The CBB

Don't worry, nobody understands the Guidonian hand! There's two confusing things about it. Firstly, it's about hexachords. The thing to bear in mind with hexachords is that music is complicated, scales are complicated, and people had no easy way to talk about it all. Even modern musical notation did...

Gamut! That's new to me and definitely a useful concept. Grove defines it as the hexachord system (which I'll briefly touch on in a bit) or by extension 'any system'. Given that the hexachord system included (when multiple hexachords were taken into account) more than 7 notes, and that non-hexachor...

Heptatonic Scales and Gamuts Right! Now that all that’s out of the way, let’s get back to the fun bit: adding notes! Pentatonic scales are great. But let’s say that we’re not satisfied with them. We want more notes. So, we keep on adding strings. For ease of notation, I’ll actually tune the next no...

Perhaps <wu> is so rare in English because <w> once was <uu> (hence the name "double U"), and <wu> would have been <uuu>. That's probably the most pressing reason, yes. The bigger background to this is that in Carolingian minuscule, and even more so in subsequent scripts, the letters 'm',...

Examples of refusing to spell something with the sequence <wu> include "wolf", "wonder", "wool", "wood", "wound" and "wont", all of which were originally spelled with < u >. Also "woman" and (ultimately) "won't", which p...

Does anyone know why the English words starting with <kn> such as knight or knave switched from writing them with <cn>? Given that k is typically only used before front vowels, in <ck>, and in loans, I’m surprised they wouldn’t have left <c> as the silent letter I don't know, but I do wonder if the...

Thank you for your detailed response. So, IIUUC, there's is more of a register difference between -ing-derived nouns and other deverbal nouns and less of a semantic difference. Is that correct? I would say: hmm. Overall, no. -ing nouns are used in every register. However, -ing nouns are often more ...

I was recently wondering about the semantics of nominalizations in languages that mark definiteness and number in noun phrases. Is there a difference in meaning between the following English phrases? Are these even acceptable? And what are the differences exactly? Fights of the Titans A fight of th...

and because -um and -us have different outcomes in many daughter languages. [mostly, -um acts like it had a long vowel, or a half-long vowel, or something, so that at least temporarily it was't lowered, so it triggered metaphony]. Just interested, in which modern language the difference is visible ...

I've been looking at scale-building on and off for ages now, and I've only just worked out the whole "build on relative pitches" step you mentioned (3-2-3-2-2 as your example) and man that's helped understand, I think, a little bit better what makes a scale "good" (in terms of, ...

I would suggest identifyiing unusual features in the language and explaining how they would have developed. You can then cross-reference your answers with the related language sketches to make sure your proto-language could have lead to all the daughters.

I generally have four go-to paths if I'm thinking about tone: a) from the loss of codas b) from neutralisation of onsets c) from vowel length d) from changes in word shape I don't think neutralisation is a great answer for a romlang spoken in Europe, because voiced/voiceless contrasts (or equivalent...

Tangent: Transposition, Modes, Tuning in Fifths, and Tuning in Different Directions Let’s have a bit of housekeeping at this point. To define a scale in real terms, we actually need two things: we need to have a pattern of relative pitches (our 3-2-3-2-2), but we also need a specific pitch to ‘anch...

Creyeditor wrote: ↑18 May 2023 19:37 Nice, nice, nice! In general, I will read through the whole thread and I like your style and structure so far. More specifically, I read through this part and I already knew the individual facts but I wasn't aware of the connections between them. So good job

Thank you.

And I think that's enough for today! Back with more tomorrow!

From Tritonic to Pentatonic So, A-D. Well, it’s more interesting than just A. Entire cultures survive on this, and even in many cultures with more complicated music some instruments may have only these notes. But... we can do better. We can tune up by a fourth again, the same way as before! This wi...

Octaves, Tuning in Fourths, and Ditonic Scales. Let’s assume that we’re trying to play different notes on a string instrument. The easiest (at least, conceptually simplest) way to do this is to add an additional string. So let’s use this as our thought experiment. [the same logic also applies to fi...

Why are there twelve notes in an octave? Why does a scale only include seven of them? Why do many cultures only use five notes in their music? Why those five? What on earth is ‘temperament’? A lot of things in music appear arbitrary and confusing. Partly because some of them are. But a lot of things...

So, as some of you may remember, some time ago I said I would post a series of posts on How Music Works, which I thought may be of general interest, and could be specifically of interest to conworlders thinking about how music works in their own societies. That, as you may have noticed, hasn’t happe...

So I've been working on evolving a conlang from a protolang I have, and I realized that I have a pretty big problem: I have 15 conjugations for every verb, which means every conjugation of my verbs need to go through those sound changes so I can get the results I want. I'm comfy with sound changers...