Re: Strange English in the manual

[David Bobroff]

>> The only exception is a persistent inability to write "staves"
>> instead of "staffs", but I think that is some kind of joke.
>
>It's American usage.

American usage, as far as I, as an American, know is:

staff/staves

My British colleagues say:

stave/staves

I was reading through the PDF manual today and saw one particular place
where "staffs" was used.  In this instance is was in section 5.1.8
"Defining new contexts"  In this instance the word "SimpleStaff" was in
'typewriter' font and the pluralizing 's' was in a roman font like the
surrounding text.  This to me was very clear, meaning "speaking generically
about instances of 'SimpleStaff' within LilyPond syntax".

Now, after a phone call to a British friend who had the Oxford Companion to
Music at his fingertips I can pass along that according to this book
staff=stave; they are interchangeable and the plural in each case is
"staves" when speaking of the musical symbol.  Furthermore, in a paragraph
about this musical symbol, the Companion uses staff/staves and not
stave/staves.  It is never "staffs" unless you are talking about discreet
groups of, for example, office personnel.

Yes, the non-native English speaking authors do, indeed, do a great job
expressing themselves in English.  Yes, there are linguistic flaws in the
English docs.  There are also flaws which appear to have crept in during
editing where there is an extra word that should have been removed or a
missing word which should be added.  If I find myself sufficiently
motivated I will have a whack at going through the docs and fixing some of
this.

-David