I became interested in music when I was very young. In primary school, I was a member of the music group in the school’s performing arts team. At that stage, I encountered music mainly by listening, singing and playing, and I never found it especially difficult to understand. Yet when I entered secondary school and music classes began to introduce formal theory, I became confused.
The Chinese term for a major second, “大二度”, had always sounded awkward to me. It seemed to turn an ordinal concept into an absolute quantity, as though “二度” meant a distance of two units. I found the expression not merely confusing but almost nauseating at a psychological level. This was not a rejection of music. It was an instinctive resistance to a concept that did not seem linguistically coherent. I was too young at the time, however, to think of returning to the English term and tracing the idea back to its source.
Many years later, after moving to Australia and gradually shifting much of my reading from Chinese to English, I began to notice that many Chinese translations of technical terms contained similar problems. Some were merely imprecise, while others created serious misunderstandings or even reversed the original meaning. I recently discussed one such case in How a Mistranslation Shaped Our Misunderstanding of Science, which examines the Chinese translation of falsifiability as “可证伪性”. In my view, this is not a minor problem of wording. It transforms a concept concerning “the possibility of being wrong” into something resembling the conclusive act of “proving something false”, almost reversing the direction of the original idea.
The problem with “大二度” is not as serious as the problem with “可证伪性”, because the former has become part of an internally coherent system of established musical terminology. Nevertheless, the two cases reflect a similar linguistic phenomenon. The translation fails to preserve the basic structure of the original term, making it difficult for a Chinese reader to see how the concept was formed. I had known the elementary theory of intervals for a long time, but it was only in recent years, when I began to understand it through English, that I finally recognised the source of the discomfort I had felt since secondary school.
An Interval Name Is Not the Same as a Pitch Distance
An interval is the pitch relationship between two notes. In Western music theory, naming an interval begins by counting the letter names or staff positions spanned by the two notes. This count is inclusive, which means that the starting note is counted as well.
When counting from C to D, C is the first note and D is the second. C–D is therefore a second. The word second is an ordinal. It means “the second”, not a distance of two units between the notes.
Once the diatonic span has been established, we then consider the number of semitones separating the two notes. C and D are two semitones, or one whole tone, apart, so the interval is called a major second. C and D♭ also form a type of second because the letter names still run from C to D, but they are only one semitone apart, making the interval a minor second.
The name therefore contains two layers of information. Second identifies the span within the sequence of note names, while major or minor specifies the size of that span. A major second is neither a single note nor a distance of two abstract units. It is a particular kind of interval formed by two notes.
A whole tone describes something different. It gives only the actual pitch distance, equal to two semitones. It does not tell us which note names have been used or how the notes function within the written structure.
In twelve-tone equal temperament, for example, C–D and C–C♯♯ have the same audible pitch distance. Both span one whole tone. Yet they do not have the same interval name.
C–D uses two different letter names. Counting inclusively from C, D occupies the second position, so the interval is a major second. C–C♯♯ uses the same letter name twice and is therefore a type of unison—more precisely, an augmented unison. The pitch distance is the same, but the notational and musical structures are different.
This is why music theory needs both a major second and a whole tone. The first describes a diatonic span together with its interval quality; the second measures pitch distance. Put simply, a major second is a structural classification, while a whole tone is a measure of distance.
How the Chinese Translation “二度” Creates Confusion
In English, second is unmistakably an ordinal. It comes from counting inclusively and identifying the destination as the second note position. When the term was translated into Chinese as “二度”, however, the marker that would explicitly convey “the second”—the character “第”—disappeared.
In ordinary Chinese, “二度” can easily sound like a quantity of two degrees, comparable to two metres, two years or two units. A learner may therefore interpret “大二度” as an absolute distance and assume that C and D are separated by “two degrees”. This turns an ordinal relationship within a sequence of note names into a cardinal measurement.
If an older brother is one year older than his younger brother, “one year” expresses their age difference. In the same way, C and D are one whole tone apart, and one whole tone is the expression that measures their pitch distance. A major second is not a quantity in this sense. It identifies the relationship the two notes form within the system of notation and diatonic note names.
The statement “C and D form a major second” is standard in Chinese music theory and cannot simply be declared incorrect within that established system. On the surface of the language, however, the translation is not transparent. It turns a clearly ordinal English form into a Chinese expression that can easily be read as an absolute quantity. It also conceals the inclusive counting method on which interval numbers are based.
If students are told only that “C to D is a major second”, without being told that second is originally an ordinal, confusion is almost inevitable. A more accurate explanation would be:
Starting from C and counting C itself as the first note, D is the second note position, so C–D belongs to the category of seconds. The actual distance between C and D is one whole tone, or two semitones. For that reason, the interval is called a major second.
Only then can the two concepts be properly separated. A major second tells us what interval the two notes form; a whole tone tells us how far apart their pitches are. Although “二度” is now an established Chinese technical term, understanding it requires us to recover the ordinal meaning retained by the English word second. Otherwise, it is very easy to mistake a structural relationship for an absolute quantity.
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