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That’s not completely true. There are wordless melodies associated with Samavedic recitation all over India. For instance my Guruji knew a particular set and

That’s not completely true. There are wordless melodies associated with Samavedic recitation all over India. For instance my Guruji knew a particular set and we are Gujarati Brahmanas. However in Kerala they have a specific Shakha of the Sama Veda (“branch” i.e. school of recitation) which is unique. The idea that any of this is “pre-speech” sacrifices clarity to the point of utter misinformation.

danans 8y ago
That's a fair point. After all many Vedic recitations are replete with syllables whose purpose is strictly musical/mystical and without concrete meaning, the most famous being of course "AUM", but also the sequence "shrim, hrim, klim, glaum, gam". If you peruse the book that Michael Wood cites in that comment, you'll find many other Vedic examples of meaningless musical particles like "ha bu" and "bham bham". Conversely, in the Indian pakhawaj drum composition recitation system (of much more recent vintage than Vedic chanting), there is a form called Paran where the opposite takes place: The semantically meaningless, but rhythmically sophisticated patterns of drum syllables are overlayed and interspersed with phonologically and rhythmically similar words drawn from Sanskrit, usually descriptions of a deity. The words in this case play second fiddle to the structure of the musical composition. Here is an example: https://youtu.be/hJg4NOCKTZI?t=443 https://youtu.be/hJg4NOCKTZI?t=443 The Michael Wood documentary, while overall pretty decent, unnecessarily exoticizes it in the example of the Kerala Brahmins, but you see very similar phenomena (melodic meaningless syllables) in popular and folk music around the world today, from India to Motown. In fact, there's a vocal technique from Jazz called scat-singing, that exclusively uses meaningless syllables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scat_singing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scat_singing

danans 8y ago

That's a fair point. After all many Vedic recitations are replete with syllables whose purpose is strictly musical/mystical and without concrete meaning, the most famous being of course "AUM", but also the sequence "shrim, hrim, klim, glaum, gam". If you peruse the book that Michael Wood cites in that comment, you'll find many other Vedic examples of meaningless musical particles like "ha bu" and "bham bham". Conversely, in the Indian pakhawaj drum composition recitation system (of much more recent vintage than Vedic chanting), there is a form called Paran where the opposite takes place: The semantically meaningless, but rhythmically sophisticated patterns of drum syllables are overlayed and interspersed with phonologically and rhythmically similar words drawn from Sanskrit, usually descriptions of a deity. The words in this case play second fiddle to the structure of the musical composition. Here is an example: https://youtu.be/hJg4NOCKTZI?t=443 https://youtu.be/hJg4NOCKTZI?t=443 The Michael Wood documentary, while overall pretty decent, unnecessarily exoticizes it in the example of the Kerala Brahmins, but you see very similar phenomena (melodic meaningless syllables) in popular and folk music around the world today, from India to Motown. In fact, there's a vocal technique from Jazz called scat-singing, that exclusively uses meaningless syllables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scat_singing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scat_singing