The Oral Style (RLE Folklore) by Marcel Jousse

Author:Marcel Jousse [Jousse, Marcel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781317550259
Google: aK7ABgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-02-20T05:02:24+00:00

Nearly all of us read this as if it were French, with a rhythm of duration and intensity:

when the rhythm of the quantities of the vowels should make us feel, mutatis mutandis, something like what we feel when we pronounce the following syllables, paying attention only to the quantity and not to the intensity, duration and pitch which are inevitably inherent (though in different ways) in all the oral propositional gestures of a language:

One can see, then, how necessary recording machines are for the objective study of living rhythmic schemas, to record the four characteristics of the laryngo-buccal dance of the various ethnic reciters all of whom are, in fact, more or less incapable of analysing these characteristics themselves.

For example, “the Imouchar who came to Algiers in April 1858 all composed rhythmic schemas with great ease. When I asked them on what laws their [rhythmics] was based, they seemed very surprised by the question and assured me that in composing [rhythmic schemas] they consulted the ear only. They had never supposed that the [composition of rhythmic schemas] could be subjected to rules other than the need of the song. Not having obtained any information from them, I had to try to ascertain their rhythms for myself” (HANOTEAU:201). But we know what to think of such investigations done without the help of instruments. “Everyone, even the person who listens very attentively and has a perfect ear, hears in his own fashion. Like all our senses the ear has its own idiosyncrasies, and deceives us [by conveying to us perceptions, not sensations], and it is often far from perfect” (DE SOUZA:C,37).

“The Arabs of pre-islamic times were [also rhythmists] without being metricians, just as they were prosaists without being grammarians. They did [not] know the laws that governed the measures of their [rhythmic schemas] … When they composed, they had as a guide only the ear, or, in other words the rhythm resulting from their [automatic] ordering of long and short vowels [or, more precisely, the tone of closed and open syllables] and their succession in the words” (MOHAMMED ben BRAHAM:1) forming the oral propositional gestures, the parallel balancings of their spontaneous rhythmic schemas which are the primordial units of oral style.

For “one should not lose sight of the fact that metrical feet are only symbols, that they represent either the words of a language (single, strung together or consecutive), or artificial words, formed by syllables borrowed from different words … now, the question arises: are the feet the result of some metrical conception, that is to say, have the Arabs invented them with full knowledge of the facts in order, subsequently, to fit the words of their language into them, or, on the contrary, are the feet themselves created by the use of certain words, by their [automatic] juxtaposition in the sentence? All the evidence points to the second alternative. First of all, it is well-known that [the rhythmic oral style] existed long before Khalil discovered and fixed its laws, but even

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