Phonological Soundscapes in Medieval Poetry Christopher Hench University of California, Berkeley Department of German Berkeley, CA 94720, USA [email protected] Abstract or sung aloud (with or without musical accompa- niment), any insight into how they sounded to the The oral component of medieval poetry audience would reveal a crucial aspect of the per- was integral to its performance and recep- formance. Stock’s reading emphasizes the sounds tion. Yet many believe that the medieval of words and how the repetition of words is not voice has been forever lost, and any at- only a repetition of a concept, but a repetition of tempts at rediscovering it are doomed to a sound, reinforcing an idea’s connection to that failure due to scribal practices, manuscript sound (Stock, 2004, 195). Yet it is not necessar- mouvance, and linguistic normalization in ily about hearing and recognizing these patterns, editing practices. This paper offers a rather that “in the sound dimension the individual method to abstract from this noise and rhetorical figure is blurred and a total acoustic im- better understand relative differences in pression emerges” (Stock, 2004, 200). phonological soundscapes by considering This paper proposes taking advantage of the in- syllable qualities. The presented syllabifi- formation in syllables to gauge the aesthetic affect cation method and soundscape analysis of- of a poem’s soundscape by calculating the per- fer themselves as cross-disciplinary tools centage of open syllables in stanzas of medieval for low-resource languages. As a case poetry. It then attempts to correlate these “total study, we examine medieval German lyric acoustic impression[s]” with the medieval voice. and argue that the heavily debated lyri- cal ‘I’ follows a unique trajectory through 2 Soundscapes soundscapes, shedding light on the perfor- For orientation purposes, we may first read aloud mance and practice of these poets. the following stanzas from the German poet Rein- mar der Alte. As our focus is on the phonological 1 Introduction sound and rhythm, we may for now set aside un- Research attempting to generalize medieval liter- derstanding the poem, opening up this experience ary form has been severely hindered by the gap to those who are not experts in medieval German.2 between performativity and manuscript evidence, manuscript mouvance, and linguistic normaliza- [1] Destˆ ein not,ˆ daz mich ein man tion in editing practices.1 How can formal fea- vor al der werlte twinget, swes er wil. tures be identified and agreed upon if manuscripts sol ich, des ich niht enkan, differ significantly, and most transcriptions used beginnen, daz ist mir ein swaerez spil. by scholars today have been heavily edited? Re- Ich hatˆ ie vil staeten muot nu muoz ich leben als ein wˆıp, cent scholarship has called for medievalists to 3 move beyond such obstacles and recognize the diu minnet und daz angestlˆıchen tuot. importance of form in composition, performance, 2Each stanza is excerpted from a different poem. and reception (Stock, 2004; Kragl, 2011; Braun, 3Des Minnesangs Fruhling¨ (MF) 192, 25-214C. “It is dis- 2013). Markus Stock focuses on sound, reasoning tressful that a man may force me before all the world to do as he wishes. Am I to begin things that I cannot, that is for that if we believe these poems were primarily read me a difficult game. I’ve always had steadfast courage. Now I must live as a woman who loves, and does so in fear.” All 1See Paul Zumthor (1984) on the medieval voice. translations are the author’s own unless otherwise noted. 46 Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature. Proceedings, pages 46–56, Vancouver, BC, August 4, 2017. c 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics , [2] Swenne ich sˆı mit mˆıner valschen manic languages, including medieval Middle High rede betruge,¨ German (MHG), Middle English (ME), and Old soˆ het ich sˆı unreht erkant. Norse (ON), would certainly be considered by Und gevaheˆ sˆı mich iemer an deheiner Rousseau as languages phonologically less suit- luge,¨ able when compared to medieval romance lan- saˆ soˆ schupfe mich zehant guages such as the Old Occitan of the troubadour Und geloube niemer mˆıner klage, tradition, with its many open syllables. This dis- dar zuo niht, des ich sage tinction is acknowledged in the various manifes- daˆ vor mueze¨ mich got behueten¨ alle tations of the MHG word ‘tandaradei’, a popular tage.4 interjection used to voice a bird’s singing pres- ence. Variations on ‘tandaradei’ all allow for sig- It is difficult to not be immediately drawn to the nificantly more sequences of open syllables than unique phonological soundscapes. Destˆ ein notˆ is normal for MHG phonology, emphasizing the vo- marked by many closed syllables, creating a short cal quality of the singing. Heinrich von Stretelin- abbreviated affect, while Swenne ich sˆı, with a ma- gen reimagines himself in the position of the bird, jority of open syllables, generates a more iambic with the world needing his song, and augments rhythm. Although the musical settings and perfor- the poem’s soundscape by adding more open syl- mance for these medieval poems and many oth- lables to his own singing to match the bird’s ers have not survived, we can gather from the tune (Schweikle, 1978): phonology of the stanzas that they must have been very different. The great French philosopher Jean- [3] Frowe, bluomen unde kleˆ Jacques Rousseau wrote extensively about lan- unde heide, diu so wunneklˆıche gruene¨ guage and music, arguing that some languages lˆıt, were more phonologically suitable to music than Die wen muoten unde me,ˆ others. Rousseau believed that an unsuitable lan- daz diu vogellˆın wol singen suozze guage would be “indistinct” and “piercing” when widerstrˆıt. 5 set to music (Rousseau et al., 1998, 144). To Des froit¨ sich sereˆ avoid this, one would have to be selective with mˆın gemuete,¨ dazˆ si sint froider¨ ˆıch. words, generating very “insipid and monotonous” al dur ir ereˆ music: “its progress would also be slow and tire- singe ich mere,ˆ some for the same reason, and if one wanted to sˆıt si ist minneklich. press the movement a little, its haste would resem- Deilidurei faledirannurei ble that of a heavy and angular body rolling along lˆıdundei faladaritturei!8 on cobblestones” (Rousseau et al., 1998, 144).6 Although Rousseau’s description is surely ex- Rousseau’s characterization of a less-suited lan- aggerated, many writers after him have shared his guage can also shed light on the formal play in sentiment that vowels and open syllables are cru- MHG poetry emerging in the early 13th century cial to the composition of sung music and may observed by Hugo Kuhn, Thomas Cramer, Markus even correlate with melismatic syllables.7 Ger- Stock, and Manuel Braun (Kuhn, 1967; Cramer, 4MF 173, 13-96C, 53b. “If I were to ever deceive her with 1998; Stock, 2004; Braun, 2013). Rousseau’s my false words, then I would have valued her improperly. claim that a less-suited language would be And if she were to ever catch me in any lie, then she would “force[d]” to exclude many words and would thus immediately shake me up and never believe my lamentation, moreover anything I say. May God protect me from that every become “monotonous” is exactly what the schol- day.” arship has identified (Cramer, 1998, 45). Mo- 5 Rousseau understands Italian as having one of the great- tifs are constantly rehashed and Kuhn claims that est phonemic inventories due to its open syllables and bright vowels (Rousseau et al., 1998, 148). nothing new was contributed after the formal 6Charles Kensington argues that languages with fewer shift. It appears that a musical vocabulary re- open syllables, English in particular, can remedy this if lex- ical breadth is sufficient to substitute words (Salaman, 1876, 8MHG text from Bartsch (1964). “Lady, flowers, and 123-124). clovers, and heather, which lay so wonderfully green, and 7See forthcoming work by Murray Schellenberg, ‘Influ- who want very much that the little bird sings well and sweet ence of Syllable Structure on Musical Text Setting.’ Ross et in response. They are pleased by this very much, my senses, al. (2007) suggest that preferred musical intervals are related that they are joyful. All by her honor, I sing more, since she to formants in vowel phones. is dear. Deilidurei faledirannurei lˆıdundei faladaritturei!” 47 stricted by the phonology of a language, in addi- While the SSP alone can be very accurate, errors tion to the natural development of the genre, led to may still occur in the onset. The legality princi- formal play aimed at breaking these boundaries. ple argues that “[m]edial syllable initial clusters With Konrad von Wurzburg’s¨ mid-13th century should be possible word initial clusters” (Venne- infamous rhyme poem (Schlagreimlied 26, I), in mann, 1972, 11). Daniel Kahn notes that this prin- which every word is rhymed, we understand well ciple still leaves several possibilities if a consonant Rousseau’s sense of “a heavy and angular body cluster could be broken up into more than one per- rolling along on cobblestones.”9 missable word-initial grouping. To remedy this, Kahn argues that there “is a strong tendency to syl- 3 Syllabification labify in such a way that initial clusters are of max- imal length”(Kahn, 1976, 41). Because ‘tlˆı’ is not To analyze phonological soundscapes on a large a legal onset in MHG, i.e., ‘tlˆı’ does not start any scale we must first be able to accurately syl- MHG word, the ‘t’ is then drawn to the first sylla- labify words. The sonority sequencing princi- ble, and ‘werl-tlˆı-chen’ becomes ‘werlt-lˆı-chen’.12 ple (SSP) (Jesperson (1904)) and onset maximiza- While some may consider this the correct syl- tion and legal initials (Vennemann (1972) and labification, we argue that an intervocalic ‘ch’ Kahn (1976)) capture the fundamentals of syl- should be considered ambisyllabic and thus also labification in many languages.