Am 22.04.25 um 03:45 schrieb David Wright:
On Mon 21 Apr 2025 at 17:17:03 (+0100), Wol wrote:
Oh - and why does lilypond insist on calling an english half-note a
full note?
Apart from not being sure what you mean by an /english/ half-note,
I can't find the term "full note" in the LP manuals, unless it's
split across two lines, like in your post.
Isn't this the "whole note" vs. "semibreve" discussion?
In that case: The mensural note names survived in a number of languages
to some degree and in various variants, cf.
https://dictionary.onmusic.org/appendix/topics/notes-and-rests. And
while I personally like the traditional latin names very much, it's not
obvious for us today why a note value that is so long that we don't much
use it anymore should be called "breve" = "the short one". (The reason,
as most of us probably now, being that the note values were added over
time starting from the longest ones which, at the same time, gained in
actual length.)
But of course it's not much more sensible to call a crotchet in 3/4 time
a "fourth note" (like the Americans and we Germans do) - so the beat is,
by name, one fourth of a certain length that practically does not exist
in the music at hand...
Lukas
