Are there historical references that show that "diatonic" is a version of 'di-tonic' meaning 'two tonics'?
Wikipedia says that "diatonic" refers to a whole note scale or a scale with seven pitched per octave.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_and_chromatic
But my take is that the major and minor scale are built from five-note groupings with the intervals of WWHW and WHWW ... which is another way of saying that keys are built in fifths C-G-D-A etc. because C and G (I and V) are the most consonant notes ... the G is the 'secondary tonic'.
This is also the position of a music theory website ...
www.historyofmusictheory.com/?page_id=158 which states...
"This second tonic or “Di-tonic” which phonetically can be argued that this was the original meaning of “Dia-tonic” (Two tonics root and 5th producing the Hypo(dual tonic/di-tonic) scales as opposed to the common “Diatonic” naming convention."
But there is no historical reference here.
Is there an actual historical reference to our phonetic speculations that diatonic really means 'di-tonic'?
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Diatonic comes from Greek "?????????" (there are early Greek music theory texts from times way before Western Middle Ages) and "di" and "dia" are completely different word constituents in Greek. It sounds like that website is making up things.
The only times I've seen the word "ditonic" used in music were in theoretical scale lists. Rather than meaning "two tonics" it means "two tones", in the same sense that we use in talking about pentatonic or heptatonic scales.
"dia-" is Greek for "through": diameters are measures through a circle, diagonals are lines dividing squares or rectangles, etc by going through their center from corner to corner, etc. Diatonic is literally "through the tones".
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