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#738: God Created Heaven and Earth
Mar. 13th, 2020 09:01 pmThere are a lot of diacritics you have to deal with if you want to transliterate non-English text. Spanish has Ns with tildes. German has Us with umlauts. Korean has Os with the curvy U-things on them (this might not be the technical term).
Now we're onto Taiwanese and superscripts. The music is described as a "Pinpo melody," except that the n is written as a superscript next to the i. From my very ill-informed Wikipedia browsing, I'm guessing that this means the vowel is pronounced more "nasally." (In languages like French, whether or not a vowel is nasal can change the meaning of a word.) The music is also attributed to "Taiwanese Seng-si," but I don't know what that means either.
The melody itself is another pentatonic one, but in a minor key and with a pretty big range, so I'm guessing it would sound rather different from a "southern" US pentatonic melody. It's a simple pattern but it's emerged in lots of different cultures!
Also, to those of you joining us due to the quarantines, hello! I try to jump around from section to section so I don't get too bogged down in any one theme. The "tags" at the bottom will link you to archives of posts on a similar theme, whether it's the category they're listed under in the hymnal or one of the repetitive topics that comes up in the blogging.
Now we're onto Taiwanese and superscripts. The music is described as a "Pinpo melody," except that the n is written as a superscript next to the i. From my very ill-informed Wikipedia browsing, I'm guessing that this means the vowel is pronounced more "nasally." (In languages like French, whether or not a vowel is nasal can change the meaning of a word.) The music is also attributed to "Taiwanese Seng-si," but I don't know what that means either.
The melody itself is another pentatonic one, but in a minor key and with a pretty big range, so I'm guessing it would sound rather different from a "southern" US pentatonic melody. It's a simple pattern but it's emerged in lots of different cultures!
Also, to those of you joining us due to the quarantines, hello! I try to jump around from section to section so I don't get too bogged down in any one theme. The "tags" at the bottom will link you to archives of posts on a similar theme, whether it's the category they're listed under in the hymnal or one of the repetitive topics that comes up in the blogging.
