lyrics and music?

[extent_of_foxes]

Thank you for the links!

Good point that there isn't room for a full alphabet in addition to musical notation. I can come up with some ideas to address that, but I want to be clear that my main point was just the observation that this is a way to generate "words" which have unusual structure, not any sort of specific detailed theory. To carry on with wild guessing:

• There might not be lyrics at all, if the music doesn't have lyrics, or if the music is intended to go with a text that the reader is supposed to be familiar with.
  
• There might be only some sort of reduced lyrics, to remind the singer how the music and text line up.
  
• The lyrics might not include all phonetic distinctions present in the language. For example, voicing distinction might be dropped, or sounds that the author disliked might be removed entirely. This would be a odd thing to do, of course.
  
• And, to reduce the number of symbols needed for the music, the pitches or rhythm might not be precisely specified.
  

Regarding "Fi sounds better than fib, sure, but ris sounds better than bris", I'm not actually talking about what sounds better, but about how a singer might consider syllables to be divided. Consonants must be sung at some particular time, or the choir will sound disorganized. As I personally think of it (I have some early music experience but I'm fundamentally raised in a modern choral tradition) the word "fibris" does not have two notes. It has six! The initial unvoiced "f" is a grace note before the first sung pitch, "i". The "b" and "r" are a pair of grace notes before the second held "i", and if the two syllables were sung on different pitches, the "b" and "r" would have the pitch of the second syllable. Finally, the "s" has to be placed somewhere, either on the next syllable, if there is one, or at the end of the last note of the phrase. A consonant at the beginning of a syllable can be timed in reference to the held note, but a consonant "floating" at the end requires (for me) keeping track of a separate rhythmic event.