Talk:Tempering out
"Vanish"
I'm not sure this word deserves to be one of the lemmas, not to mention a redirect page and many replacements in other articles. It's an everyday word which basically means disappear, and both are figurative ways to describe tempering out. These metaphors are typically used to add lexical variety in writing, tho some authors may prefer using one of them as we found in Paul Erlich's Middle Path. However, I'm afraid that alone doesn't make it a synonym, since it can be used outside the context of RTT to mean other things. For example, to describe the collapsing of small steps in mos scales.
A temperament is sometimes referred to by a recipe. Does that make recipe a proper replacement of temperament? I don't think so. A recipe can be a temperament, a scale, a chord, or others, depending on context. There's nothing in the word itself to inform the reader that it's a temperament. So it's a good alternative if the context is clear, but still not a formal substitute. Vanish is like recipe.
Note that, while RTT is abstract, what it models is very concrete. An interval can be made to "vanish" thru some manipulations for sure. The question is: what kind of manipulation is used? What's the implementation? Here we should see vanish is no substitute for tempering out.
Edited the page to reflect that.
FloraC (talk) 04:27, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for weighing in.
- I agree that Paul's paper alone is not enough to establish synonymy, though I could also point to prevalent usage on Discord, Facebook, Yahoo Groups, etc. I don't think it's nearly as tenuous a synonym for "temper out" as "recipe" is for "temperament".
- In this case, I was avoiding "temper" as a verb since it is so ambiguous, however, in the case of "temper out", I agree that it is less ambiguous.
- I am fine with your edits. And thanks for the other improvements to the page you made. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 20:02, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
- That's interesting to see how those usage patterns compare on Discord. Thanks for compiling and sharing the data. I had only searched for for usages of "vanish" myself; I was only seeking to convince myself that a variety of active/influential users used "vanish" in this way, i.e. that it wasn't just me anymore. I did find this to be the case: sintel, tprice, frostburn, A.Liv, Kite, Stephen Weigel, Fumica (yourself), osmium, richie, eurybia, and others have used "vanish" in this way. I think this is strong evidence for synonymy, even if "vanish" is less popular than "temper out".
- Info on Facebook is not accessible (though I am actively working on making it so!), but I did search in the Yahoo archives. There we have 1864 total hits for "temper out", "tempers out", "tempered out", and "tempering out". For "vanish" we have 1296. Of course, "vanish" is used in other senses, and I can't check all of them, but my intelligent guess based on random sampling per mailing list is about 3 in 4 of those are in the RTT sense. So, we could estimate that forms of "temper out" were always more popular than forms of "vanish", but in the beginning of RTT, it was only about twice as popular. --Cmloegcmluin (talk) 21:15, 28 December 2022 (UTC)