"note head" or notehead" and other similar combinations?

• Oct 17, 2017 - 09:36

Currently MuseScore uses both, "note head" and "notehead", which is the right term here?
Native speakers needed...
Using MS Word's spellchecker on the handbook wants "note head".

Some more of those:

  • Is it "realtime", "real-time" or "real time"?
  • Is it "multimeasure rest" or "multi-measure rest"?
  • "titlebar"
  • "drumkit", "drumset", "sidesticks"
  • "upstem"/"downstem"
  • "fretmark" vs. "fret mark"

There had been a similar discussion about "barline" vs. "bar line", which resulted in consistently using "barline" everywhere in MuseScore and the handbook

Comments

• Oct 17, 2017 - 10:20

There is a difference between "realtime" or "real-time", which is an adjective (as in "realtime computation"), and "real time", which is a noun phrase, as in "to compute in real time". The pronunciation, or more strictly the intonation, is also different.

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• Oct 17, 2017 - 14:35

Native speaker's opinion:

You are correct about the usages of real time and real-time. As far as intonation is concerned, I don't usually hear much difference except in different parts of a sentence such as the beginning, middle or end regardless of which is used.

I don't think titlebar or fretmark are words.

Upstem, downstem and multimeasure should more properly be either up stem or up-stem... the hyphenated word is probably better but the other is acceptable.

As far as drumkit, drumset and sidesticks are concerned, they are music specific words that I don't know if are correct or not.

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• Oct 17, 2017 - 18:10

Actually, we had this conversation as well a while back, and "notehead" won. Supposedly everything was already changed to notehead. See #100396: Change "note head" to "notehead" in UI. I guess maybe something things got missed, or this is new code / code added later.

We are indeed inconstent about most of the things you mention, and it bugs me too :-) Mostly these things are subjective, and I don't really care which way we go on any of them but prefer consistency. Except maybe "titlebar", which I suspect is just wrong.

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• Oct 19, 2017 - 15:02

Changed "titlebar" to "title bar", it occurred once in the handbook.
Changed "fretmark" to "fret mark" in the handbool, several occurences on the tablature page.
Changed "upstem" and "downstem" tro "up-stem" and "downs-stem" in handbook, occurred only once.
Changed "multimeasure" to "multi-measure" in the handbook, quite many occurrences in several pages.
I'll leave drumkit, drumset and sidesticks as they are for now.

' Fixed' "node head" to "notehead" in MuseScore by doing it in the en_US and en_GB translations. Will submit a PR for master, not sure 2.2 is worth the effort and think the PR for master won't cherry-pick cleanly, as the changes are in UI files that have been heavily changed meanwhile.
Same for "multimeasure" vs. "multi-measure". and "realtime" vs. real-time".
See https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/3319

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• Oct 20, 2017 - 16:05

Yes, the idea that hyphens gets used for things that are not normally recognized as words is common. I guess the question is whether multimeasure deserves to be so recognized. Other sources say hyphens should be used only bwfote certain vowels where otherwise it might be difficult to parse correctly, like how "multionyx" might appear as if it were to be pronounced as "mul-shun-ix" rather than "mul-tee-on-ix".

Again, youncan find sources back up different options here. No sense worrying about which is "right", just be consistent.

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• Oct 20, 2017 - 04:17

I'm not 100% sure, but believe that "multimeasure rest" had been used consistently. Only the spell check on the handbook stumbled across it. Being German I am used to see combined nouns like this (and much longer ones too), just not in English, there it looms wrong to me, hence my call to native speakers.

Where is the ambiguity between re-sent and resent? I had changed a few occurrences of "redock" to just "dock", maybe "re-dock" might be better? Alongside with "undock".

Edit: in the code, in comments, it mentions "multi-measure rest", also in comments that are used to generate the plugin documentation, so do become user visible, so there was inconsistency.
And ''only required if" doesn't mean "otherwise forbidden", or does it?

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• Oct 20, 2017 - 15:09

As far as re-dock is concerned, I think the re- is redundant (no pun intended). You are docking the window. The word re-dock to me would mean it's docked and you want to dock it in another position, but that is really splitting hairs because I, and I expect most other English speakers, would understand it either way.

''only required if" needs some context to understand. A certain function in a plugin is only required if the note as a slur on it for example.

"otherwise forbidden" would lead me to believe I can use a certain option unless using it would lead to an error or imply that it is not allowed in certain situations such as placing a "To Coda" in a second volta. This is forbidden (or at least useless) in the current versions of MuseScore since the "To Coda" would never be reached during playback.

These two terms are basically opposites of one another.

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• Oct 21, 2017 - 15:20

Just doing a Google search shows multinational is more common without the hyphen, but multi-billionaire is more common with. Possibly Sspporting the view that a determining factor is the "officialness" of word. In any case, definitely refuting the vorw that it is only about ambiguity parsing vowel combinations. As I keep saying, these things are subjective, and style guides differ on this just as they on questions like pluralization of numbers.

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• Nov 16, 2017 - 16:12

Since this needs a conclusion : I, a french speaker will decide :)
I believe shorter is better and multi-measure, real-time etc... just look one char too long for me. Since there is no definitive source, I choose to keep multimeasure and realtime.
Thank you all for the discussion and the research!

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