Re: capppella, singing intervals

At 11:21 PM 6/10/99 +0200, Christopher Stembridge wrote:

>About the hair-splitting:
>Italians
>(a) use both 'a capella' and 'a cappella' (the latter is more usual these
>days).
>(b) couldn't care a damn about spelling in the sense that they write
>'comune' and 'accomodare' where English respects its Latin origin more and
>has 'commune' and 'accommodate'.

I believe the Italians may be conforming the spelling to their speech. If
the long vowels of Latin have become short in Italian, they would properly
be spelled with single letters rather than double.

Some Romance languages allow no long hard consonants, hence Span. _capilla_
and Port. _capela_.

--Charlie Jordan <http://www.rev.net/~aloe/music/just.html>