Richard Robinson writes: | On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 06:49:43PM +0000, John Chambers wrote: | | That's an intriguing thought. How does Arabic song-transcription work ? | is the music written right-to-left ?
Yes. There's a traditional notation that's not at all like the European staff notation, but I don't know how it works. You also see staff notation that's the mirror imagee of how Europeans print it, so that lyrics will look normal underneath the notes. You see the same thing in Yiddish song books from eastern Europe, and the Hebrew liturgy is often written this way. It scares people at first, but it really only takes a few minutes to get used to it. Arab musicians can generally read music equally easily in either direction (if they read music at all). It's no big deal. Reading your language backwards is a real pain, so it's easier to reverse the music. | And then ... is it a Mongolian alphabet, that goes down one line and | then up the next ? No, it goes top-down, with the first line (column) at the left. It's actually a rotated version of an Arabic-like script, derived from an old Syriac form of that sort of writing back around the 12th century during the Mongol expansion. It's a true phonemic alphabet with symbols for both consonants and vowels. I can't read it at all. The Soviets also devised a Cyrillic form of Mongolian (but that is now deprecated ;-). One sort of zig-zag writing you may have read about was used by the ancient Greeks. It's interesting to see inscriptions written in that script. You can really see the connection between the older Semitic scripts and the modern European scripts. But it's probably a good thing that they gave up on it before printing was invented. I've seen people write English this way, just as a prank. I've seen my wife do this; she can write mirror English nearly as fast as normal English, without messing up the mirror-image letters like 'b' and 'd'. I once took a linguistics class in which one assignment was to devise a good writing system for English, based on any other writing system of your choice. Some people in the class came up with some very good English scripts based on other alphabets. In the past couple of decades, the Mayan writing has been mostly decoded. It might be fun to try to make this work for English. It wouldn't be easy, though, because Mayan writing was a syllabary, and English isn't a good language for syllabary writing. And, as far as I know, the Mayans didn't have a music notation. The scholars haven't reported anything that looks like music, to my knowledge, though they have reportedly identified poetry in some of the inscriptions. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
