The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #110424   Message #2316290
Posted By: Nerd
15-Apr-08 - 12:09 PM
Thread Name: England's National Musical-Instrument?
Subject: RE: England's National Musical-Instrument?
How about the English Horn (which is neither English nor a horn)!

Fiddle is not really an exclusively English word. There's Fiedel in German and Fiddel in Danish, for example--as close as one could reasonably expect. All of these words are technically cognate with viol, violin being a diminutive form from Italian violino. I don't think it's farfetched to think of people in other languages calling the erhu an example of a Chinese viol, using whatever their cognate term might be.

I don't think the word fiddle turns up in old English, but "fiddler" does, with an "edh" in place of the double d: fi{edh}elere. The medieval Latin cognate of fiddle was vitula, and no one is sure whether the word was imported independently into all the Scandinavian and Germanic languages from medieval Latin, borrowed into several and spread to others from those, or whether there was an Old Teutonic original from which the Germanic forms derive. In any case, it is the same word with different consonant and vowel changes leading to its different pronunciations throughout Europe.