"Sagispeak"
Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2015 9:03 pm
[Skip straight to the final Sagispeak table, which also shows the updated short-ASCII.]
I thought that the drawbacks of a tuning-independent way of pronouncing the accidentals would outweigh the benefits, until George showed me the beautifully simple system he'd come up with.
In George's pronunciation system, the directions up and down are just two vowel sounds. "Ao" is pronounced exactly like the vowel sound in the word "down", and that's what it means. "Ai" is pronounced exactly like the vowel sound in the word "high", and that's what it means. Then we just put different consonants in front of these to indicate what kind of a down or a high it is. For the 5-comma (syntonic comma) left-half-arrows it's a pental down and a pental high, so we pronounce them pow(n) and pigh [we don't sound the (n)] and we spell them pao and pai. Sharp and flat stay the same, and we can also have pao sharp and pai flat.
George hasn't published the full system yet. He's still deciding on some of the consonants. I got special dispensation to release the info about "p" being used for the pronunciation of the 5-comma symbols. But don't assume the 7-comma will be "s" for septimal, since we have septendecimal (17) commas too, and commas that have the prime seven in combination with others. The consonants for all single-flag symbols (other than the 5-comma) are likely to be based on the similarity between the downward version of the symbol and a lowercase consonant letter. In fact the same letter we use for the short ASCII representation of the downward accidental. Unfortunately there is no lowercase letter that looks like the downward 5-comma symbol \! given that we want to reserve "v" for the 11-diesis down symbol \!/.
I thought that the drawbacks of a tuning-independent way of pronouncing the accidentals would outweigh the benefits, until George showed me the beautifully simple system he'd come up with.
In George's pronunciation system, the directions up and down are just two vowel sounds. "Ao" is pronounced exactly like the vowel sound in the word "down", and that's what it means. "Ai" is pronounced exactly like the vowel sound in the word "high", and that's what it means. Then we just put different consonants in front of these to indicate what kind of a down or a high it is. For the 5-comma (syntonic comma) left-half-arrows it's a pental down and a pental high, so we pronounce them pow(n) and pigh [we don't sound the (n)] and we spell them pao and pai. Sharp and flat stay the same, and we can also have pao sharp and pai flat.
George hasn't published the full system yet. He's still deciding on some of the consonants. I got special dispensation to release the info about "p" being used for the pronunciation of the 5-comma symbols. But don't assume the 7-comma will be "s" for septimal, since we have septendecimal (17) commas too, and commas that have the prime seven in combination with others. The consonants for all single-flag symbols (other than the 5-comma) are likely to be based on the similarity between the downward version of the symbol and a lowercase consonant letter. In fact the same letter we use for the short ASCII representation of the downward accidental. Unfortunately there is no lowercase letter that looks like the downward 5-comma symbol \! given that we want to reserve "v" for the 11-diesis down symbol \!/.