Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song

在大多数欧洲语言中，词汇和语法上的区别是通过辅音和元音的序列（“分段音素”）来表达的，这些音素很容易用字母来表示。然而，语言声音系统的许多方面——音高、声调、节奏——不可能如此轻易地写下来；例如，英语句子末尾的句号粗略地代表了一系列的话语最终效果，包括音调降低，节奏减慢，在某些情况下声音质量嘎吱嘎吱。这些“韵律”或“超分段”现象很容易被忽视，不仅因为它们不影响单个单词的意思，而且因为它们在写作中反映得很差。它们也是歌曲中最明显的特征，歌曲将自己的韵律和旋律强加于语言的节奏和旋律模式上。由于这些和其他原因，超分段语虽然是口语的一部分，但在某种意义上是“超越文本”的。然而，在许多语言中，超音段特征的作用就像辅音和元音一样，用来表达单词之间的区别。最著名的例子是像汉语这样的“声调语言”，在这些语言中，“花”和“言”的区别只通过音高来表达。这些特征给字母书写带来了挑战，因此，尽管它们在意义上起着重要作用，但它们往往仍然“超越文本”。它们也给歌曲带来了问题，因为它们在音乐形式的要求和歌曲想要传达的语言意义之间造成了冲突——不仅仅是音乐情绪和文本整体意义之间的不匹配，而且在表达单词的音调模式和音符持续时间的非常直接的潜在影响中。因此，用声调语言学习歌曲和写作提供了一个有趣的机会，可以提炼更普遍的“文本”概念（即，不那么字母化、不那么以欧洲为中心、不那么文学化）。在这个项目中，我们建议研究南苏丹丁卡语的超分段特征。选择丁卡语有几个原因：它是一种繁荣的语言（大约有200万人使用），是世界上已知最丰富的超分段系统之一；歌曲创作是丁卡族以牛为基础的社会文化体系中充满活力的一部分，歌曲被用来交流社会、田园和精神生活的各个方面；丁卡语的读写能力有限，正字法还远未标准化，因此书面丁卡语的变化很大，因此有可能提供对超分段系统本身以及写作和文本创作的社会文化背景的见解。此外，该语言在各种环境中使用，从丁卡家园的传统牧民群体，到南方城镇的城市化群体，到喀土穆和国外重要的内战难民社区。由此产生的语言、写作和歌曲的可变性是本提案的核心：我们更大的目标是有助于理解丁卡语的非文本超片段属性如何以不同的格式（语音、歌曲、写作）进行调解，以及这种调解如何受到从听觉和视觉感知的低级属性到文本创建的物理和文化环境等因素的影响。

In most European languages, lexical and grammatical distinctions are conveyed by sequences of consonants and vowels ('segmental phonemes'), which are readily represented in alphabetic writing. However, many aspects of linguistic sound systems - pitch, tone of voice, tempo - cannot be so readily written down; for example, the full stop at the end of an English sentence crudely represents a whole range of utterance-final effects, including lowered pitch, slowed tempo, and in some cases creaky voice quality. These 'prosodic' or 'suprasegmental' phenomena are easily overlooked, not only because they do not affect the meaning of individual words, but also because they are poorly reflected in writing. They are also the features most obviously overridden in song, which imposes its own metre and melody on the rhythmic and melodic patterns of speech. For these and other reasons, suprasegmentals, though integral to spoken language, are in some sense 'beyond text'. Nevertheless, in many languages suprasegmental features function just like consonants and vowels to convey distinctions between words. The best-known cases are 'tone languages' like Chinese, where the difference between e.g. hua 'flower' and huà 'speech' is conveyed only by voice pitch. Such features pose a challenge for alphabetic writing, and therefore often also remain 'beyond text' despite their important role in meaning. They also pose a problem for song, because they create a conflict between the demands of the musical form and the linguistic meaning the song is intended to convey - not merely in mismatches between the musical mood and the overall meaning of the text, but in the very direct potential influence of pitch patterns and note durations on which words are expressed. Studying song and writing in a tone language thus provides interesting opportunities to refine a more general (i.e. less alphabetic, less Eurocentric, and less literary) notion of 'text'. In this project we propose to study suprasegmental features in Dinka, a language of Southern Sudan. There are several reasons for choosing Dinka: it is a thriving language (some 2m speakers) with one of the richest known suprasegmental systems in the world; composing songs is a vibrant part of the Dinka cattle-based socio-cultural system and songs are used to communicate about all aspects of social, pastoral, and spiritual life; literacy in Dinka is limited and the orthography is still far from standardised, so that written Dinka is quite variable and thus potentially provides insight both into the suprasegmental system itself and into the socio-cultural contexts of writing and text creation. Moreover, the language is spoken in a variety of environments, from traditional pastoralist groups in the Dinka homeland, through urbanised groups in towns in the south, to significant communities of civil war refugees in Khartoum and abroad. The resulting variability in speech, writing and song is central to this proposal: our larger goal is to contribute to an understanding of how the non-textual suprasegmental properties of the Dinka language are mediated in different formats (speech, song, writing), and how this mediation is influenced by factors ranging from low-level properties of auditory and visual perception to the physical and cultural settings in which texts are created.