Books › The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers on these instruments, 1892 › scan 21
Scan 21
The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers on these instruments, 1892
2 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 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 chvota, whence it degenerated to chvotta, from that to hrotte, thence to rotte, with intermediate modifications, such as crotta, and the English crowd, until it ultimately became vote. 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 kvoud. In Halliwel'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 ghvrad or ghvroud 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 Phenicians 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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