Why do your people have seasons?

[alexis_the_tiny]

Found the mandarin version of the rhyme and the English explanation behind it.
If you want the rhyme written in Mandarin, I can copy and paste it over. I cannot read Mandarin and have forgotten most of the Hokkien dialect ever since my grandmother passed away but I'll try to give a rough translation of it.

Anyway, the rhyme goes roughly like this: The sky is dark, it is going to rain, something or other about some water way, the sea dragon king is looking for a wife, Some turtle thing is beating a drum. Annd the final two lines completely elude me. But its a beautiful rhyme when sang in Hokkien. There's another version which I must have mushed up with this version. Its almost the same thing, but its about grandparents having a disagreement and some kind of punch and judy type scenario.

This is the explanation I found online,

"Irrigation of the field is always an important operation to the farmer. In the old days, when modern irrigation technology was not available, the farmer depended very much on raining. So when the sky was dark, knowing that it was going to rain, the farmer would bring out his 'changkol' (I think this is a Malay word for 锄头. There is no equivalent word in English because in the west, a spade is used.), the farmer would bring out his changkol to make sure that the water ways are properly cleared so that his field would be properly irrigated by the rain water.

Out of people's imagination, the wedding scene of of the Dragon King, the God who controlled raining, was vividly described in this children's rhyme."

Not my original words, its from this website's forums. http://www.chineselanguage.org/forum...php?f=6&t=1626