Bass – Fish or Fiddle?
September 27th 2011 06:17
Bass is a fish. Bass is also a musical term. I think most English-speakers know this, but don't you ever wonder just why two such completely unrelated words have the same spelling - and a different pronunciation?
If two words are spelled the same shouldn't they at least be pronounced the same, even if they mean two different things?
Well, no. There are plenty of examples of this sort of thing. Look at "I read this every day," and "I read this yesterday." Or "I'll lead the way," and "Hurry up and get the lead out."
But why "bass" for a fish (pronounced bass-like-an-ass) and "bass" for a big fiddle (pronounced base-like-an-ace)?
For that matter, where does the word "base" fit into this, and why don't we just spell the fiddle thing base and be done with it?
Now hold on there, Pilgrim. English isn't always easy, but there are usually reasons for everything if we just look around a little bit.
Nobody set out to spell the fish and the fiddle the same way, much less to do that and then pronounce them differently, and all of it just to confuse you. Boy, are you paranoid.
As usual, we have to take these one at a time.
First, bass - the fish.
According to Miriam-Webster and several other dictionaries, bass can be traced back through Middle English, to several Middle Germanic words like baers, bars, and barsch, to an Old High Germanic word - bersich - which was the word for the fish we know as a perch.
And bass - the musical term?
The experts aren't so clear, but it seems likely that bass came through French and Italian from the Latin word bassus, meaning "short" or "low." So bassus gave us both the word base and also took a detour through Italian to become "basso."
"All right," you say. "Let's leave the fish alone. I can see that one. But why, since ‘base' and ‘bass' both mean low, why not just call the darned thing a base fiddle?" Good question. It's that Italian thing. When modern Western music was developing (think opera), the Italians had a monopoly on the whole business and their terms naturally got popular. Anybody who was anybody had to use the Italian definitions of musical terms ("arpeggio," "andante," "fortissimo," etc.).
A big, deep-sounding cousin of the violin was a bass-viol, then later, a double-bass. Remember, English frequently drops the final vowel in imported words ("basso-viol" would have sounded kind of ridiculous). So "basso" became "bass."
Simple, right? It was all a big coincidence that bass and bass - which are two completely different words - came to be spelled alike and pronounced differently. And that base and bass are spelled differently but mean pretty much the same thing.
Oh, all right. This is old, but I know some of you came here expecting to see this, so here it is:
"All of your bass are belong to us."
I'll leave it to you to decide whether I'm talking about fish or fiddles.
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