Languages: “Inward Journey” Recital Pt. 2

French, German, Italian. Maybe English, maybe Russian, MAYBE Spanish and MAYBE Czech: these are the languages a classical singer can expect to encounter in their journey through college, through summer training programs, Young Artist apprenticeships, etc etc. This leaves the other 5,993 languages of humankind in the category of “other.” Are these 7 so specialized, so perfect for singing? In fact, the answer is no. They are standard only by historical accident.

The slightest exploration will reveal linguistics to be one of the most fascinating & beautiful fields of knowledge that people have undertaken. The amazing variety in human languages, in their structures, in their range of sound combinations, in their modes of expression, is enough to boggle the mind. The subject has attracted me as an amateur for years.

One who has studied Spanish or French may have a sense of how different a language may be from English—but in fact these languages are, on the spectrum of world languages, remarkably similar to English. Those who have studied Russian can imagine something a bit more remote from English, but in fact still quite close in world terms. All of these languages belong to the family known as “Indo-European” and probably descend from a common ancestor spoken approximately 6000 years ago. Those who speak Japanese, Korean, one of the Chinese languages, Thai, or Vietnamese have a much better idea of how radically the structure and logic of a language can depart from what we are used to in English. To me, this range of difference is astounding & beautiful. Therefore, it is a shame to me that my own chosen art form, classical music, remains sadly neglectful of the possibilities inherent in the world’s languages.

I have wanted to program a recital focusing on repertoire in non-standard languages for some time. For me, it is a double passion project, allowing me to not just learn some unusual repertoire, but to delve into these languages, take them apart, and learn how they work (granted, this study is only scratching the surface compared to actually learning to speak one of these languages).

Proceeding from this idea, my collaborators & I originally conceived a program for this recital featuring classical songs in Irish Gaelic, Swedish, Finnish, Farsi, Catalan, Japanese and Korean. Over time, due to time constraints, this was condensed to a recital featuring the Irish, Swedish, and Finnish (as well as a brand new cycle in English). It has been fascinating to delve into the repertoire available in non-standard languages, and I look forward to programming more languages on future recitals.

For those who are interested, I want to share a few words about each of the languages we are including.

Irish Gaelic belongs to the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European language family. The Celts may once have been the predominant ethnolinguistic group populating from the British Isles across Western, Central, and Northern Europe, before the spread of Germanic & Latin-speaking peoples across the continent. In later centuries, these (Celtic) languages all become minority languages bordering on linguistic extinction. Aside from Irish, Celtic also includes Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Manx, Cornish and a few others. Despite having germinated on the British Isles, English is not a Celtic language, but rather a Germanic language deriving from Anglo-Saxon, a West Germanic language.

For the singer, Irish presents a number of challenges. The first is its extraordinarily complex spelling system. Irish has been written with Roman letters (like English) for about 1200 years, making it pretty old as written languages go (in comparison, the Finnish language did not develop a writing system until about 450 years ago). Like many languages, including English, the effort to record the sounds of Irish in Roman script was a difficult science, because Roman letters were designed to match the sounds of (you guessed it) Latin. The range of Irish vowel sounds that far outrun the simple and pure [a] [e] [i] [o] and [u] of Latin. These five pure vowels can still be heard today in Spanish & Italian, but otherwise it is actually quite humorous that a writing system with only five vowel symbols is used to write most of the languages of Europe, the majority of which have far more vowel sounds than that (five being actually a rather low number for a vowel inventory). In Irish, the solution has been two fold. Some variation is allowed by the addition of the diacritic accent ´ . So one sees ten written vowels: a,e,i,o,u,á,é,í,ó,ú. The remaining vowel subtleties are communicated by combining these symbols, sometimes several vowel letters appearing in a row.

The consonants are no less complicated than the vowels. Irish has a distinction known as “broad”/“slender”—this is the same distinction that someone who has studied Russian will know as “hard”/“soft’—, or, for the linguist, “velarized” vs. “palatalized”. To put it over-simply, it means that each consonant sound has two slightly-different variants. If you pronounce the wrong variant, you have mispronounced the word. Again, Latin has no such distinction and its alphabet is in no way suited to convey it. The solution? Lots and lots of silent letters. Essentially, in Irish, many letters function only as diacritics, modifying the letter next door. Many more letters remain in the spellings of words left over from archaic pronunciations which are no longer current (much like many of the confusing spellings in English).

Thus we get seemingly-ridiculous spellings such as: comhaireamh, pronounced “KOrev,”; cuimhin, pronounced “queen,”; and thabhairt, pronounced “hoort”.

Thankfully, our three Irish songs (the cycle Trí Amhrán by John Kinsella) are distributed by Tionscadal na nAmhrán Ealaíne Gaeilge, that is, The Irish Art Song Project of the Contemporary Music Center. In their effort to make the Irish Language more widespread in the concert hall, they have provided tools to make the pronunciation of the song texts more easy. Each has been meticulously transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Most singers know how to read IPA, although many of the sounds in Irish, and thus the symbols used to represent them, were unfamiliar to me, because they do not exist in English, French, German or Italian. Thus, sounds like: [χ], the unvoiced uvular fricative, and [ɣ], the voiced velar fricative. The silent letters indicating broad/slender are replaced by IPA diacritics, thus: [ljo] representing the sound of “lo,” but with a palatalized [l] (for Russian speakers, лё as opposed to ло).

The final effect, though, is a beautiful language with a flowing, tripping sound. I hope that some of the beauty of this language will come through in my expression of the texts.

As far as structure/grammar, without going into too much detail, I found Irish to have interesting similarities to English and French, but with plenty of idiosyncrasies that I can’t understand without having truly learned the language.

The next set on our program is in Swedish. The cycle is Södergran-Dagbok, or Södergran Diary, by composer Mark Robson, based on poetry by the Swedish-speaking Finnish poet Edith Södergran.

Swedish is a Scandinavian language belonging to the North Germanic branch of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family. German and Swedish are both descended from a common ancestral language (known to linguists, though not to its ancient speakers, as Proto-Germanic), and began to diverge sometime between 1900-2500 years ago. Swedish is a close relative of Norwegian and Danish, and slightly further diverged from Icelandic. (Interestingly, the speakers of the Scandinavian common ancestor, known as Old Norse, did at times invade the British Isles, and some influences from Old Norse can be observed in the structure of English).

As far as its sounds, I found the Swedish language to be more difficult than Irish. I believe that the sounds of Irish, particularly its vowel inventory, have come to resemble those of English over the years, as it has coexisted with English, and in general now only exists (with some exceptions) as a second language learned by native English speakers. Swedish, on the other hand, has a complement of very different vowel sounds. At first glance they seem to conform to those found in German, but they have a few that are unfamiliar and seem to occupy “middle-territories” between the German vowels. Students of German must go to some pains initially to learn the difference between u and ü. These same sounds exist in Swedish, represented by the letters o and y, but Swedish has even a third “ooh” sound, represented by the letter u. This sound has lips even more tightly rounded than ü/y, but the tongue not quite as high (but not yet as low as German u/Swedish o). There is even more subtlety here than I’ve just enumerated, because in the case of the letters u and o, there is both a short/open and a long/closed variant of each (this phonological structure will be familiar to German speakers). 

Swedish also has an unusual prosodic feature of secondary stress, which is also very alien to someone used to speaking English or German. In English, each word generally has a single stressed syllable, and “secondary stresses” are quite weak compared to the main stress. In Swedish, in words with a second stress, that stress is quite marked. Because rules of word-construction and stress are very basic to our innate understanding of language, prosodic rules like this are uniquely strong challenges to the language-learner. The second stresses bear less effect on a singer than on a speaker, since many elements of our prosody are predetermined by the composer’s setting. Nevertheless, rendering the phrases naturally requires that one be familiar with the stress-pattern of each word.

Swedish shares with Irish (and English, and...and...and…) the funny condition of being written in the Roman alphabet. The inventory of sounds is enriched by a few extra symbols, such as å, ö, and ä. Some sounds are represented by digraphs (two letters representing one sound, like “sh” or “th” in English), such as sj representing the sound [ɧ], the almost-impossible (for an English speaker) “voiceless coarticulated velar and palatoalveolar fricative,” a sound which does not exist in any language I’ve ever studied.

Unlike Irish, Swedish has a distinct tradition of “classical” or “lyric” elocution. Much like French and German, there is a slightly different variety of Swedish that is sung by classical singers compared to that spoken in everyday conversation. (By way of example, the gravelly, back-of-the-throat, rolled French “r” sound that is so associated with a French accent is generally not used by classical singers, but is replaced in classical singing with an Italianate flipped or rolled “r”). When I first coached the texts of these Swedish songs, I worked with a native speaker who was not an expert specifically in the lyric tradition. The aforementioned [ɧ] sound gave us lots of trouble and I went to great pains to learn it. When I later had the chance to learn a bit more about the lyric tradition, I was simultaneously relieved and disappointed to learn that, in singing diction, this sound is rendered simply as [ ʃ ] (just like English “sh”). Much easier!

Complicating the situation for someone who wants to pronounce accurately, recall the fact the poet of these songs, Edith Södergran, was not a Swede but a Swedish-speaking Finn. There is a longstanding tradition of Swedish as a literary language in Finland, and a well-established Swedish-speaking minority there. However, for purposes of diction, the Swedish spoken in Finland is distinct in some ways from the standard Stockholm Swedish, and so I’ve also been working to conform my Swedish to good “Finnish Swedish.”

Structurally, Swedish reminds me very much of German, though perhaps closer in a few constructions to English. One unusual feature that sets it apart from both languages is that in most cases the article follows rather than precedes the noun.

I want to extend thanks to my Swedish native-speaker coach Stella Fors, and to Kathleen Roland-Silverstein, who gave me some insight into the issues of proper lyric Swedish and “Finnish-Swedish”.

The final language on our concert (besides a beautiful new commission on English texts by composer Michael Welsh) is Finnish. Although it is represented on our program only by a single short song, “Kullanmurunen” or “Nugget of Gold,” by Oskar Merikanto, this is the language I was perhaps most excited to work with. Why? Because it is the furthest away, linguistically, from all the other languages I’m familiar with! And, after all, variety is the spice of life.

Although they fare from very different branches of the Indo-European tree, Irish from the Celtic and Swedish from the Germanic, both of these languages belong to the same large family as English, French, Italian, and German. Finnish, on the other hand, is not an Indo-European language at all (contrary to what may be common perception, Finnish is not a Scandinavian language). It fares from the Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family, a branch which also contains Hungarian and Estonian. The common ancestor of Indo-European and Uralic is not known and there is no way of knowing how long ago they may have diverged. To a student of languages, this is very exciting. For someone versed in Indo-European languages, studying Finnish is like visiting an alien planet!

I took this recital prep as an opportunity to make a real study of Finnish—more complete than my cursory studies of Irish and Swedish, though still far from being able to speak the language.

As far as its sounds, Finnish is the easiest of the three languages. It quite literally has fewer sounds than the other two. It has all the five pure vowels of Latin or Italian, plus ä, ö, and y, the first of which sounds just like the English “a” in a word like “pan” or “hat,” and the latter two of which are identical to sounds in German or French. Finnish has a rather restricted consonant inventory, none of which are unusual to someone who knows Italian or Spanish. 

Its only unusual feature is the importance of phonological doubling. Consonant doubling will be familiar to anyone who has studied Italian, but Finnish also features phonological vowel length, a feature that is quite hard for an English speaker to internalize and grasp. Again, though, much like the secondary stress of Swedish, vowel-length becomes a lot less relevant to a singer than to a speaker, since the length of each syllable has already been pre-determined by the choices of the composer.

In its grammatical structure is where Finnish really diverges from what we are familiar with in Indo-European. I’ll briefly quote some materials from the Finnish course from Pimsleur Language Learning (great products for language learners, by the way):

“Finnish grammar is quite complicated, but the rules have few exceptions. Nouns have fifteen cases; verbs have five infinitives. It’s an agglutinative language, which means that every morpheme (a small meaningful unit) added to the noun is a unit that modifies its meaning. For example, the word päiväkirjastanikaan is composed of the following: päiväkirja (noun) means “diary,” sta (suffix) means “from,” ni (suffix) means “my,” kaan (suffix) means “not even.” So the whole word means “not even from my diary”.”

In other news, “a small meaningful unit” is the name of my upcoming EP.

Finnish is truly a pleasure to study & pronounce, and a language I hope I will continue to become familiar with as time goes on. I want to think my Finnish native-speaker coach Oona Wuolijoki.

Keep eyes peeled on this blog for my next post about this recital which will be about the overall process of its conception & preparation. Cheers and thanks for reading!