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New Year Song for Wen Zhong
While my broadband lasts...
I want to do 31_days prompts but snow, work, and getting to work and back eats all my time and energy. This is annoying. I wish the prompts weren't so very date-specific, but maybe I'll go back and do them some time. Meanwhile, here's a little ditty I've had in my head ever since I created that icon up there.
Writing English songs with Chinese names is impossible, simply because tones kill rhymes. Take everything here as an eye-rhyme, because half the time I hear Fan Li as Fan Lai, especially when Fan Li is saying it. And I still can't figure out how many syllables in Jian. I'm making it an elided one but any help from native speakers is Much Appreciated.
A you're adorkable
B you're bù bēi bú kàng
C you're a charmer and that's flat
D you're delightful and
E you're enciteful and
F there's a feather in your hat.
G you are Gou Jian's man
H you're the pride of Han
I you're insightful though not young
J you got Jian set free
From Fu Chai's pillory
L with your lovely silver tongue
You pwned Bo Pi
With a pretty paperweight-
You helped Fan Li
Turn a tiny country into something great!
U-eh owes you a lot;
V means you're very hot;
WZ-and-X
Is not a patch on you,
The man who's straight and true
And keeps his head atop his neck.
I want to do 31_days prompts but snow, work, and getting to work and back eats all my time and energy. This is annoying. I wish the prompts weren't so very date-specific, but maybe I'll go back and do them some time. Meanwhile, here's a little ditty I've had in my head ever since I created that icon up there.
Writing English songs with Chinese names is impossible, simply because tones kill rhymes. Take everything here as an eye-rhyme, because half the time I hear Fan Li as Fan Lai, especially when Fan Li is saying it. And I still can't figure out how many syllables in Jian. I'm making it an elided one but any help from native speakers is Much Appreciated.
A you're adorkable
B you're bù bēi bú kàng
C you're a charmer and that's flat
D you're delightful and
E you're enciteful and
F there's a feather in your hat.
G you are Gou Jian's man
H you're the pride of Han
I you're insightful though not young
J you got Jian set free
From Fu Chai's pillory
L with your lovely silver tongue
You pwned Bo Pi
With a pretty paperweight-
You helped Fan Li
Turn a tiny country into something great!
U-eh owes you a lot;
V means you're very hot;
WZ-and-X
Is not a patch on you,
The man who's straight and true
And keeps his head atop his neck.
pwned by html + addendum
You pwned Bo Pi
With a pretty paperweight-
You helped Fan Li
Turn a tiny country into something great!
*two thumbs up*
Jian is pronounced as one syllable (like "zhyen" - don't know how to write that in phonetic lingo, sorry) with a falling tone so that line does scan excellently (as does the rest of the ditty, except for Han which is pronounced like Han Solo; at that time the Han dynasty did not exist, unless you are referring to the Chinese race in general in which case I fully agree). It is the same sound like the second syllable of Fu-Jian province: if you can play .ogg files, just click on the first word.
Re: pwned by html + addendum
Re: pwned by html + addendum
See, in NAmerican English, the han of Han Solo does rhyme with man. ^^;;
Yeah, I meant 'pride of the Chinese race let's use an anachronistic word for same because I need a rhyme.' I seem to recall that article said Chu was a- err- 'Chinese-type' people where Wu and Yue weren't quite (though I could never figure was he talking racial composition or linguistic.)
The zhyen problem is familiar from Japanese. I never know how to express the fact that Tokyo has two (ear) syllables and not three, even if by Japanese counting it has four.
no subject
Yeah the author took lots of ancient sources (some apocryphal, after checking out on Yahoo China) as his references to write that article which emphasized the difference between Wu+Yue (described even in the opening voiceover of Woxin as 南蛮, i.e. southern barbarians) and the rest of China (referred to also in the series as 中原 i.e. central plains).
What I gather from v. limited reading is that Wu&Yue were probably culturally (as described in his article) and linguistically distinct (in the way that the modern southern Chinese dialects Hokkien and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible with northern Chinese dialects) but racially maybe not so much: perhaps the same or slightly more than modern "northern" and "southern" Chinese phenotypes.