Tim wrote:

>Most music, including folk music, is
>governed by a fixed musical rhythm,
>to which the words are fitted. Therefore,
>it's the long and short musical notes
>which take precedence, not the long
>and short syllables which are forced
>into the musical pattern.

Indeed. Yet I suspect that it was the other
way around for Old Norse singing - that the
tones were made to fit the vowel lengths.

Vowel (and consonant) length forms a part of
the metrics of dróttkvætt. For example the
second last syllable of every line must be long.
I imagine that every type of line had a
particular set of possible "chantings".

But I am far out of my depth in this matter.

Surely there are studies of this "problem"
for other languages. Latin comes to mind.

>I discussed this once with a Chinese
>language teacher (who was not a musician),
>who didn't understand the question. In her
>mind, all of the tones were there, although
>they actually weren't - it was just her
>imagination which supplied them.

Very interesting.

>But I'm sure that Sequentia was going at
>this from the standpoint of musicians, and
>even though they may have a good intent to
>honor the text, they're thinking of the music first.

I completely agree with you.

Regards,
Haukur