Musical conlangs (was: Poetique)

On Wednesday, January 7, 2004, at 07:11 AM, Costentin Cornomorus wrote:

> --- Christophe Grandsire
> <christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:
>> En rÈponse ‡ Costentin Cornomorus :
>>
>>
>>> Like in actual music, I don't see why you
>>> couldn't pause after a phrase. Just like in
>>> spoken language!
>>
>> The problem is that in SolReSol you have to
>> pause the equivalent of a beat
>> after each and every word. Otherwise the
>> language becomes unparsable. Since
>> SolReSol words have 1, 2 or 3 notes, you cannot
>> make a nice rythm out of it.
>
> Indeed. A problem for Solresol.
Yep - a problem for SolreSol, *not* an in-built
problem for all musical conlangs (muslangs??).

> But Ray was, as
> far as I recall, proposing a new musical conlang,
Spot on! I have mooted this several times over the years
on this and other lists. I believe one or two others have
mooted similar ideas.

> and I think phrasal pauses could work similar to
> natural speech.
Indeed - why not? I see _no_ intrinsic reason why one
has to pause after each and every word in any sort of
language.  It seems like a design defect to me.

The idea of a muslang has intrigued me for many decades,
but my technical knowledge of musicology is, alas, more
limited than I would like; so it has made even less progress
than BrSc!

I first encountered a muslang many years ago - way back in the
1950s in fact.  Over here in the UK we had an excellent comic
paper called "The Eagle" which featured, inter alia, the
adventures of "Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future" (a hero of mine,
second only to Roy Rogers  :)

In one series they visited Mercury; the Mercurian language
consisted only of the five 'classic' vowels pronounced on
the various different tones on one octave the major scale
(doh through to the doh above) thus giving 40 (8 x 5)
different syllables. The only other thing I remember about
it is that it had no verbs.

At the time I didn't think too much about it - but I have
over the past two or three decades tried to discover more
but so far in vain. There are, indeed, web-sites about
"The Eagle" and even about "Dan Dare" (obviously made an
impression on more kids tha just me!).  But so far I've
discovered nothing about the 'Mercurian' muslang.

I don't suppose there's anyone on the list who has more
info on 'Mercurian' than the meager amount I have?

Ray
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