The Naxi Linguistic Art of Dongba Poetry as Seen through Lubanlurao
This paper analyzes the distinctive linguistic art of Lubanlurao, a Naxi Dongba narrative poem (also called 'The Wind Sacrifice') recounting the tragic double suicide of lovers Zhu Gu Yulepai and Kaimei Jiumingjin. The author, Mu Chunyan, examines the poem through rhythm and phonology. Rhythmically, it combines irregular line lengths, reduplicated refrains, and extended parallelism with an emotionally driven, predominantly level-toned prosody (over 70% level-tone syllables) that produces its plaintive, mournful quality, reinforced by personification, hyperbole, and proverb-like metaphors about time's passage. Phonologically, the poem freely mixes tonal matching and mismatching between paired lines, uses flexible rhyme -- including internal, initial, and chain-repetition (anadiplosis) rhyme -- and organizes syllables into caesura units whose count scales with line length. The author concludes the poem uniquely fuses folk spontaneity with the formal regularity of regulated verse.
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