Hi all,

I was wondering did anyone already made a thread about this?
I sort of expected this in the art section but it seem like it deserves a sub-forum on its own.

Music is a huge part of Chinese culture and history for that matter. There's so much diversity in it ranging region to region as well as from ancient times to modern days. Each with it's own unique origins and borrowings from others as many other civilizations have done.

Another question, mainly for the linguists. How does a language become tonal?
I've heard that the Chinese language in ancient times wasn't and gradually became for whatever reasons I don't know.

I have a friend who has this crazy theory that English in the future may face similar situations. Like not only it is an lingua franca but because of so many different groups of people learning it and using it widely, they will influence the language to a certain extent. Although I don't know how it can but is anything possible?

The reason why I added the last sentences was that I've heard many times how the Chinese language sounds like music (or people fighting). I'm trying to think that there was this book I read from a missionary during the early 20th century who was born and raised in China. She mentioned how to her, the language sounds very beautiful if spoken in a certain way I think. She heard it once and I can't remember exactly how it was described.

NOOOOOOoooooo, I like your previous avatar better.
Anyways. I don't know there are much diversity in regions. . . . As far as I can tell, music pretty much are similar, unlike forms of speech, and if they were different regions from regions, it was more to random chance then it is to logical occurrence.
From several books I got, they actually are very similar, as musics were given a certain expectation by Confucians, thus only certain forms are considered to be gentleman's music. And only these music gets to play around. . .


A professor I had once mentioned that certain dynasty uses certain dialect as main stream. So if I remember correctly, Tang uses Cantonese so Tang poem sounds better in Cantonese [I couldn't tell the difference, but I was also told I am tone deaf] and Song poems sound better in Minnan. [again... made no difference to me] Mandarin probably was not the official language 2000 years ago. . .

Yea... you'll expect that from such a huge land across so many regions.
One more thing, wasn't instrumental music the mainstream during those times?
From all those periodic drama's and movies that i've watched, many of those music played by the characters, etc are instrumentals, very rarely that they are sung in words.

About the Tang and dialect, my teacher mentioned it too a few years back, but are you sure it's Cantonese?
I can't seem to recall it.
It just doesn't seem right, since the Tang line back then had a little barbaric (no offence, but I don't mean the barbaric most people think of) blood in them.
Cantonese is spoken mostly in the far southern region, am I right?

You may want to check out the Traditional Chinese Music thread.

Also, there are other music related topics, such as Qin 琴, Ancient Musical instrument of scholars, in the hidden Traditional Chinese Entertainment subforum of the Chinese Culture forum.

First I should they maybe we need a sub-forum on the Chinese Acient Music. Because we have so many kinds of musical instruments, different from time to tme and region to region. And there are so many different music style in China, which is a very complex theme to discuss.

Second, to a language become tonal, I think it can be appeared only in China. As we know, Chinese characters use the different system from western countries. Chinese people use pictograph and sound to make the characters, but not alphabet. So, a problem comes, how to distinguish the different characters with the same sound, or one character with different meaning. The best answer is tonal, which makes whole system simple and clear.