P'i-p'a
name ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Alternative form of pipa. alt-of, alternative
"This completes the observations made with the help of the Chinese musicians at the Health Exhibition. But, in addition to these, I measured the lengths of string in several instruments at the South Kensington Museum. They very great uncertainty of the scales deduced from such measurements induces me to pass over the results. I may mention, however, that these measurements show, in a second P'i-p'a, that the four large round frets already named probably gave a Fourth, divided into a Tone and three Semitones of some sort ; that one "Moon Guitar" seemed intended to give 12 equal Semitones, that only trace of Amiot's scale which I have found, and another Moon Guitar seemed to divide the Octave into 8 Threequartertones of 150 cents each."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"This completes the observations made with the help of the Chinese musicians at the Health Exhibition. But, in addition to these, I measured the lengths of string in several instruments at the South Kensington Museum. They very great uncertainty of the scales deduced from such measurements induces me to pass over the results. I may mention, however, that these measurements show, in a second P'i-p'a, that the four large round frets already named probably gave a Fourth, divided into a Tone and three Semitones of some sort ; that one "Moon Guitar" seemed intended to give 12 equal Semitones, that only trace of Amiot's scale which I have found, and another Moon Guitar seemed to divide the Octave into 8 Threequartertones of 150 cents each."
Etymology
From Mandarin 琵琶 (pípá), Wade–Giles romanization: pʻi²-pʻa².
More for "p'i-p'a"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.