forte

Forte enters English in two distinct but etymologically related senses. The musical direction forte — meaning 'play loudly' — comes directly from Italian forte, which comes from Latin fortis, meaning 'strong.' The logic is natural: loud music is strong music, music that asserts itself with force and volume. In Italian musical notation, forte is abbreviated as f and instructs performers to play with greater volume and power. Its opposite is piano (soft, abbreviated p), and together they form the foundational dynamic system of Western music notation. The word was in common use by the early seventeenth century, when Italian composers began adding verbal performance directions to their scores, and it spread across Europe as Italian musical vocabulary became universal.

The English word forte, meaning 'a person's strong point or special talent,' follows a different route from the same Latin root. This forte came into English from French fort (strong, masculine) or forte (strong, feminine), which also derives from Latin fortis. In fencing, the forte of a sword blade is the strong part — the section nearest the hilt, which provides leverage and strength in parrying. By extension, a person's forte is their strongest area, their most powerful capability. This sense entered English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and became common in the nineteenth. The two fortes — the dynamic marking and the strength-meaning — arrived in English by different paths but from the same Latin ancestor.

The confusion between these two fortes has created a persistent pronunciation debate in English. The musical forte, being an Italian word, is traditionally pronounced as one syllable: 'fort.' The personal forte, being taken from French, is traditionally pronounced as two syllables: 'for-tay.' But because the words are spelled identically, speakers applying the two-syllable pronunciation to both have made 'for-tay' the dominant form in general usage, even when the musical sense is intended. Most English dictionaries now accept 'for-tay' for both meanings, acknowledging that the traditional distinction has been lost. The Latin root fortis, equally the parent of both, makes no complaint — strength in whatever form it takes.

In the baroque and classical score, forte was the beginning of a dynamic language that expanded enormously over the following centuries. Composers added piano and forte to their scores to guide performers; then fortissimo (very loud, ff) and pianissimo (very soft, pp); then the superlatives of each; then mezzo-forte (moderately loud, mf) and mezzo-piano (moderately soft, mp). The fortepiano — the early pianoforte — was named for this entire system, an instrument capable of forte and piano, of loud and soft, in a way that the harpsichord was not. Dynamic marking, beginning with a single word for strong-and-loud, became the notation system for the entire emotional landscape of music.