Chinese is already spoken with 4 tones and Thai with 5 tones
Then How do they sing songs? Not these tones changes while singing a song?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Mandarin songs are mostly sung to the tune, with little or no regard to the tone of the lyric. The reason? There is probably not enough tone diversity to make interesting enough melodies out of the four tones.
Taiwanese (what you call Hokkien, but I’m only limiting my observation to Taiwanese), on the other hand, has twice as many tones. The most popular Taiwanese songs you find (e.g., available in karaoke) are written with consideration for the tone of the lyric. One reason they are popular is because they are actually more understandable and memorable than if you don’t respect the tone. Those song writers who are masters at this include 鄭進一, 林強, etc. They often start out with the lyric, which already has its melodic contour defined by the tone progression (high, middle, low, rising, falling, two lexical “entering” tones (short), plus one low-entering tone in tone sandhi; there are also additional contour tones in triplication words, like 金金金 — the tone of the first elongated syllable goes up and down; the second is middle-level, and the third is high-level). Then they shift the tone of the phrase up or down while preserving the relative tone levels of the lyric as much as possible. Consider songs like 白鴒鷥, 天烏烏, 燒肉粽, 向前行, 家後, 愛拼才會贏, 天色漸漸光 — all respect the underlying tone to a large extent (I’d say well over 90% of the time).
That is not to say there are no popular songs that don’t respect the tones. 望春風 for example, is certainly popular for its memorable melody, and its melody does deviate from the tone of its lyric in more places than the other songs above. I’d say it is an exception, since people like it for the melody and for the poetic, refined language. Some pop-style songs (often given melody first and the lyric is translated) can sound contrived if they can’t find words that satisfy both the tonal, syntactic, and semantic constraints simultaneously.
To speakers of other languages, Taiwanese melodies that respect the lyrical tone may sound a bit twisted (and I notice the same with some Cantonese songs) but to the native speakers they sound just right. The tone is important. This is why sometimes when you hear foreigners who try to sing Taiwanese songs by following phonetic notation (without tone) on melody, they still sound foreign because their articulation lacks that tonal twist.
The tones do not get messed up when singing because Chinese languages use contour tones. In Mandarin Chinese, what matters is not the pitch of the sound, but the “shape” and “texture” of the sound. A flat tone is going to sound like a flat tone no matter how high or low it's sung.
In many songs tones become irrelevant as the singer sings more loudly, but the premise and individual words are still understood within the context of the song itself.
As well, many Chinese words are homophones, so singers will intentionally change tones to shift the meaning of the word and give the song itself a new or deeper meaning.