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| From: | Brett Duncan |
| Subject: | Re: tuplets |
| Date: | Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:55:44 +1000 |
| User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.6 (Macintosh/20070728) |
address@hidden wrote:
I've heard/used tuplets since the mid 1980s when I first started learning music. However, I've always understood it to specifically mean 'two in the time of x', probably as a mispronounciation of 'duplets' by confusing it with 'two' (two-plets - I grew up in Norfolk!).
I think you may be right about the mispronunciation. I learned about duplets as a student nearly 30 years ago (from music theory texts that were old even then). But the word tuplet was not one I came across until much later.
I don't particularly like the idea of creating a neologism just for the LP manual, whatever Finale may have done. As we've already seen, it's going to cause problems for translating the manual into other languages and won't necessarily even be clear to native English-speakers.
The neologism seems to have become well established in any case (e.g. Google returns over 58000 results for the term). And for English speakers, at least, it's an obvious back-formation from quintuplet, sextuplet, etc.
In what context do we actually need to use this generic term? Surely we can avoid it?
I have at hand a Schubert piano piece which includes a grouping of 23 demisemiquavers in the time of 24, and a grouping of 13 hemidemisemiquavers in the time of 8 - what would I call these? It's in cases like this that I think a generic term is useful.
My $0.02 Brett
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