Thanks Xen. I note that the asterisk character normally is raised
up in the same way as the caret *^. Also, when enlarged, the top of the asterisk can be seen to resemble the top of the upward sagittal
* . And "i" is a very narrow character, suitable for representing a very small alteration. And the pair i* fits the pattern set by b#, v^, j?, s$ and z~ where the letter is down and the special character is up.
I agree there is no satisfying plain-text (ASCII) shorthand assignment available for these last few symbols. We are really down to the dregs of the character set, and it is debatable whether anyone will ever want to use single plain-text characters for these symbols, rather than the more transparent multi-character plain-text approximations like ~|(. However, I feel there is more chance of this with the 11-limit symbols rather than the 17-limit symbol, and it seems a shame not to complete the Athenian set.
Given that no assignment is clearly better than any other for these symbols, another consideration might be: not to change them unnecessarily. You can see in
http://sagittal.org/Sagittal2_character_map.pdf, that for the past 3.5 years (and longer I think) they have been assigned as follows:
i * ranao ranai 7:11-kleisma ~10c
a g sanao sanai 17-comma ~15c
d q janao janai 5:11-s-diesis ~39c
In George's
original SagiSpeak proposal we have:
i * ranao ranai 7:11-kleisma ~10c
u e sanao sanai 17-comma ~15c
a g janao janai 5:11-s-diesis ~39c
The pair "dq" were reassigned to more commonly used Spartan symbols, to replace (indirectly) the pair "o@" which are of no use for Sagispeak since they lack a consonant. Then the next-most-obvious down/up pair "ag" were taken from the 17-comma symbols and assigned to the 5:11-small-diesis symbols. I'm not sure whether this was on the basis that they more closely resemble those symbols, or that those symbols were thought more deserving, being 11-limit instead of 17-limit. Either way, it's not unreasonable. And we have since reassigned "u" to a more common symbol for good reason.
But I don't see any reason to change the assignment of i*. So for me, it comes down only to the question of which characters should be assigned to
and
. A complete survey of the ASCII character set (or the US keyboard) shows that we have not used `,":!|()[]{}<>-+@celop or any uppercase letters. There are good reasons not to use most of these, apart from the lowercase letters. But feel free to suggest their use. I will explain their other possible uses as required. However I was previously forgetting that "p" was available. Of course "p" would have to be the up symbol (a) because it looks like one, and (b) because if pronounced (as other consonant down symbols are) it would clash with the 5-comma symbol pronunciation. But if so, what should be the corresponding down symbol?
We should not use a special character for the down symbol with "p" because all other letter/special-character pairs work in the opposite directions. "p" was previously paired with "h" for obvious visual reasons, given that "b" was already used for the flat symbol, but "h" has now been assigned to represent the natural symbol, and as such has quite a lot to recommend it. As George pointed out, it dates back to the origins of the flat and natural symbols in the 10th century from round and square stylised lowercase "b"s, representing what we now call B-flat and B-natural and which the Germans still call B and H based on having interpreted the square "b" as a lowercase "h" in the 15th century. See the
Harvard Dictionary of Music entry.
That leaves only "c e l o" for use as down symbols for
if "p" is the up symbol.
They are all pretty terrible. But I have come to favour "o", as George has suggested. "c" and "l" have the aforementioned problems that they have possible consonant sounds which clash with existing ones in Sagispeak, although there is some argument for using "c" nonetheless, because its pronunciation as an "s" is consistent with the actual sagispeak pronunciation of the symbol. which is "sanao", but one must remember the "an" and not be misled. "e" looks like an upward symbol, as George has said.
Xen-Gedankenwelt wrote:However, I think it's not a good idea to use o, because it looks similar to a note head, a zero, or a ° (-> used for diminished chords), so I would replace o with *.
I'm not sure why being similar to a notehead would matter, given that it is only intended for use in text, not on the staff. And on the rare occasion that I have wanted to represent a notehead in text, I have used an uppercase "O" as it has better scaling and alignment with the Sagittal symbols.
O
O And in the context of text, I don't think a lowercase "o" could be confused with a zero or a degree (diminished) symbol.
There is a minor mnemonic due to the alphabetical sequence of "op". But, of the other 6 pairs of lowercase characters, only 4 are in alphabetical order down up.
So, primarily by a process of elimination, I suggest:
i * ranao ranai 7:11-kleisma ~10c
o p sanao sanai 17-comma ~15c