Re: Doc: Some miscellaneous suggestions from Peter Toye (issue 579280043 by address@hidden)

[Peter Toye]

Sunday, February 9, 2020, 2:09:09 PM, you wrote:


>> On 9 Feb 2020, at 13:23, address@hidden wrote:
>> 
>> -------------------------
>> Friday, February 7, 2020, 8:39:36 PM, you wrote:
>> 
>>> Am 06.02.2020 um 22:55 schrieb
>>> address@hidden:
>>>> https://codereview.appspot.com/579280043/diff/563480043/Documentation/learning/common-notation.itely
>>>> File Documentation/learning/common-notation.itely (right):
>>>> 
>>>> https://codereview.appspot.com/579280043/diff/563480043/Documentation/learning/common-notation.itely#newcode162
>>>> Documentation/learning/common-notation.itely:162: @notation{note names}
>>>> and @notation{accidentals},
>>>> Here I disagree.
>>>>> From wikpedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alteration
>>>> "In music, alteration is the use of a neighboring pitch in the chromatic
>>>> scale in place of its diatonic neighbor."
>>>> An _accidental_ is the printed ♯-sign or ♭-sign, etc, indicating the
>>>> alteration.
>>>> Thus "accidentals" is plain wrong here. Please keep "alterations"
>>> That were my thoughts, too.
>>> But I ascribe more importance to Peter's
>>> opinion (as a native speaker)
>>> than to mine, so
>>> it is difficult for me to decide now...
>> 
>> Is 'alteration' an American English term? I've never heard it in British 
>> English. But our languages diverge... Are there any US speakers in this 
>> discussion? Wikipedia tends to have a US bias IMHO.

> +1, with respect to accidentals.  I'm an en_GB speaker.
>> 
>> 'Alteration' does not appear at all as a heading in the Oxford Companion to 
>> Music. However, 'accidental' is defined as a 'sign used in musical 
>> notation', which rather leaves open the question of how to describe a change 
>> to a note in the abstract. Something I've not really thought about. Hmmm...

> From a speed-reading of Gould, it appears that
> she uses the verb "alter" and the adjective
> "altered", but _not_ the noun "alteration" in this context.

> It is worth noting that "alteration" has a very
> specific and well-established meaning in early
> music.  This meaning has nothing whatsoever to
> do with pitch.  I've, ahem, altered that
> Wikipedia disambiguation page accordingly.

> The original section header in the LM seemed
> fine to me, but if it needs to change, how about
> "Note names and use of accidentals" ?  It seems
> to me that a user wanting to use the document to
> figure out how to specify an accidental, is
> quite likely to search for that word.

I like that one.

>> 
>> But this leaves me very unhappy about NR 1.1.1.4, which is called 
>> 'accidentals' when the first sentence is describing alterations: cis in D 
>> major is an alteration, not an accidental.
>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Probably:
>>>> @notation{note names} and their @notation{alterations},
>>>> 
>>>> https://codereview.appspot.com/579280043/