The Application of Chinese Phonemics to the Chanting of Classical Verse and Prose

All languages,tone languages or non-tone languages, have their prosodic features. The metrical patterns in the classical works of Chinese, verse and prose, represented the prosodic features of the language in a certain historical period. They have been preserved, more or less, in a tradition of “literary reading”. Being divorced to some degree from the ordinary, relatively simple, metrical patterns in the vernacular, they are not totally artificial. They are still used in the chanting of classical verse and prose as the elaborated, refined, or even exaggerated forms. From a functional point of view, these refined forms are essentially emphatic forms to fulfill, supposedly more effectively, the emotive function and poetic function of the language.