Re: musical talk?

At 5:24 pm -0400 24/10/98, Sally Caves wrote:
>On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Nik Taylor wrote:
.......
>> some 4-note words, but I don't think there were any 5-note words.  The
>> name comes from the French version of the notes' names, which used sol
>> instead of so and a couple of other differences.  That's all I know.
>
>Hasn't it always been _sol_, Nik?  Except in _The Sound of Music_, where
>it's thought to be "sew... a needle pulling thread..."
..and except this side of the pond.  'Sol' it was originally, and the first
note was 'ut'.

The names gp back to the 11th cent. when Guido of Arezzo used the intial
syllables of each half-line in a hymn to John the Baptist to name the first
6 notes of the diatonic scale, since each half-line actually did start on
the successive notes, and SI from the initials of St.John, to name the 7th
thus:

UT queant laxis REsonare fibris
MIra gestorum FAmuli tuorum,
SOLve polluti LAbii reatum,
Sancte Ioannes.

Since most of the syllables are simple CV open tables, UT and SOL felt
"uncomfortable" to some and got changed to 'doh' ('do') and 'soh' ('so');
also, for no good reason that I know of, 'si' got changed to 'ti'.

The language Baba originally asked about is, indeed, SOLRESOL.  The
language was apparently used for quite a while last century.  A Solresol
dictionary can be found at:

http://ciips.ee.uwa.edu.au/~hutch/solresol/dictionary/

Ray.