Scan 24
The Fiddle Fancier's Guide: A Manual of Information Regarding Violins …, 1892
2 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1word in almost its primitive phonetic purity—for that the two words are identical I have not a doubt? The Anglo-Saxon word is Cruth, and the Welsh Crwth, in old French Caroth. In old high German chrota, whence it degenerated to chrotta, from that to hrotte, thence to rotte, with intermediate modifications, such as crotta, and the English crowd, until it ultimately became rote. There are besides these, some dozens of different forms of the same word and its degenerations, such as the Irish cruít, kruith, and the Cornish kroud. In Halliwell's "Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words" croud and crouth are found as nouns signifying a fiddle, while the verb crowd is "to move one thing across another, to make a grating noise." It is more than merely interesting in this last connection to note that the old Hebrew verbal root ghrad or ghroud is almost identical in phonetic power and meaning. It signifies "to scrape" or "scratch." Suppose we go a little further and point out that long before the Greeks and Romans knew anything about the British Isles, the Canaanites (Phenician) had colonised a considerable portion of the mainland, and were busy working its mining resources. The Cassiterides islands were no doubt known to the later Greeks by name, but Diodorus Siculus confesses that he did not know where they were. He had merely heard of them as places to which the early Phoenicians had gone. Although some modern scholars—for reasons which do not appear to be very cogent—have relinquished the notion that the Cassiterides of these Canaanitish settlers are the Scilly Isles off the Cornish coast, Cornwall itself, and all the southern district teem with etymological reminiscences
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