The 1700ish G minor tunes were played on standard fiddles in standard tuning Scordatura tunings were well known and often written in the music; there are many Scottish folk examples, but *the* piece exploiting them was Biber's Rosary Sonatas. If a funny tuning wasn't written in the score we (almost always) know it wasn't expected. The difference must have been one of training, but why I can't imagine.

There are a few tunes that have to seen in Birdeye's way. "The Oyster Wives Rant" a.k.a. "The Black Mill" is one. The upper tetrachord is that of a dorian or mixolydian scale, but the lower tetrachord has a gap where the third ought to be, and there's no apparent reason why it should be seen as being in a dorian (kind of minor) or mixolydian (kind of major) scale. This would not be ambiguous in Arabic music (the motivic structure would classify it) but in western European idiom it is. There aren't a lot of tunes like that.