Re: Just another boring question about manual cautionary accidentals...

[Trevor Bača]

On 9/2/07, Valentin Villenave <address@hidden> wrote:
> 2007/9/2, Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden>:
> > there is no place to store exclamations inside a pitch.
>
>
> Oh I see. The point is: I didn't think the "pitch" as a single element.
>
> So -- correct me if I'm wrong -- what you call "pitch" should be
> divided into 2 parts:
> pitch_root (a, b, c etc.) and pitch_suffix (-is, -es or whatever), so
> that the exclamations could fit between these two elements?
>
> ...But I guess this would be a major modification :(

[Valentin, I have nothing truly helpful to say, but maybe a linguistic
aside can be fun anyway:

Is it possible that part of what's going on here is a difference in
thinking about note "names" between Dutch (and German), on the one
hand, and English (and FR, IT, ES) on the other? By that I mean that,
in English, it makes perfect sense to think of "a flat" as comprising
a root and a modifier (with, interestingly, the modifier following
*after* the root ... perhaps we borrowed that bit of syntax from
French or Latin back in the day, like with so much); and so, in
English at least, "a forced natural" makes sense. Same in French, yes?
Something like "la bémol" and "la bémol ... obligatoire"?? (What is
the right way to say "forced" here? French works better on my brain
after my second cup of coffee, which is still brewing in the other
room.)

But maybe this doesn't work in Dutch (and German) with the -is and -es
endings? Seems like "fis" is integrally a single word ... such that it
would be really weird to have a type of "infix" element separating the
"f" and "-is". I dunno. Maybe one of the Dutch speakers can comment?

And perhaps that's what's going on with the definition ...

simple_element:
       pitch exclamations questions octave_check
optional_notemode_duration optional_rest {

... because the "pitch" part is always only one single word in Dutch
and German (even though this is not the case in EN, FR, etc). So I can
see "a!f" as the normal "reading order" of the adjectives in English;
and I can see "af!" as the normal reading order in French; but I think
maybe "a!es" would look surreal in Dutch.

One last aside: I was taught a kinda bizarre parallel to the Dutch
single-syllable system when I was in school. Specifically that you can
turn, for example, "re" into "ra" (for a flattened second scale
degree) and into "ri" (for a sharpened second scale degree). One thing
I've learned watching this list is that the way we all get taught
solfege varies considerably between different countries, so it
wouldn't surprise me if this ra-re-ri thing was somewhat idiomatic to
the way I got taught, but I really have no idea. Anyway, using this
ra-re-ri system, it would be truly bizarre to have something like
"r!a", which starts to look more like perl code than anything
reaonable ;-)

Trevor.]



-- 
Trevor Bača
address@hidden