Hans à berg:: > > On 20 Apr 2025, at 04:13, Michael Gerdau <m...@qata.de> wrote: > >> Frankly I don't understand why people want to change h to b, etc. If > >> you want english talk english, don't mix the languages, it's sloppy > >> and creates confusion. ... > In types of music where English is predominant, it is confusing to > adhere to the strict Germanic convention, and the strict English > version does not work very well in Swedish. Therefore, one has started > to use b instead of h, and Swedish style for accidentals.
My point is that it is sloppy and confusing to mix the two languages. In english there is truck (US) and lorry (British), in swedish we call it "lastbil", but some people impresed by the US-english language have started calling it truck in swedish, but "truck" in swedish is a forklift; is that an argument that we in sweden should replace "lastbil" with "truck" ? It is the same thing with note names and that is why I consider it sloppy. It is clear that it creates confusion. > The letter h came into use in Medieval times as a confusion over a > squarish b, so that is not good either, but has been accepted, as it > occurred so long ago. Well, close, there wasn't accidentals and keys as we have today, but there was two kinds of "b"s so that needed to be handled and the solution then was to have a square and a round, called durum/quadratum and molle/mollis/rotundum, b's. The square b then lost it bottom line and became h. BTW, theese two b's is the origin of the current flat, neutral and sharp signs and I havn't heard any arguments for replacing thoose signs. > https://www.sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/har-man-sagt-a-far-man-saga-h They just superficially skims over the topic, the real problem is that poeple mixes the languages, there will always be confusion and misunderstanding when people takes words and ideoms from other cultures and languages and applies it in a different context. /// Regardless, it seems the music schools have started to use the bess-b convention instead of b-h, so this topic will be moot in one or two generations. Regards, /Karl Hammar
