Talk:Marvel temperaments

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Relation between "Negripent" and Negri

I found the redirect Negripent pointing to the section Marvel temperaments #Negri where nothing can be found about "Negripent" (also nowhere else in this article). --Xenwolf (talk) 11:35, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

I just stumbled across this issue myself! I did a little research and I think I figured out what's going on here.

Without ever really thinking about it before, I suppose I'd always assumed that "negripent" meant something along the lines of "black-like", with the "negr-" prefix and "-ent" suffix; I never thought of an explanation for the "p", but I must have vaguely assumed that it was some European language's idiosyncrasy. Anyway, that's not it at all.

• It turns out that the "negri" part is for someone named John Negri: https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning-math/topicId_3774.html#3813 I see that this information is found on the wiki here: Temperament_names#Negri. Sintel questions whether John Negri is real here: https://en.xen.wiki/w/Talk:Temperament_names. I do find evidence that he is real, though (and will alert Sintel to this). The paper Paul references here (https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning/topicId_31054.html#31065) is almost certainly "The Nineteen-Tone System as Ten Plus Nine", which is on pages 11-13 of Volume 5, Number 3 (Winter 1986-1987) of Interval magazine (https://interval.xentonic.org/tables-of-contents.html). This is corroborated by Graham Breed's site here: http://x31eq.com/catalog.htm And here's a couple links with a record of John Negri's performance at AFMM with the Blue Guitar Ensemble: https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning/topicId_15414.html#15414, and https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning/topicId_14441.html#14441
• As for the "pent" part, that was meant to distinguish the 5-limit version of this temperament from its 7-limit extension, which was called "negrisept": https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning-math/topicId_11629.html#11662. So it's actually the Greek numerical prefix "pent-" for 5 and Latin numerical prefix "sept-" for 7, both used strangely as suffixes. Comparing "negrisept" as it appears in Middle Path (https://dkeenan.com/Music/MiddlePath.pdf) with 7-limit negri on the wiki, these appear to be the same thing: https://en.xen.wiki/w/Slendro_clan#7-limit, so that's what happened to "negrisept".
• In 2004, Gene Ward Smith suggested revisions to Paul's names as he was about to publish Middle Path for the first time. He suggests shortening them to "negrip" and "negris": https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning-math/topicId_10620#10640 It looks like this practice of suffixing "-pent" and "-sept" was used for other temperaments too, as we also find "dimipent" and "dimisept" here, as well as "sensipent" and "sensisept".
• A couple weeks later, Dave Keenan proposed renaming "negripent" to simply "negri": https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning-math/topicId_10945.html#10945 And perhaps from that point on most people went with that, with a brief period where some acknowledged Paul's terminology (as Herman Miller did in the link on my second bullet here). In Middle Path that negripent refers to 16875:16384, or [-14 3 4⟩, which is thee same thing as the wiki refers to as "negri" now. So I suppose since later revisions to Middle Path never renamed this from "negripent", but the wiki moved forward with "negri".

So what to do from here? I suppose "negripent" should redirect here instead: https://en.xen.wiki/w/Slendro_clan#Negri, and a similar redirect should be made for "negrisept", but to the 7-limit subsection.

--Cmloegcmluin (talk) 17:30, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

I went ahead and made the two proposed changes for now. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 18:01, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Negri has a dedicated article so these redirects should definitely go there. FloraC (talk) 07:34, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

You definitely know more about wiki conventions, so if that is the redirect path that readers should expect, then I'll gladly defer to you on this point. Thanks as always for your attention to the cleanliness of the wiki. (And by the way, thanks too for cleaning up my bare links; I think you've done that for me before, and I'll try to be more mindful of that moving forward.)

But if Negripent and Negrisept both simply redirect to the top of the Negri page, then shouldn't we explain the findings of my research above somewhere there? With my redirects, the fact that these refer to 5-limit and 7-limit negri, respectively, was at least implicit. My concern is that your recent edits have removed this important information entirely.

I can see that if we added a statement to the Negri page that explicitly explains things — and explains fully — how negripent and negrisept are out-of-use historical names for 5-limit and 7-limit negri, then I think this could be a best-of-both-worlds solution. Do you agree, or have I misunderstood anything? Thank you for this opportunity to further improve. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 15:36, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I think the wiki should be uniform in its usage (or "not-usage") of the -pent and -sept suffixes. If negripent and negrisept are considered out of use, then should sensipent and sensisept also be considered out of use, and so on?

Also, the redirects should point to the page about the topic. The out-of-use historical names can be mentioned in a "history" section at the top of the page, just below the lead section, but the redirects do not need to point to the section, because people looking for "negripent" are most likely looking to learn about the temperament, not about the terminology changes. --Fredg999 (talk) 18:30, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree that the wiki should be uniform about its treatment of the "-pent" and "-sept" suffixes. Perhaps I shouldn't have been so confident when I wrote above that they are out-of-use. I assumed this because I only just learned their meaning from doing my research recently, which is documented above. The first occurrences of "dimisept" and "sensisept" on the wiki are in this discussion thread! "Dimipent" and "sensipent" both do however occur elsewhere. Are you aware of any other temperaments which use this pattern?

We should also learn whether suffixes of this type have ever been used for further prime limits past 5 and 7. I'm not sure if they have. I suppose the pattern could continue with "-undec", "-tredec", etc., as in "negriundec" or "sensitredec".

For what it's worth, I don't like this pattern. It's mostly only because using prefixes as suffixes bothers me from a linguistic standpoint. But this isn't only a pedantic point. I personally went for many years without understanding what these names meant, and it's primarily because I didn't recognize them as prefixes given that they were used as suffixes.

Anyway, it sounds like you agree with my proposal to add this historical information about these names to the Negri page, and have given some extra detail on how it could be executed. I agree with your details. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 18:54, 21 June 2023 (UTC)