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

[Graham King]

> 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.

> 
> 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/