ピアノ

1709 in Florence is the standard date often linked with Bartolomeo Cristofori's keyboard instrument, though Treccani also discusses work around the end of the seventeenth century. The Italian name pianoforte joins piano and forte because the instrument could produce quieter and stronger sounds by touch. Cristofori worked for the Medici court, and Scipione Maffei described the mechanism in 1711. Japanese ピアノ ultimately comes from this Italian music word, often through European music education. Shogakukan's Seisenban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten cites ピアノ in Gyokuseki Shirin from 1861-64, before the full Meiji school system. Later music textbooks used ピアノフォルテ and the dynamic mark p; Seisenban also gives 1904 for the music symbol sense. Related Japanese katakana terms include フォルテ, メトロノーム, ソナタ, and グランドピアノ. Modern Japanese ピアノ mainly means the keyboard instrument, as in ピアノを弾く, and it can also mean the score direction p. Italian piano is wider: outside instrument names it can mean quiet in music, slowly in speech, and even floor in everyday Italian. English piano is close to Japanese for the instrument, but Japanese does not use ピアノ for a building floor.