>> The only exception is a persistent inability to write "staves" >> instead of "staffs", but I think that is some kind of joke. > >It's American usage.
American usage, as far as I, as an American, know is: staff/staves My British colleagues say: stave/staves I was reading through the PDF manual today and saw one particular place where "staffs" was used. In this instance is was in section 5.1.8 "Defining new contexts" In this instance the word "SimpleStaff" was in 'typewriter' font and the pluralizing 's' was in a roman font like the surrounding text. This to me was very clear, meaning "speaking generically about instances of 'SimpleStaff' within LilyPond syntax". Now, after a phone call to a British friend who had the Oxford Companion to Music at his fingertips I can pass along that according to this book staff=stave; they are interchangeable and the plural in each case is "staves" when speaking of the musical symbol. Furthermore, in a paragraph about this musical symbol, the Companion uses staff/staves and not stave/staves. It is never "staffs" unless you are talking about discreet groups of, for example, office personnel. Yes, the non-native English speaking authors do, indeed, do a great job expressing themselves in English. Yes, there are linguistic flaws in the English docs. There are also flaws which appear to have crept in during editing where there is an extra word that should have been removed or a missing word which should be added. If I find myself sufficiently motivated I will have a whack at going through the docs and fixing some of this. -David _______________________________________________ Lilypond-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
