![]() [(myl) A quasi-Gricean implicature ensures that if there's a short ("breve") there must also be a long ("longa"), right? And speaking for myself, though I knew about the "longa", the "maxima" is new to me. I have know, since a child, the series from breve to hemidemisemiquaver (tho' I remembered the last as a hemisemidemiquaver and the penultimate as a semidemiquaver - I wonder whether both are equally valid), but never before encountered a longa. Well, I have learned something (by no means for the first time) from this forum. ![]() Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics.It's not entirely clear when and why to chose "semi", "hemi", "demi", or "quasi" for the various powers of 1/2 involved, but whatever…Īnd there are probably studies Out There exploring how inflation has modified time-values over the centuries - perhaps someone in the comments will point us to them. The whole list: Traditional (British) nameĪctually there's more! As this Wikipedia page shows you, at the long end there's also an " Octuple Whole Note" (= "Maxima"), and at the short end there's the "Hundred twenty-eighth note" (= "Semihemidemisemiquaver" or "Quasihemidemisemiquaver"), as well as the "Two hundred fifty-sixth note" (= "Demisemihemidemisemiquaver"). Similarly, when I was a kid, a bottle of soda from a machine cost a nickel - whereas now it's \$1.50 or \$2.25 or more. In other words, quavers were originally "shakes" or "trills", decorative musical wiggles, presumably to be performed as fast as possible.īut now, at an andante tempo of ♩ = 75, a "quaver" lasts for 4/10 of a second - long enough to say two or three syllables. Thus a quaver, known more rationally as "eighth note", comes originally from the (presumably Old English, and anyhow obsolete) verb quave, meaning "To quake, shake, tremble", plus the frequentative suffix -er, as in clatter, flutter, wander, waver and twitter. But the traditional names of musical notes do - and are an interesting exercise in lexical history, combining etymologies from Greek, Latin, Old English, French, and Italian, along with a pervasive inflation of time values. ![]() Punctuation names don't actually follow the powers of 1/2 beyond "semicolon", of course.
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