Martina Rosenberger wrote: > What you have read between the lines, could mean, that the portuguese > 'Guitar' could be the "godfather" of the English 'Guitar'.
Yes, although "could" is of course an essential word here. I'd love to learn a bit more about the sources Cabrals quote. Very much of this is based on the assumption that the "Guitarra" in the sources he refers to was some kind of cittern-like instrument and not the "Spanish" guitar. hat's how I understood Cabrals and as far as I know that's what the word has always meant in Portuguese but I would like to be absolutely sure before taking it much further. > That would turn things completely the other way round. Not necessarily - strangely enough. I still belive the Portuguese guitar as we know it today is strongly influenced by the English guitar. The Preston tuners alone is enough to prove that (except for one curious fact: Preston never actually patented the tuners named after him. Was it because he didn't actually invent them?) But that doesn't mean the instrument didn't start its life in Portugal. History has lots of examples of ideas and stuff evolving through bouncing back and forth between countries. One possible scenario: + The instrument type known as the English or Portuguese guitar originated in Portugal at the beginning of the 18th century or even earlier and was known as the guitarra. (A digression: this may explain why the Portuguese kept the original name of the viola da mano while others adopted the guitar term for it. They already had an instrument they called a guitar.) + Around mid 18th C. - possibly a little bit earlier - the instument was imported to the British isles where the native cittern tradition was more or less extinct. The Brits of course adapted it to their own needs. + The British variant made its way back to Portugal where at first it appears to have been regarded as a different instrument from the original one. The two were however too similar for such a distinction to survive for long so eventually they merged into what we know today as the Portuguese guitar. One reservation: It's still possible the modern instrument shows no real British influence at all. We need a closer look at 18th and early 19th C. Portuguese instruments to determine that. This is just a theory of course. I wouldn't dare draw any kind of conclusion at this point. But the theory seems to fit all the facts and may even offer an explanation to to previously inexplicable ones (how the English guittar got its name and why the regular guitar is called a violao in Portuguese). ------- Now on to some rather wild thoughts: The guitar term seems to first appear in Spain at the beginning of the 16th. C. Apparently it's generally accepted that it evolved from the medieval gittern but apart from the similarity in name there's nothing to link the two instruments together. The early Spanish guittara is clearly a small viola da mano (or vihuela da mano as the Spanish called it). So how about this speculation: ? Guitarra was originally the Iberian name for the gittern or some other cittern-like instrument. ? In early 16th C. Spain this instrument had become rare enough the name became adopted for a different instrument with some of the same function as the original had had. This new Spanish guitarra was however unrelated to the older instrument just as the modern Swiss/German Zither is unrelated to the cittern. ? However, in Portugal the original "guitarra" still survived and still survives to this day (although of course heavily modified through the centuries). This theory is really far fetched of course but it *still* seems to fit all known facts. Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com http://www.tablatvre.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
