Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2017-06-16:

"Sewers caused all our troubles. The masses in this country are not like your Americans, nor even like the British. They are slave stock. They are good for nothing but slaves and only when they are used as slaves are they happy. But we, the decent people, made the mistake of giving them modern housing in the cities where we have our factories. We put sewers in these cities, sewers which extend right down to the workers' quarters. Not content with the work of God, we thus interfere with His Will. The result is that the slave stock increases. Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao, all these Red leaders would have died in their infancy instead of exciting the rabble and causing good Spanish blood to flow. When the war is over, we should destroy the sewers. The perfect birth control for Spain is the birth control God intended us to have. Sewers are a luxury to be reserved for those who deserve them, the leaders of Spain, not the slave stock." -- Gonzalo de Aguilera y Munro, landowner and former army officer, offers his take on the cause of the Spanish Civil War.

[ http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/2711/1/The%20answer%20lies%20in%20the%20sewers(lsero).pdf]

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

[Oh, the echoes I'm hearing in attitudes toward the poor...]

Argh, blackletter. Caroligian Minuscule was a legible hand. Insular, too. But a couple hundred years after they had those perfectly reasonable scripts ... somebody had to invent Fraktur. *sigh*

I'm trying to read something from a book that uses a lot of Fraktur or some similar blackletter typeface. Any Latin or French or Italian name or word -- or Roman numerals -- got set in an almost modern-looking, very clear typeface, but everything that's German text or organ tabulature is in blackletter. I think I'm okay on the lowercase -- I'm sure this snippet:

is "c d e d c h c h a g" (well, c-overbar, d-overbar, etc. -- the overbars mean "an octave higher", and the octave seems to start on H (b-natural) though I think I've spotted inconsistencies in that). But I could use a sanity-check on uppercase, since I'm looking at strings that aren't words. With that in mind, am I correct in reading this:

as "c G c d e d e d e f"? That second letter looks awfully B-ish, but it's not actually a B, right? And this:

is "f d e f g e f g   c G A h c h c h A h"? Or are those uppercase H, since they appear to be larger than the h in the first snippet? (I tried to make all these snippets the same scale, not zooming at all between screengrabs, but I'm not entirely sure converting from TIFF to PNG in Preview preserved that.) Though if those really are H instead of h, I think I'm going to treat that as a typo because jumps of a diminished ninth are out of character for the rest of the piece.

The piece all these are from is "Da bei rami" by Clémentine de Bourges, taken from Ein schön nutz unnd gebreüchlich Orgel Tabulaturbuch (Jacob Paix, 1583, Getruckt bey Leonhart Reinmichel, Lauingen, Germany). That PDF is huge, but I have a smaller file containing just the cover and the pages for this tune. I'm just about finished transcribing it into standard modern notation (by way of ABC), but for proofreading the notes that go down into the uppercase octave and getting confirmation that this:

really does mean "[triplet: c# b-natural c#] [triplet: d c-natural d]", which so far has been the only sense I've managed to make of it. (What resembles an 'ae' ligature is, I'm pretty sure, a 'c' followed by the 'sharp' curlicue. Elsewhere there are what look like 'fe' ligatures that pretty much have to be f-sharps.) And that I'm putting my b-naturals in the correct octaves. So I guess in addition to somebody unfazed by Fraktur, I could use input from somebody who reads mensural notation.