New to engraving...am I on the right track?

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David Ward
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Re: New to engraving...am I on the right track?

Post by David Ward »

Anders Hedelin wrote: 23 Sep 2018, 09:35 I'll go along with John there. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the master of rendering an expressive, meaningful text in singing, said that a sounding consonant before a vowel should be intonated at the pitch of the vowel, even if it precedes the new harmony (!). The (sounding) consonant becomes a sort of tied-over grace note to the vowel in other words.
So, not only in time, but also in pitch the consonant belongs to the following vowel, and it seems just very natural to put it there, in the right place musically, if not linguistically. Or am I e-rring?
Mind you, I'm not really sure about this. I never before practised 'musical hyphenation' in my own songs, but, inspired by this discussion, might very well do so in the future. When possible, it might be safe to add.
My opinion FWIW is that the avoidable unfamiliar is more likely to lead to errors than the familiar, hence my preference for ‘normal’ hyphenation in English. In English the lack of inflection and the way multiple roots affect spelling might be quite confusing if split oddly. Fischer-Dieskau was usually singing in German, with its different (and more consistent) rules of both spelling and hyphenation.
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Schonbergian
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Re: New to engraving...am I on the right track?

Post by Schonbergian »

noth - ing is another dictionary hyphenation that makes no sense from either a linguistic or phonetic perspective.

David, I think we could say the same about many kinds of "unfamiliar" notation talked about here that nonetheless parallel the musical ideas much more closely than textbook notation. It's up to the composer and the engraver to choose the notation that works best for their music, irrespective of extremely arbitrary rules.
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David Ward
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Re: New to engraving...am I on the right track?

Post by David Ward »

I agree that ‘noth-ing’ would be totally absurd. It does seem to exist in some on-line & computer hyphenage, but it is not in either the 1933 twelve volume Oxford dictionary or the 1983 two volume one (I've just checked as I have both here), so I don't know the origins of that absurdity, nor of some other hyphenage/spelling misinformation on-line and in computer applications.

A silly thing that irrationally irritates me when (not often) I'm in the mood for being irritated is this. Computer spell checks in their tautologically labelled ‘British English’ specify ‘-ise’ endings rather than ‘-ize’ ones, but for many British people of my generation this is over-simple. Our classical education taught us to prefer ‘-ize’ when we can reasonably derive the ending from mediæval Latin ‘-izare’ and to favour ‘-ise’ only when it is more sensible to derive it from the French ending ‘-iser’ (eg when the root word is directly derived from French). The out of date Oxford dictionaries I mentioned above give the ‘-ize’ endings where appropriate without the slightest hint that these might be exclusively American. For example ‘realize’ is the only spelling given in the 1983 two volume Oxford dictionary (and I stress this is a UK publication from OUP), so where the computer nonsense of ‘realise’ being the only correct spelling for the absurdly labelled ‘British English’ has come from I've no idea. Some similar nonsense appears to be occurring when concocting hyphenations such as ‘noth-ing.’ That said, there have long been some UK publications which have favoured ‘-ise’ endings. I have a mid-nineteenth century edition of Disraeli's Sybil which has ‘realise’ and other similar usage. The choice was there, but it's nothing to do with being either British or American.

There's a moral there somewhere (maybe, use your own judgement).
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Anders Hedelin
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Re: New to engraving...am I on the right track?

Post by Anders Hedelin »

This post was meant to be deleted by me. Sorry.
Last edited by Anders Hedelin on 29 Sep 2018, 10:27, edited 2 times in total.
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Anders Hedelin
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Re: New to engraving...am I on the right track?

Post by Anders Hedelin »

David Ward wrote: 23 Sep 2018, 13:14
My opinion FWIW is that the avoidable unfamiliar is more likely to lead to errors than the familiar, hence my preference for ‘normal’ hyphenation in English. In English the lack of inflection and the way multiple roots affect spelling might be quite confusing if split oddly. Fischer-Dieskau was usually singing in German, with its different (and more consistent) rules of both spelling and hyphenation.
After some thought I must give you right, David. Placing the consonants close to where they are sung would possibly be of help in a sight-reading situation (?). Let's hope that all singers do not perform a prima vista.
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