There are many different fiddles from many different lands – for example, the Chinese erhu fiddle, the Norwegian hardanger fiddle and, the one most in the West now play, the Italian fiddle/violin

Another classic example of Wavy's refusal to take on board anything that contradicts his deeply entrenched erroneous viewpoints!

To quote myself from way back:

When people say fiddle they're referring to the violin. The word has an interesting (complex & by no means fully understood) etymology, but in terms of pragmatics it would seem to derive from a verb rather than a noun - a verb which at last yields the noun violin, but it is interesting that in modern musical usage fiddle exists as both a noun and a verb. That said, the iconographical evidence would suggest the earliest bowed instruments in the West were, in fact, lyres (i.e. crwth, juohikko, talharp etc.) rather than lutes (i.e. violin, viol, vielle, rebec etc.) - but, oddly enough, no bowed-lyre was ever called a fiddle.

So - fiddles are thus called by English speakers simply to denote that the instruments in question are played with a bow. It is only English speakers who would call an Erhu a Chinese Fiddle, likewise the Karandeniz Kemence a Black Sea Fiddle, or a Hardingfele a Hardanger Fiddle. The Hardingfele is a specific development of the violin about as far away from the erhu in terms of organological taxonomy as one could wish to get. In terms of classification they're not even in the same family and yet both get called fiddles by English speakers, which only makes them fiddles in the sense of convenient, but not accurate, nomenclature.

For someone who supposedly loves the world being multicultural this counts as an alarming line of colonial thinking on your part, Wavy. It amounts to a disrespectful ignorance in which you wilfully persist no matter how many times you are told. Or is Stigweard right, and you are just doing it to wind people up?