Small thing but I noticed in the tempo popover that if I type “piu mosso” it recognizes it for playback, but renders the text literally without the accent. I am not Italian and cannot often remember if it’s an accute accent or grave accent without googling it everytime (I know, tsk tsk).
However, I have noticed that the dynamics popover knows what I’m after, and will automatically correct and place the accent. So if I type “piu f” into the popover I get:
Tiny potatoes I know, but thought I would toss it out there for consistency’s sake and for those of us English speakers who can’t remember the nuances of accents. Thank you!
I’m sorry but you are in fact confusing things on purpose. Maybe there’s some esoteric etymological reason why you are of the opinion that piú would be more “refined” than più (and I’d like to hear it) but both in contemporary standard Italian and in the pidgin lingua franca known as music notation, the spelling is più.
L’accento scritto è grave, di regola, sull’u (ù) come sulle altre lettere che rappresentano ciascuna una sola vocale (à, ì); ma taluni, come s’è detto, lo fanno acuto sull’u (ú) e sull’i (í) in quanto vocali chiuse per loro natura.
Treccani extract
Anche nel Novecento, però, non mancano proposte alternative come quelle di Pier Gabriele Goidanich che, nella sua grammatica del 1918, indica l’uso dell’accento acuto e non dell’accento grave su í ed ú «sempre strette» (Goidanich 19624: 73) in parole come cosí o giú (grafia, questa, che ha sostenitori ancora oggi)
Hugo you should read Einaudi’s publications. All of them use the acute accent for i and u in every occasion.
If you are affirming that a grave accent isn’t wrong, I agree with you. But also acute isn’t wrong and, in certain circumstances, I, as Einaudi, prefer it. This simply because the acute accent respects the way those vowels are pronounced
Haha, thanks for sharing. It wouldn’t surprise me that even among native Italian speakers there are different uses. After all, Italy has numerous regional languages and dialects, so someone (as mentioned with Einaudi) is bound to do it differently!
Although English spelling can be wacky (and wildly inconsistent from land to land and dialect to dialect), I’m at least grateful we don’t natively deal with accents (as a matter of debate - in particular which one and which direction they should point). Of course there will be sticklers over the precise use of accents for loan words (such as how we say " Voilà" borrowed from French), but most English speakers just leave the accent off, which is how words like naïve and coördinate eventually lost their umlauts – we simply can’t be bothered!
Whichever the case, I suppose I would prefer the one which is most common and consistent with the one automatically corrected in the dynamics popover – which in this case is più
Thank you Jonathan!
The French are the best masters when it comes to accents; they are fundamental to understand whether a vowel should be pronounced open or closed; for this reason, we Italians pay attention above all to the e, but other vowels can be important as well; the Spanish are the worst, because they only use the acute accent, while the English… well, you know!
But yes, the most important thing is avoid to miss a needed accent!
I really wouldn’t have thought that accents in Italian were not like in French, not optional, at least when it comes to acute or grave. Are you absolutely sure that più mosso should have an acute accent? I would have thought an expression such as « molto di piú » could have taken an acute accent, because of the function of the word. Some more food for thought.
Hi Marc! As I wrote, the usual accent for u and i is grave, in fact the Italian keyboard is as such. But if you want to correctly show the way they are pronounced, the accent is acute. In fact the best Italian editors use this option. When I write with the keyboard normal text I use the grave, but if I write something important with Word or LaTeX the accented i & u are automatically transformed into acute.
Thank you!
