![]() George Bernard Shaw did his best to reform English phonetic spelling, but it didn't catch on, maybe because we're all too used to deriving the concept of a "circle" from the word "circle," and it's an extra cognitive step to decode the unfamiliar signifier sirkel.Īnd we use two flats for a double flat because it works perfectly well and everyone knows what it means. We write and talk about musical notes the way we do because everyone understands us if we did otherwise we'd also have to disseminate our new systems along with our meanings or risk being ignored. We use the QWERTY keyboard, even though it was invented specifically to slow us down, because so many people have learned on it that it's hard to create a big market for DVORAK. (I mean, it might also be that, but it's not only that.) We do things this way because there is an inertia to symbols and to tools. We do things the way we do them because that's how they're done-and no, it's not just a matter of hidebound traditionalism, resistant to change. Invariably, the short answer is "just because that's how it's done." And the longer answers often become insufferably long, dragging out the history of alphabets from Phoenicians to Greeks and of Germanic and Latinate linguistic influences, or brother Guido and his gamut, or the vihuela and re-entrant tunings.īecause all of these are living practices, evolved and amalgamated over centuries, not invented on the spot by one omniscient engineer who can see these glaring inefficiencies from the outset. ![]() Many times, looking at musical practices, verbal languages, and many other topics, we ask questions like "Why do we do it this way? Wouldn't this other way be more efficient?" (Or "easier to understand," or "clearer," etc.) Why does the English language let you make a "k" sound with either "c" or "k"? And an "s" sound with either "c" or "s"? Why don't we just pick one letter for each phoneme? Why do we refer to musical pitches with the letters A-G and then modify them with flats and sharps, instead of just using 12 letters? Why does guitar have intervals of a 4th between all its strings, except for a 3rd between two of them? ![]() I'll go ahead and answer this question in its current state. ![]()
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