David Nalesnik <david.nales...@gmail.com> writes: > I can really only speak of the Midwest, and of undergraduate music > students. It is my observation that the habit of calling F-sharps "F" > goes along with mistakes in sight-reading and in chord spelling.
Let's talk about sharps in order not to think b/h is involved. I think it is noteworthy that you can ask "is the F sharp?" in English, but there is no way you could ask "Ist das F ein Fis?" in German in the same way. You can ask that question, but it is like "Is David actually Paul?" rather than "Is David David Nalesnik?". Basically the question is not asking for what kind of F is there but whether mistakenly F had been written instead of F sharp. -- David Kastrup