sun are the old friend’s feelings.
Waving your hand you depart from here,
To the whinnies of our separating horses.

38/ Let’s focus on the first couplet as an example, given here in Middle Chinese pronunciation:

青山橫北郭 tsʰēŋ ʂɛ̄n kwāŋ pʌk kwak
白水遶東城 bæk ʃwí ɲéw tūŋ dʒēŋ

[Key to tone marks:

ā = Level
á = Rising
à = Departing
a = Entering (syllable also ends in p, t, or k)]

39/ Here is a representation of the prosodic pattern, where “—” represents Level (long and flat) and “╳” represent Oblique (short and contoured):

— — — ╳ ╳ 青山橫北郭 tsʰēŋ ʂɛ̄n kwāŋ pʌk kwak
╳ ╳ ╳ — — 白水遶東城 bæk ʃwí ɲéw tūŋ dʒēŋ

40/ Note that the alternation of Level and Oblique is reversed as we move from one line to the next, so that the two lines of the couplet have complementary tonal values.

Line 1 starts with three Level Tones; Line 2 starts with three Oblique Tones.

41/ The overall rhythmic pattern, which would be immediately evident to the ear of a medieval Chinese listener, cannot be detected in either the Mandarin or the Cantonese pronunciations.

(I’ll make a recording of this for you eventually, I promise!)

42/
Mandarin:
Qīng shān héng běi guō
Bái shuǐ rào dōng chéng
Tones:
1 1 2 3 1
2 3 4 1 2

Cantonese:
Cing1 saan1 waang4 bak1 gwok3
Baak6 seoi2 jiu5 dung1 sing4
Tones:
1 1 4 1 3
6 2 5 1 4

43/ But there’s more going on here than just a juxtaposition of pitch and length to fit the formal requirements. In places, Li Bai has cleverly selected his words so that the feel of the tones reinforces the meaning, thus painting an impressionistic picture of the scene!

44/ In the third couplet, the phrase ‘drifting clouds’ (浮雲) is made up of two long, Level-Tone syllables: smooth and graceful horizontal movement.

In contrast, the phrase ‘setting sun’ (落日) is made up of two Oblique-Tone syllables: abrupt and kinetic vertical movement.

45/ Stepping away from tone and meter, there are other resonances found in the Middle Chinese pronunciation that are simply lost in modern reading traditions. There's so much going on here that is invisible in modern pronunciation!

46/ Consider again the first line of the third couplet, which begins with these three words in the Level Tone:

浮雲游 drift/cloud/wander

47/ We’ve already seen that these three syllables are all in the long, level tone, matching not only the prosodic pattern demanded by poetic form but also tone-painting the poetic imagery. But beyond that:

48/ They all had the same high back rounded vowel (think English “oo”), creating a deeply resonant, calming assonance.

浮雲游
bjū ɣjūn jū (“byoo ghyoon yoo”)

49/ This acoustic property is lost in Mandarin and Cantonese:

Mandarin: fú yún yóu
Three different main vowels: u, ü, o (IPA [u y o])

Cantonese: fau4 wan4 jau4
One main vowel: a (IPA [ɐ])

50/ The three vowels of the Mandarin syllables are pronounced with rounded lips like the Middle Chinese, but they are all different, so the effect of repetition is lost. The three vowels of the Cantonese syllables are the same, but they are short, low, and unrounded.

51/ Neither language’s reading conveys the same feeling, or impressionistically evokes the floating cloud imagery, the way the Middle Chinese pronunciation does.

52/ I don’t want to be misunderstood: Many aspects of classical Chinese poetry can be appreciated on the printed page or when read aloud in modern pronunciation. This poetic tradition speaks meaningfully to tens of millions of people today, and that's great.

53/ But there are dimensions that have been lost. A full appreciation of the aesthetic effects of a poem composed in the Tang dynasty can only be achieved with some understanding of the poet’s contemporary pronunciation and how it felt to listeners and readers.

54/ And I think especially for those who study poetry through an academic discipline, this dimension is important.

And so much of it is recoverable! We just need more collaboration between literary scholars and historical linguists.

55/ Okay, that’s enough on prosody.

Next time we’ll see how tone, prosodic alternation, and linguistic features besides pronunciation all interact in the crafting of parallelism.

It’s even more interesting than rhyme and meter!

P.S. If you are curious about how we know what we know about medieval Chinese tonal values, here are two English-language studies that you may find of interest:

Pulleyblank, Edwin G. "The Nature of the Middle Chinese Tones and Their Development To Early Mandarin." Journal of Chinese Linguistics 6.2 (1978): 173-203.

De Boer, Elisabeth M. The historical development of Japanese tone: from proto-Japanese to the modern dialects: the introduction and adaptation of the Middle Chinese tones in Japan. Harrassowitz, 2010. See pages 371-389.

Here endeth part two.

/end