That I didn’t know, and is useful info. But beware: tone and intonation are different things.
Probably a throwaway remark that I over-interpreted. I’ll forget it.
I didn’t make it clear that I wasn’t thinking about poetry, but prose. I have been pondering why I find the IT generated voices on SC Voice very difficult to listen to. Phonemically they’re clear, I think they have syllable stress; so what is missing is intonation?
EDIT after 3 weeks: that wasn’t correct: The Bots on SCVoice have neither syllable stress nor intonation. If they had syllable stress, which is known, they would be tolerable to listen to without bothering about whether Pali did/din’t have intonation patterns – which is a good thing because modern speakers will be influenced by the tone/intonation features of their known langua ges.
To make the point clear, I wasn’t (just) talking about poetry either.
Linguists use poetry to infer how words used to be pronounced. For example, most of what we know about old Chinese pronunciation comes from rhymes.
This, of course, assumes that the words were pronounced the same in the poems as in that language’s prose. As @stephen pointed out, there are some cases where the meter of the poem causes you to pronounce a word a bit differently (think, “That floats on high o’er vales and hills”) but such examples are the exception. For the most part, words are pronounced the same in prose as in poetry and thus knowing how a word was stressed in poetry tells us (in general) its pronunciation.
As far as the Amazon AI voices: yes. They are still lacking any real understanding of prosody.
Perhaps future AI language models could help text-to-speech algorithms shape their speech to better reflect the meaning of what they’re saying, but for now the algorithms are mostly stuck pronouncing one word one way (with a few heuristics like “pause between sentences” added in).
What would you say is the most commonly chanted prose sutta? Pref MN: With your help I could then find versions of the same sutta being chanted by Sri Lankan, Thai, Burmese and American monks. I should like to listen for the differences.
Ven. Analayo in a recent book, Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research, has analyzed those recorded chants in detail.
(See the section “Case Study in Pāli Xenoglossy”. )
Dhammaruwan’s story is related in detail, the recordings are described, 13 are transcribed, differences from the received text are related in detail.
One interesting thing noted is “at the time of recitation, the reciter did not have a proper knowledge of Pāli grammar””
Also interesting is that the recitations do not agree with any modern edition consulted.
There is also a discussion of “The Brain in the Listing of Anatomical Parts”, the brain being absent in the canonical listings.
The conclusion is that, “the evidence surveyed above suggests that Dhammaruwan’s chanting of these texts as a child is a genuine case of xenoglossy, in the sense of involving a recitation of material in Pāli that he did not learn and was not made to recite in this way in his present life in Sri Lanka. “
“…the chants contain a number of variants that are distinctly un-Sri Lankan. “
The recitations give an interesting snapshot of Pali recitation from a very distant time.
Good question! I don’t think that’s a reasonable statement. If we look at the way this topic is treated by Geiger, for example, we can see that stress impacts the quality of the vowels in related Prakrits. For example, in Jain Prakrit, arahant becomes arihant. This gives us a very good indication that the second vowel is unstressed, due to its weakening from a to i. (Like the unstressed Aus in Australia is dropped to give “Straya”.) The vowel in a syllable before a stressed syllable is normally unstressed, so this gives us hints as to where the stresses occur. While obviously stress can be different in different languages and change over time, what we see probably isn’t random change and findings from other Prakrits and Sanskrit could sensibly be used to infer historical Pali stress patterns. There are explicit rules for stress in Sanskrit.
Stress is not actually the same as heavy and light syllables. It is something else that tends to result in often sub-phonemic (argh is that the term?) lengthening of the stressed vowel, accompanied by the shortening of other vowels. As per Sanskrit, we would expect a heavy penultimate syllable to be stressed; if the penultimate syllable is light, the stress will move forward.
I don’t think the Pali on Sutta Central would actually have any kind of proper stress, the syllables would be equally stressed, which is characteristic only of “robot language”, hence why it might sound mechanical or difficult to listen to.
Actually, it was making this observation that set me off on this line of thought in the first place. I’m learning a lot. I need to study what you shared here carefully, and to apply it to what I am writing. I shall be back. Again, many th anks.
Btw, how would you have reacted if I had asked:
Q1: Is this a reasonable brief statement?
It’s not possible to know what intonation the original Pali speakers used, and the systems used today have come to us through the Sri Lankan, Burmese and Thai [?chanting] traditions.
Yeah, maybe a bit difficult to know much about the intonation outside of inferring a few very general things. I did a few weeks of spoken Sanskrit but dropped bcos the internet connection to India was poor. Pretty sure that our teachers used bitonal Hindi intonation. Hindi has fall (command) rise (emphasis on non sentence final content word & question), and rise fall intonation (question word). I think. Among other things.
I would have guessed this is normal across most Indian languages, so it would be surprising however if Pali had something else. I can’t be imagine being told to go (gaccha!) with rising intonation, for example. But I don’t know of any books that touch on this.
The traditional grammars normally aren’t very good with non-phonemic features. Actually, traditional Pali/Sanskrit education has been that way for a long time: the traditional methods assume you speak an Indic vernacular and just need grammar.
AFAIK Prosodic features get nearly completely lost in the Burmese and Thai chanting traditions. The Sri Lankan tradition retains stress and possibly some aspects of intonation. I used to occasionally do a bit of Mandarin singing in lay life (in addition to KTV) and in Mandarin, sometimes the tones are incorporated into the song tones. It’s very possible that the better Sri Lankan chanters have rising tone questions (I think I have heard this in Ven. Na Uyane Ariyadhamma recordings) but it may be incorporated into the chant.
Excuse me, this is a little late and slightly off-topic, but, regarding Dhammaruwan, I read somewhere once that, in addition to the chants of his you commonly find, there is a recording of him chanting the Mahānidāna Sutta somewhere. Can anyone confirm or deny?
I think I have heard end sentence rising question tone in the recordings of Ven. Na Uyane Ariyadhamma reciting the samanera panha i.e. the general melodic line of the chanting follows natural intonation patterns (may not be exact). But that is a question word at the end of the sentence. It would sound a bit unnatural if it were falling tone on kim in dve nama kim etc.
In “taṁ kissa hetu?”, I think the tonal pattern would more naturally be rising-falling, with rising on kissa as the question word. As per the 3rd example I gave for Hindi tone pattern.
Will give it more thought after I recover from the flu. I think this is an understudied area, so I am just throwing some thoughts out there. A significant percentage of people I know are not good enough at chanting to have anything like naturallish intonation. As intonation aids comprehension, there might be a very good prescriptive argument for at least avoiding unnatural intonation patterns in the chanting.
anks.