Re: Three questions for ancient.itely

[Juergen Reuter]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2008, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Eyolf_=D8strem_ wrote:

> I'm working on the docs for ancient music,

Nice to hear!

> 3. The form "Episem" is used, both as a lilypond command and in the
> documentation text. Since it's not really a medieval concept at all, but a
> term invented by the Solesmes monks when plainchant was revised/-vived in
> the late nineteenth century, it is not an established term in any language
> other than french, where it is episeme (and it doesn't appear neither in
> Merriam-Webster nor in the full OED). If anything, Episem is the german
> form.  I would strongly recommend going with the latinized greek "episema",
> which is what the Vatican editions have.

Originally, I borrowed the term "Episem" from the OpusTeX implementation 
of Gregorian Chant.  Just a couple of minutes ago, I did a small search on 
Google and have to agree that the form "Episema" is obviously much more 
used than "Episem", especially in non-German languages.

As you are working on the docs, there is another thing that comes into my 
mind:  Currently, \augmentum is introduced in Sect. 2.8.3.6 (Gregorian 
square neumes ligatures).  This was motivated from an implementation 
point of view, which is special for \augmentum within ligatures. 
However, from a user's perspective, I think \augmentum should be 
introduced in Sect. 2.8.3.1 (Ancient articulations), showing simply an 
augmented punctum note.  Then, in Sect. 2.8.3.6, it should be stated that 
\augmentum is treated specially within ligatures (i.e. all dots 
vertically aligned after the ligature), showing "\[ \augmentum a 
\flexa \augmentum g \]" as an example.

And yet another thing: The "Hufnagel" style of Gregorian Chant is in 
English language obviously better known as "Gothic" style.  However, 
now that lily 2.12 is already in beta release stage, I would not recommend 
performing such a big rename at present.

Thanks & greetings,
Juergen