Duet, Trio, Quartet, Quintet, Sextet, etc. Why is “trio” in here instead of tritet?
In: 154
Blame Vivaldi.
Most of music terms come from italian, that in turn comes from latin (mostly) and greek (a little bit).
Trio is (and used to be) the most common way to describe a group of three people (trio, followed by terzetto, but terzet is not a nice sounding word in english).
On the other hand there isn’t (and wasn’t) any way to say quartet, quintet etc in italian other than quartetto, quintetto etc.
Why is this the case in italian? Hard to tell, language is complex.
But english (and all western music) mostly inherited this jargon from the italian of the late 1600.
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