The CBB

Phonology Puerto Rican Spanish has a reputation for being hard to understand, especially for the non-native speaker: a rapid cadence, frequent elision of consonants and even syllables, and dissimilarity to the highland varieties of Spanish most often taught abroad tend to lead to intelligibility pr...

I know that there’s a lot of love for Romance languages here on the CBB and I’d like to add my little bit to the Teach and Share pile. Here’s a brief rundown of the eccentricities of my native tongue, the variety of Spanish native to the island of Puerto Rico. First, the broad strokes. While there i...

Chcę się uczyć języku polskiego. I want to learn Polish. ¡Qué bueno! Quiero practicar mi español, porque no puedo hablar en el idioma con mucha fluidez. That's nice! I want to practice my Spanish, because I can't speak in the language with much fluency. דִבַּרְתָּ אֵת הַלָשׁוֹן מְאֹד טוֹב! הַסְפָרַ...

Hebrew :isr: לאֹ אָכַל הַסוּס אֵת סָלָט מְלָפְפוֹן. Lōʾ ʾāḵal hasûs ʾeṯ sālāṭ mǝlāp̄ǝp̄ôn. [loː ʔɔˈχɑːɑl haˈsuːus ʔeːeθ sɔˈlɔːɔtˤ malɔfaˈfoːon] NEG eat.PERF DEF=horse DEF.ACC salad(.CSCT) cucumber The horse does not eat cucumber salad. This Hebrew—like all Hebrew, really—is somewhat of a temporal m...

The first two lines are directly from the Peshitta translation of Luke 1, except for the additions of Mary and Jesus' names. If I see how the Greek words are used in the Septuagint and compare them with their Hebrew counterparts... κεχαριτωμένη kekharitōménē | grā́tiā plḗna | full of grace - this f...

I've recently started studying pre-modern Hebrew, and this seems like a good place to start translating. There are a handful of Greco-Roman and Christian concepts here which are a bit tricky to translate—both hail as a greeting and grace and sin as ideas are somewhat foreign to Jewish thought, but n...

In theory, one could play in the key of any of the twelve shí’èrlǜ pitches, and any of the seven pitches within those keys could serve as finalis. Therefore, scholars of the Tàng and Sòng recognized eighty-four possible mode-key combinations, or diàozi (調子, chōshi , ‘mode-key combination’), in whic...

Thank you again for all this. There's several things I'd like to ask about or comment on, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow now (or the day after?). Instead, I'll just share a few historical notes from Grove on the topic of gagaku, which may or may not be true: The pleasure is all mine [:D]. Ev...

Jupiter's balls, what wealth of musical insight have I found after going 'I wonder what's up in the cbb'. thank you so much for this thread, and I look forwards to moar. And the chinese are so... writy! I bet their musical history is relatively well documented. I'm enjoying myself [:P]. I'd really ...

Thank you for this thread! It’s great – I like the inclusion of characters and Pinyin. I'm so glad I can share [:D]! This particular romanization style/format was principally inspired by Zompist's China Construction Kit, in which all Pīnyīn consistently has tone diacritics and words are first intro...

Heptatonic modes NB: The sources I’ve consulted use two different pitch equivalencies between the Sinospheric shí’èrlǜ (十二律, jūniritsu , ‘twelve tones’) and our twelve-tone chromatic scale. Scholars dealing with Chinese music tend to arbitrarily assign the generating pitch huángzhōng (黃鐘, ‘yellow b...

Thank you so much for this! Both the Chinese [Thrasher 85] and Japanese [Garfias 60] traditions recognize two more additional accidental tones, referred to in much of the Japanese literature as “exchange tones”: biàngōng (變宮, henkyū , ‘si’, lit. altered gōng ’) and biànzhī (變徵, henchi , ‘fi, lit. a...

Just anticipating a question or two (I finished this far too late last night to expect any sort of completeness). Tuning practice is often separate from tuning theory in East Asia. One can almost always expect scale degrees 1, 2, and 5 to be stacked perfect fifths in the Pythagorean sense [Thrasher ...

For convenience’s sake, I’ll write out all Sinospheric concepts in Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (漢語拼音, ‘Transcription System for the Chinese Language’), followed by a parenthetical with traditional characters, the Japanese reading in Hepburn (sometimes *conjectural), and a translation in single quotation marks. If...

What a fantastic introduction! I can’t wait for your maqamat analysis :) As a brief aside, some older Sinospheric classical music does play into this heptatonic/modal Greco-Indian tradition (I like your term, Salmoneus!). I find this most striking in the Tang court music underlying Japanese gagaku, ...

:esp: Spanish ¡En confianza! in confidence Feel free! Spanish is flexing the semantic range of confianza here; as well as “confidence”, its English cognate, it often denotes interpersonal trust. Here, the speaker is giving permission by emphasizing the familiar bond (real or fictive) that they share...

I just wanted to say that I absolutely adore the vibe of Boral :) This is likely a bit of an off-topic question, but what is the music theory of Boral-verse Europe like? The manoscard scale is somewhat reminiscent of the American blues scale; Gerhard Kubik among others describes “blue notes” as the ...

…. According to a well-known example (which I believe is common in West Africa? ), women inherit land and dwellings from their mothers, while males inherit tools and boats from their dads. I was unaware of the West African example; however there is also an example on some Greek island(s) (which I f...

:eur: European Romance Car es uns còrbs com un escriptori? [ˈkaɾ.es.ysˈkɔrs.kum.yn.es.kriˈtu.ri] why COP.3SG.PRS INDF.M-NOM raven-NOM like INDF.M desk Why is a raven like a writing desk? European Romance is a standardized Old Occitan, used as an auxlang in a 22nd century European Union from a specul...

Although I'm not an Indo-Aryanist by any means, it certainly reminds me of what I've seen of the Dardic languages. Excited to see how the morphology works out