Throat singing

[Benjamin Barrett]

Looking at the countries where the eight ethnicities who practice throat singing live (according to the Altaic wiki, we have:

Tuvan, Mongolian, Kalmyk peoples: Russia, Mongolia, China
Khakas people: Khakassia, Krasnoyarsk Krai, Kemerovo Oblast, Tuva Republic
Altay people: Russia, mostly in the Altai Republic and Altai Krai
Buryat people: Buryatia Russia with smaller groups in Mongolia and China
Kazakh people: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, Russia, Mongolia
Nanai people: Russia, China

I don't know enough of the geography to say with much confidence, but their geographic description sounds reasonable to me.

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On Aug 14, 2011, at 9:03 AM, victor steinbok wrote:

> The OED entry for "overtone singing" (which also subsumes "overtone chant"
> and "overtone chanting") has a slight geographic overstatement:
>
> "traditional esp. in Mongolia, Tibet, and adjacent parts of central Asia"
>
> That's like saying, "India, Indonesia and adjacent parts of Southeast Asia"
> or "Norway, Italy and adjacent parts of Western Europe". At issue may be the
> distinction between two traditional designations. The Soviet and post-Soviet
> political designation only ascribes to Central Asia the former Soviet
> "-stans"--Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
> The broader UNESCO definition includes northern parts of Afghanistan, Iran,
> Pakistan, a small bit of India (Kashmir), the Sub-Ural part of Russia
> (literally adjacent to Kazakhstan, running down along the Chinese border,
> south of Taiga), Mongolia and a rather substantial part of Western and
> Central China, including Tibet. Tibet (and Kashmir, I suppose) is the only
> one of these that stands out as the location of a very distant culture and
> group of languages, compared to all the others (although there is a mix of
> Muslims, Buddhists and "animists" among the rest). Whatever the case,
> Mongolia covers the Northeast of the UNESCO-defined region and Tibet the
> Southeast, they are not adjacent to each other, making the adjacency claim
> very odd, from my perspective. By UN definition, which follows largely the
> Soviet division, they are not even a part of Central Asia at all. And, to
> make matters worse, the practice of overtone singing stretches almost
> continuously across nearly the entire Asian part of Russia, across the
> Behring Straights into Alaska and Canada. So, the OED definition is both
> overstating and understating the conditions.
>
> VS-)
>
> On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> Mongolian throat singing is in the news. =
>> (
>> http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/mobile/?type=3Dstory&id=3D2015=
>> 896486&)
>>
>> The OED has it as an alternative under the entry for "overtone singing," =
>> which seems to be the more general term, but you have to do an advanced =
>> search to find it.
>>
>> Inuit throat singing =
>> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_throat_singing), a different sort of =
>> singing is not in the OED.
>>
>> FWIW, according to "Throat Singing" on the Altaic Wiki =
>> (http://altaic-wiki.wikispaces.com/Throat+Singing), throat singing is =
>> practiced in eight different Altatic cultures.

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