09/01/09 10:39:43
>>620
English and Japanese are different in terms of isochrony. Your mother tongue is a stress-timed language, and mine is mora-timed.
Also, because of this difference and phonetic dissimilarity,
Japanese encodes semantic information into sounds in a strikingly different way from European languages.
It is virtually impossible to explain what's going on if you only speak one language,
but if you encode meanings into notes in a song the same way as you do in English,
then you give very little information to a song.
I know this doesn't make sense to you; it's like teaching people living in a desert the difference between the crawl and the breaststroke.
But the point is that we use time and sounds in a different way to convey meanings, and
this makes it entirely different to write and sing a song.
You'll be surprised when you compare Japanese versions of famous English songs.
Semantically very little can be encoded in such songs in Japanese
because the style forces translators to use a skewed poem writing method that only works in different isochrony and phonology.