How do RTL languages work for lyrics to music?
Well, things that I’ve seen that use languages that are written right-to-left or in other ways follow the same syllable to note convention. That said I’ve mainly seen things that are transliterated, but I do recall seeing Chinese and Hebrew characters under conventional notation. I’m sure it’s weird to a native speaker, but western musical notation is fixed as being read left-to-right so that’s just the way it goes.
This doesn’t totally capture it, but in part: “The setting of vocal texts is beyond the scope of this proposal; however, there are no known bi-directional implications of Western Musical Notation. When combined with right-to-left texts, in Hebrew or Arabic for example, the music notation is still written left-to-right as usual, the words being divided into syllables and placed under or above the notes in the same fashion as Latin scripts. The individual words or syllables corresponding to each note, however, are written in the dominant direction of the script.
Hebrew’s built-in musical notation is called trope or cantillation, and it’s not musical notation in the usual sense. There are symbols that represent particular patterns of notes, but you can’t create any particular sound out of them, and even the patterns are very dependent on particular traditions and a whole host of other things. What I have usually seen for nontransliterated Hebrew words under music is standard notation, with the Hebrew words broken up into syllables which are then arranged from left to right. It’s quite confusing to read for someone used to ordinarily-written Hebrew.
