Scan 86
Researches into the early history of the violin family, 1883
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 76. See the scan on archive.org.
1applied to a characteristic peculiarity of the crwth should not be genuine Welsh; and their preconceived notion led them to disregard the statements of archæological scholars, who are greater authorities on this question than are musicians, and who point to the mediæval Latin burdo, "a drone," and to its occurrence in romance literature. If the word is of romance origin, the Welsh and Irish may have obtained it through the English.
3Perhaps the following observation by Thomas Wright ("Essays on Archæological Subjects," Vol. ii., p. 33, London, 1861) explains the occurrence of those musical terms in the Welsh language.
5"I am perfectly satisfied," T. Wright remarks, "that the Welsh language, as we know it, contains a considerable number of words which have been taken directly, not only from the Anglo-Saxon, or English, but from Anglo-Norman also, and the former perhaps came into the Welsh language since the Norman Conquest."
7Nay, the very name of the nation which claims to have given to the continental nations the parent of the violin and various musical terms, is probably foreign. "The German race," T. Wright explains, "had a term for those who were of a different race from themselves, which was represented in Anglo-Saxon by the noun wealh, 'a foreigner,' and by the adjective waelisc, or wylise, 'foreign,' but which, as the Romans were the only race quite different from their own with which they had much acquaintance, they applied especially and almost solely to people speaking the Latin tongue. During the middle ages the term Welsh, in the German languages of the Continent, meant especially French, but was applied also to other neo-Latin dialects; in the German of the present day the same word (Wälsch) is applied peculiarly to the language and people of Italy. It was no doubt for the same reason—namely, that they were a people speaking Latin—that the Anglo-Saxons applied this word to the population they found in Britain, and it probably became extended to what we now call Wales and the Welsh, merely because, when they subsequently became acquainted with them, the Anglo-Saxons
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