Additional information about 謠
說文解字:
- Criteria
- SONG
1. The current general word for a song with or without accompanying music of any kind is gē 歌.
2. Shī 詩 refers to a regularly rhymed song with a generally regular number of syllables per line.
3. Fēng 風 refers to a folk song with a given melody.
4. Fù 賦 refers originally to any narrative or descriptive song in early texts but came to refer to the genre of rhyme prose.
5. Yáo 謠 refers to a folksong, mostly in ancient texts to a children's ditty, with a more or less fixed melody, but the focus seems to be on the text and there is no accompanying music involved.
6. O!u 謳 is a dialect word (state of Qi) referring to popular work-songs with a more or less fixed melody.
7. Yín 吟 is occasionally used, from late Han and Three Kingdoms times onwards, as a noun and refers to a popular song.
- SING
1. The current general word for singing a song is gē 歌.
2. Míng 鳴 refers to the singing of non-human agents.
3. Chàng 唱 is to set the tune in singing, but the word later came to refer also to reciting prose texts in a dramatic drawn-out manner. See CHANT
4. Hé 和 is to chime in singing according to a tune set by someone else.
5. O!u 謳 and the rarer yáo 謠 refer specifically to unaccompanied singing of songs, typically folk songs.
- Word relations
- Epithet: (SONG)童/BOY
Tóng 童 by itself is an archaic word referring to a boy, but the term enters freely into non-archaic binomes. - Assoc: (SONG)歌/SONG
The current general word for a song with or without accompanying music of any kind is gē 歌. - Assoc: (SING)吟/CHANT
Yín 吟is to hum and quietly intone something for one's own enjoyment, perhaps as one walks along, typically as an expression of one's emotions, and not primarily for others to listen to, and the word is never used as a transitive verb with an object indicating what exancly is being hummed or intoned. - Assoc: (SING)謳/SING
Ōu 謳 and the rarer yáo 謠 refer specifically to unaccompanied singing of songs, typically folk songs.