CHANTING. Many scholars trace chanting to the earliest stages of human development, a time when speech was presumably not differentiated from chant. Even today Saami (Lapp) women in Finland, Jewish women in Morocco, and Santali women in Bihar, India, unconsciously replace sobbing with chanting while lamenting their dead. Australian Aborigines, when excited, break into a torrent of words governed by rhythms and cadences resembling chant. Hungarian dirges and some Khanty (Ostiak) and Mansi (Vogul) tribal melodies of Siberia consist of sung declamations, while the Zulu, Yoruba, Igbo, and Bantu-speaking peoples possess real "melody languages." Contemporary shamans and medicine men on several continents are known to chant sacred rites in a secret language, often invented by themselves. Furthermore, not only American Indian Navajos, African Khoi, and Liberian Jabos use tone levels in their speech: contemporary Burmese, Siamese, Annamese (Vietnam), and Chinese recognize two to nine different tone levels in...