- Generalisation of the terms "epimoric" and "superparticular" as applied to ratios
- another time I asked for multiplicative equivalents of a number of addition and subtraction based terms (to which e.g. Dave suggested they use of “qoppa” as the analog to “delta”; I should really shape up our results and share them in the Lounge subforum here sometime soon)
Of course Sagittal has an ancient Greek theme:
- ancient Greek city-states lend their names to the symbol sets
- Ancient Greek deities populate the Sagittal mythology and lend their names to heraldic descriptions of the symbols
Sagittal comes from Sagittarius, the Greco-Roman god of archery (honoring him because Sagittal symbols resemble arrows). Like any Greco-Roman god, Sagittarius has both a Greek and a Latin name. Unfortunately, as should be apparent from the “-ius” ending, Sagittarius is the Latin name. The ancient Greeks referred to this god by the name “Toxotes”, which we modern English speakers pronounce “TAHKS-a-tees” (or /ˈtɑks ə tiːz/ in IPA).
In order to keep consistent around the Greek theme, I propose we rename Sagittal to “Toxic” notation. Fascinatingly, the English word toxic comes from the Latin for “poison”, toxicum, which in turn comes from Greek toxikon (pharmakon) meaning “(poison for) arrows”. So Latin somehow got switched up and took its word for poison from the Greek word for arrow due to the practice of poisoning arrows, and then English inherited this result. The word toxic, like sagittal, has other meanings already in English, but I do not feel they are likely to have significant overlap with the microtonal domain that Sagittal deals with. Er, that Toxic deals with. Yeah... it is going to take some getting used to! Talk about some serious hysteresis.
So I’ve already checked and the domain toxic.org is not in use currently so I reached out to inquire about purchasing it.
We can batch the rename along with the other changes to the Bravura fonts when we next reach out to Steinberg. I’ll won’t reach out to Daniel about it until we’ve had some discussion.