Mermaid Lore? - Tumblr Posts

So I’m sure this has been considered before, but d’ya think the whole mermaids singing thing is actually them trying to sing sea shanties they overhear from sailors? Like, the songs are in foreign languages and the mermaids hear them from kinda far away, and so they get the melody but not really any cohesive idea of the lyrics and so instead they just do the thing where you sing a whole bunch of noises that kinda sound similar to the lyrics, but their voices are higher pitched and weird and so it just comes out sounding completely unlike the actual sea shanty.