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)

I don't know of other temperaments who would use -pent and -sept suffixes. I know however that most temperaments which have various strong extensions (and possibly other relationships, I'm not sure if it always has to be strong extensions) can be distinguished by terms like "5-limit X" or "7-limit X", and I suppose subgroups (which are not prime limits) could be used in a similar fashion as well. --Fredg999 (talk) 19:31, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Right. That's the approach I prefer, and I suspected this preference was shared widely. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 20:11, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I see that Flora has added information about negripent and negrisept to the Negri page. However, this still leaves us in an inconsistent position re: sensipent and sensisept, and dimipent and dimisept. I remind folks that while I don't like this naming pattern and would rather not propagate it further, it does appear to be the case that with some intentionality it has already been propagated at least as far as these three cases: currently, "sensipent" and "dimipent" are given as the names of the 5-limit temperaments, as well as the entire family.

But this seems strange to me to include the 5-limit-specific suffix in the name the family, which includes all the higher-limit extensions. The Sensipent family page begins, "Temperaments of the sensipent family temper out the sensipent comma". I feel like it would it be more logical for this to be "Temperaments of the sensi family temper out the sensipent comma"; this implies how these temperaments also temper out other higher-limit commas in addition to this 5-limit comma, and that their name will likely be a variant based on the "sensi" root but without any longer including the "-pent" suffix. Similarly, "dimipent family" should probably be the "dimi family", then, which includes temperaments like "diminished".

Negri is not explicitly identified as a family at this time; it is a section on a clan page. Should it be explicitly identified as a family, and "negripent" given as a name for the base 5-limit temperament of this family?

"Negrisept" is currently given as "7-limit (negri)". Should "negrisept" be added to that section title in parentheses, in the same way that "negra" is included in parentheses as a name for the 2.3.5.7.13 extension?

"Sensisept" is currently given as "Septimal sensi". Should "sensisept" be added to that section title in parentheses?

Is "dimisept" the same as "diminished"? If so, should it be added to that section title in parentheses?

I think the answer to each of those questions is "yes". Finally, I suggest that all three of these pages should acknowledge and briefly explain the naming pattern shared among them, to prevent inconsistencies between them from developing in the future.

--Cmloegcmluin (talk) 16:32, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

My general answer to all the questions is no, remarking:

Negripent and negrisept occurred in Middle Path (2006), but not in Tuning Continua (2008), or so described by any existing music in the temperament, so these are just deprecated names no longer in use. Even for negra I'm not that sure it should continue to be labeled as official since negri extends just naturally to the 2.3.5.7.13 subgroup. Sensisept and dimisept should be considered obsolete for the same reason, along with semisixths. I haven't seen anyone utter these alternative names since the 2010s.

Maybe there's a fair reason why sensipent stuck – the 5-limit is considerably more accurate than the main 7-limit extension, and there are many other reasonable extensions. Whether that's enough to justify separate names for 5- and 7-limit sensi is debatable.

Finally, if we're to identify negri as the head of a family, it seems we should immediately name an alternative extension to it. 19 & 48 and 29 & 48 might be good to consider.

FloraC (talk) 05:10, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for this, Flora. In this case, I'm more than happy for the answers to my suggestions to be "no". I admit that I can be a bit of a consistency-phile sometimes...even when I dislike the thing I'm consistentizing! You've clearly shown here that the proper state for these temperament names — with respect to this weird prefix-suffix naming pattern that some folks tried out in the past — is inconsistency. When naming patterns like this get subjected to historical forces they often start falling apart, and this is just one of those messier cases. So I accept that things are what they are.

Re: making negri as a family, then, if anyone does want to pursue it, that's totally fine with me; I don't care either way.

I suppose all I'd really ask for is a note on at least one page somewhere explaining how for dimipent and sensipent, the "-pent" part was originally meant to indicate the 5-limit, but has since lost that meaning, without disappearing as it did in the case of negripent → negri.

--Cmloegcmluin (talk) 17:00, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

I just noticed something else while looking at the Temperament names page. It appears that the "sept-" prefix was used as a suffix in a temperament name but in a different way than this pattern which was meant to indicate the prime limit. In the name "semisept" it's probably meant to convey the septimal nature of a major sixth (which is semi'd, so I suppose this is a variation on the outdated temperament name "semisixths", which is probably somehow related to sensi; this temperament does not appear, however, to be the same thing as sensisept / 7-limit sensi, as we can see here: https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning/topicId_74762#74779). So that's just another complication to consider in our documentation of this naming pattern. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 21:13, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

One more thing. I found this page (https://yahootuninggroupsultimatebackup.github.io/tuning/topicId_97783.html#98172) where Graham writes:

The "sept"/"pent" distinction was according to a rule I never agreed
with. I think it was that the TOP tunings had to be the same for the
name to be the same. Gene ignores it. I don't care much either way
for established names, but I may have to keep "Sensisept" because it
exists in a higher limit. I can see the rule makes some sense if
we're talking about temperaments, as I understand them. The existence
of the rule may indicate Paul was understanding temperaments a similar
way. But as I understand temperament classes (which is similar to how
others understand regular temperaments) the tuning is allowed to vary
over a wide range. There are subjective rules I follow when I share
names over different limits and we can talk about individual cases if
you like. I don't have a fixed definition, or deterministic
algorithm, for deciding if two things in different limits are the
same, and I don't want one.

So that gives some additional insight to the use of these prefixes, though I haven't yet found the original proposal of this distinction that Graham is referring to. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 21:51, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Semisept should be analysed as semi- prefixed on sept so the sept isn't a "suffix" as in sensisept tho it appears identical. I added a short description to the temperament. FloraC (talk) 07:55, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for explaining that, Flora.

I did some more research and added notes about the -pent and -sept suffixes to the Temperament names page under Diminished and dimipent, and linked to there from the sensi section as well as the new section you added to the Negri page. This leaves me satisfied. Feel free to discuss or revise further if I've missed anything. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 22:52, 29 June 2023 (UTC)