PRINCIPLES OF ORTHOGRAPHY FOR
TEXTS ON MUSIC IN ENGLISH
FROM THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ERAS (TME)
Principles of orthography for the TME are derived from the principles of orthography followed in the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum and saggi musicali italiani.
I. TEXT
A. Text data files produced from printed or manuscript sources will retain as exactly as possible the original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. (The fairly large manuscript w will normally be read as lower case, and ff will be read as a capital-letter F.) There will be the following exceptions:
1. Syllable separation will be normalized for the most common words (e.g., "togedre" for "to gedre," "betwene" for "be twene," "acord" for "a cord").
2. In printed material, small caps will be converted to upper- or lower-case letters as the context requires. (Roman numerals will always be entered as upper-case letters.)
3. In printed material, corrigenda published as a part of the book itself will be entered (but note B.1.e below).
4. Accented letters will be entered without accents.
5. Suspensions and abbreviations will be expanded, including those represented as such in modern editions. (Those ignored by the modern editor will not be corrected.) To the degree possible in transcriptions of manuscripts, the English spellings of expansions will be normalized according to the most prevalent orthography in the treatise or in other material written by the same hand in the same source. If no example spells the word out in full, the modern equivalent is used (e.g., expand "oth" to "othyr" or "othir" or "other" if there are precedents; otherwise, expand to "other").
Abbreviated cardinal or ordinal numbers in Latin (e.g., 2a, 4a, 3us, etc.) will be expanded when the result can be expressed as a single word (e.g., secunda, quarta, tritus, etc.) but otherwise should be left in abbreviated form (e.g., 1343o). They will not be expanded in English unless the source employs a single, consistent spelling of the word. Numerals (Roman or Arabic) will be left as numerals.
6. Periods, commas, colons, or paragraphi always will be placed on the baseline.
7. Proper nouns will be capitalized.
8. Initial letters of titles and true incipits will be capitalized, but initial letters of obvious or apparent fragments will not be capitalized.
9. The letter thorn always will be rendered as th. The very rare letter yogh will be rendered as Z/z, unless it appears exclusively to represent consonantal initial Y/y, in which circumstance it will be normalized to Y/y.
10. Other non-Roman letters not part of the standard ASCII character set will be entered as capitalized letter-names between brackets (e.g., letters of the Greek alphabet will be entered as [Gamma], [Delta], etc.). Words written in non-Roman letters will be transliterated according to the standards of the Chicago Manual of Style, 13th ed.
11. In order to preserve the lining of poetry, a return (ASCII code 13) will be entered at the end of each line.
12. Double letters set one above the other will be entered side by side.
B. Various types of available symbols that are readable on any machine (i.e., from alphanumeric codes 32-126) will be used in data files:
1. Single brackets ([ = ASCII code 91; ] = ASCII code 93), if added editorially rather than occurring as part of the text itself, will enclose various types of material:
(a) Codes showing the beginning of each page or folio side, surrounded by hyphens. For example, [-2-] will indicate the beginning of page 2 in text drawn from a published (or paginated) work; [-f.22v-] will indicate the beginning of the verso of folio 22 in text drawn from a manuscript (or foliated) work. When a single word is split between two pages or folio sides, the break will be indicated after the word.
(b) Codes for musical notation appearing within a sentence (see the TML's
"Table of Codes for Noteshapes and Rests," and see also the section below on musical notation).
(c) Editorial notes indicating the presence of figures, tables, or a musical example. For each example, a separate line will exhibit a reference to the source and the page or folio side (e.g., [Meech, 246] or [London, Lansdowne 763, f.106v]). If the example is accompanied by text, this will be included within the brackets (e.g., [London, Lansdowne 763, fol. 107v, 2; text: b. Fa. [sqb]. mi. b molle., properchaunt, .3., .5., .6., .8.] to enable the search program to locate and display text strings within figures as well as within the text proper. The text, of course, will also appear in the graphics file (stored and retrievable as a GIF file) that will store the figure, table, or musical example itself.
(d) Text added by later hands, including glosses and scholia (noted following the text: m. sec. or m.alt. or m.rec.), especially by marginal hands (noted following the text: in marg.).
(e) Corrections added to the base text (noted: corr.). These may be above the line (noted: sup. lin.) or in the margin (noted: in marg.)
(f) Non-Roman letter-names, except for the letters thorn and yogh as noted above.
(g) Deletions (noted: del.) and repetitions (noted: bis).
(h) Graphics files, e.g. [Cserba, 235,1; text: In bethleem] [FRAARSCM 01GF].
2. Angle brackets (< = ASCII code 60; > = ASCII code 62) will enclose (a) letters, words, or passages read by conjecture; or (b) if a short passage cannot be certainly transcribed, dots indicating the approximate number of letters. In the very few cases where an entire passage may be illegible, the number of lines followed by "legi non potest" will be noted within the angle brackets.
3. Braces ({ = ASCII code 123; } = ASCII code 125) will surround an interpolated passage to show the apppropriate transposition.
4. The asterisk (* = ASCII code 42) will be used as equivalent to the obelus.
All musical symbols or notation that appear within sentences of the text will be entered as codes. In general, single-line examples---especially examples with no specific pitch content---will also be encoded. See the TML's "Table of Codes for Noteshapes and Rests." Polyphonic or other more complex music examples, charts, figures, graphs, and similar sorts of material that cannot be easily keyed as ASCII text will be scanned, saved in GIF format, and keyed to the original location in the printed or manuscript source.
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