I'm looking for a way to show the dotted eighth - sixteenth rhythm using a system of rhythmic symbols.
In standard notation, the rhythm looks like this:
In French, it is easy to teach this rhythm because we can say "saut-te" and then the name of whichever note follows, such as "noire".
In English, use the "1e&a" method of counting rhythms, and I find that the way this rhythm is represented using this system is ambiguous. Apparently in this system there is no difference between counting four sixteenths or counting a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth.
For instance, if we count four sixteenth notes, we use all the syllables:
But now when we count the dotted eighth sixteenth rhythm, which only has two notes, we still apparently have to count all the syllables, making it identical to the four note example above:
So in desperation, I turned to the Orff system. This method of rhythmic solfege uses words to represent rhythms, such as "raspberry" to represent triplets, or "hippopotamus" for quintuplets. But still I can't find any examples of words to use with the dotted eighth-sixteenth-quarter rhythm.
What's in your experience the best and least ambiguous way using rhythmic syllables to count or sound out this rhythm?