Jack Campin writes: | | One problem: what if you want to mix character sets in a tune? - | e.g. to have a Chinese song documented in English? (T: and w: | fields in Chinese, N: and D: fields in English).
What I'd more likely want to do is: three T: fields (Chinese characters, pinyin, and English), one C: line (characters and pinyin), and two or three w: lines. Even more fun is the trad Yiddish/Hebrew/Arabic music, where you want the original (left-right), a transliteration (right-left), and maybe an English set of words at times. This is easy inside a computer, where all alphabets have the same order (byte 0, 1, 2, ...) but it's not always easy to find a really good layout on screen or paper. There's a semi-standard way to do left-right music with the lyrics underneath with each syllable in right-left form. It's painful to read, but you get used to it. Of course, all of these languages have been printed with the music in mirror-image form for centuries, but that doesn't help when you want the lyrics in two different alphabets that go in different directions. It's probably good that the Greeks dropped their zig-zag writing scheme before modern music notation was developed ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
