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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