"Chords are just arpeggios"

There might be some dialect drift going on here. In four decades of playing various keyboard instruments and the violin and singing in choirs, I had never heard anyone use arpeggio to refer to broken chords played out of pitch order until coming into contact with the ukulele and banjo communities. Of course, it’s totally understandable how linguistic communities oriented around instruments that use re-entrant tuning might develop slightly different meanings for technical terms like “arpeggio” and “inversion”, but that doesn’t mean the words have unconditionally changed in meaning. In fact, there are communities where the distinction between “arpeggio” and “broken chord” is useful and has been retained.

(There are also some questions about edge cases that have come up in these discussions, which is somewhat orthogonal to this issue.)

David

I think this pretty much hits the nail on the head. These terms and their definitions are part of classical music theory and if you play classical music at all. I play classical music on the recorder and did a course in classical music theory some years ago and in those circumstances you have to learn the precise definitions and so I had to learn to distinguish between an arpeggio and a broken chord. However in less formal musical styles, technical terms are often used much more loosely. In a sense it doesn't really matter as long as everyone understands what you are talking about.

I think sopher was only partly right when he (she?) said language was imprecise. It's true of everyday language but if you are working within a particular sphere then there will be terms that have a precise meaning because they describe key aspects of that sphere. In that sense the language is precise, in fact it has to be precise and you need to know that precise meaning so if you use that term, others will know what you are talking about and everyone is clear they are all talking about the same thing.
 
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