Timeline for Omission of definite article with musical instruments
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 17, 2018 at 16:04 | comment | added | phoog | @FumbleFingers maybe not, but doing the same with "plays on the violin" also yields 14 results, while "...on the piano" and "...on the pianoforte" together yield 11 results. (Omitting the preposition yields fewer results in every case.) Other instruments with similar results include flute and organ; instruments with fewer or no results include trumpet, viola, oboe, trombone, and horn. | |
| Oct 17, 2018 at 15:44 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @phoog: Searching for plays on the guitar on Google Books, and scrolling to the second page of results, I find only 14 indexed instances of that sequence of words in the entire century from 1750 to 1850. I can't actually read the full context in all of them anyway, but there only seem to be 3-4 different examples (published in more than one book). So I'd be inclined to say "more common" isn't really meaningful that far back. | |
| Oct 17, 2018 at 14:53 | comment | added | phoog | @FumbleFingers your ngram is a little more interesting if you extend the date range a bit and add the phrases plays the piano and plays the guitar. Plays the guitar was the most common of those phrases until around 1825. Still more common was plays on the guitar. | |
| Oct 17, 2018 at 12:15 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @PLL: You've probably expressed my thinking better than I could have myself, thank you! All I can do is add a link to this NGram showing that the collocation plays guitar only really started to gain traction in the 30s. It began accelerating more rapidly as electric guitars became more widespread in the 50s, and has now actually become more common than plays piano. | |
| Oct 17, 2018 at 8:16 | comment | added | PLL | @phoog: Historically, the guitar is absolutely the older instrument; but for the last half-century or so, the guitar is more associated with current popular music, and the piano with classical music, thought of by most as more old-fashioned. So it’s easy to believe that e.g. mentions of pianos in the n-grams corpus correlate with writing in a slightly more formal register than mentions of guitars. | |
| Oct 17, 2018 at 4:01 | comment | added | phoog | @FumbleFingers in what sense is the guitar more modern? Merriam Webster dates the English word to 1668, a third of a century before the piano was even invented. | |
| Jul 9, 2013 at 22:20 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | Yes - I play zampogna / hurdy-gurdy / crumhorn sound rather strange. | |
| Jul 6, 2011 at 23:57 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | If you use this NGram to check British/American usage, I think it's clear that UK usage increasingly drops the article for all instruments, but this tendency is stronger with more 'modern' guitar than 'traditional' piano. | |
| Jun 29, 2011 at 20:21 | comment | added | psmears | Agreed - "I play the piano" is far more common in the UK than the version with no article. | |
| Dec 12, 2010 at 3:09 | history | answered | PLL | CC BY-SA 2.5 |