source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 06:19:49 -0800 Subject: wolves: last words From: Daniel Wolf <106232.3266@compuserve.com> The term _Wolf_ and its plural _Woelfe_, were established tuning terms in German in the early sixteenth century, and were rapidly imported to English as _wolf_ and _wolves_. The fact is, the name was chosen because of a perceived resemblance of certain intervals to the howling of wolves. As wolves' calls do have a distinctive steady beating, and are often dichordal, this is not an unreasonable metaphor. Any qualitative judgement about this sound is a function of time and place, and we are now - given our modern, urbanized reverence for animals - free to admire both sounds, and recognize certain similarities, much as listeners in the past apparently found both sounds disagreeable, while recognizing similarities. Your regular ( -s) ending for a synechdoche form is without precent grammatically and unnecessary, because the term _Wolf_ was used initially as an unaccompanied noun, and not in the adjective-noun combinations (_wolf interval_, _wolf tone_) found later (my earliest example is nineteenth century - but Jonathan Walker may know an earlier source). As I indicated before, the _wolf_ is a metaphor, and a metaphor must retain the declension of the borrowed term. Furthermore, English has so few surviving Germanic plural endings that it certainly adds to the surface variety of our language to be able to use one when we can! Letīs get back to tuning... Dr Daniel Wolf, Frankfurt Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 10 Dec 1996 21:43 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA21595; Tue, 10 Dec 1996 21:45:28 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA21566 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id MAA28256; Tue, 10 Dec 1996 12:45:24 -0800 Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 12:45:24 -0800 Message-Id: <199612101540_MC1-CE2-BDC2@compuserve.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu