dikrek Read them. Short version: #196 and #199 sharpen the disagreement rather than settle it, and one of the two actually concedes my point while presenting it as a rebuttal.
On #196 — "they did not have note names in the 6th century, they used the Greek finger names."
That sentence contains its own answer. The Greek scale-degree names are note names: proslambanomenos, hypate, parhypate, lichanos, mese, paramese, trite, paranete, nete. Boethius uses them constantly. So the claim isn't "no note names existed" — it's "the names weren't letters", which is a much smaller and much more defensible claim, and one I already agreed with.
Also, they aren't finger names. Lichanos is (forefinger string), and that's about it. Hypate / nete are positional (top/bottom of the instrument as held), mese is middle, paramese is next-to-middle, trite is third. It's mostly a positional vocabulary, not a hand-based one.
PASHKULI A to B sometimes is a whole tone interval and other times is a whole diapason ("octave") depending on the current analysis
That part is correct, and it's the strongest observation in the post — but it doesn't mean the letters denote intervals. It means Boethius's letters are figure-local labels, exactly like the letters in a Euclidean diagram. In each monochord diagram he re-letters the points from scratch, so A–B in figure 12 and A–B in figure 16 have no reason to match. The letters mark positions on the string — i.e. pitches — and intervals are named by pairs of letters. "AB is a tone" is the syntax of geometry, not evidence that AB is the primitive object.
Which is why the C to D is a semitone??? screenshot in #199 isn't a gotcha. It's the expected behaviour of a system where letters index diagram points in order. But note what that costs the wider argument: if Boethius's letters are arbitrary local labels with no fixed pitch, they can't be used to establish anything about how later note-letters were assigned, in either direction.
On #199 — "it was not extended, it was a completely different approach."
Agreed for Hucbald, and my #57278 wording was too loose there: Hucbald's descending seven letters are not the Guidonian A–G, and the Britannica note quoted is right about that. Fine.
But that's not the system Γ was appended to. The octave-repeating A–G gamut is the one in the Dialogus circle itself and the closely related 10th-century sources — and within that system, Γ sits below A, is written with a foreign glyph rather than a Latin letter, and gives us the word gamut. Those three facts only make sense if the alphabetical series was already anchored with A at the bottom of the existing compass. If the naming had genuinely begun from the whole open string, the obvious move was to call it A and shift everything up a step. Nobody did, in any surviving source. "It was the starting point of the geometric construction" and "it was the first name in the series" are two different kinds of first, and the argument in #51826 needs them to be the same one.
Two smaller things in #199:
- The dasian signs and the "tritus / deuterus" business belong to Musica enchiriadis, not to Hucbald's De harmonica institutione. Britannica's headline attributing Musica enchiriadis to Hucbald is the outdated view — the treatise is anonymous, sometimes tentatively given to Hoger, which is what #51861 said. So the citation is being used against a position it doesn't actually support, and it contradicts the earlier post.
- "A to B was arbitrarily chosen to be a whole tone and B to C a semitone so they can sequentially be different intervals" — no. The letters were arbitrary; the tone/semitone pattern was not. That pattern is the diatonic gamut the chant repertoire already sang, inherited via the Greek systēma. The whole point of a letter series is that it was laid over an existing interval structure rather than dictating one.
Net: the Boethius disagreement is now mostly terminological and I'd call it close to resolved — his letters aren't ancestors of A–G, and I said so. The Γ chronology is still the weak load-bearing beam, and #199 didn't move it, because it argued against Hucbald's system when the relevant one is the Dialogus gamut.
To dikrek's point, and I'd rather say this plainly than politely: the parts of this thread I can't dent are the ones with a document or a lever behind them. The parts that fall over are the ones where a gap in the record is filled with what the monks "must have" been thinking. Cutting the mind-reading would lose nothing and cost the critics their easiest targets.
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