Frank Nordberg wrote: >? Guitarra was originally the Iberian name for the gittern or some other >cittern-like instrument. > > > Frank, I think it is all one single root possibly confusing two Indo-European compound words, each meaning 'so many strings'. kythera, cythera, zither, cistre, cetra, kitar, gitar, guitar, guitarra, giterne, gyterne, zister, zittern, kit (a type of early fiddle), cittra, citole, cystole, citola, cetole, cithrinchem, cithrin, cister, chitarra, chitarrone, sitar.
In Scots, the word 'kist' is consonant with the English 'chest'. One has a hard k, the other a softened ch. With the differences between Latin and Greek pronunciation of written words, the Byzantium/Rome division, any musician brought up reading Church Latin (most musicians) in mediaeval Europe would have used one of two distinct styles of pronunciation, still present in Britain between High and Low (or Catholic and Protestant) churches. One style uses softened c or ch sounds, the other uses hard sounds. For 'c' there are (at least) four different pronunciations in Europe, not always depending on the following vowels, and not always using an added 'h'. There is a zh sound, a hard kound, a ch sound, and a soft c sound. There isn't a 'g' sound but g also has soft variant especially in Romance languages, and can end up sounding much like some 'c' variants. Also, the cittern-like stuff had a bad habit of being popular in Lombardy, Provence, the Iberian west coast and similar places which had wonderful range of dialects locally plus constant interference from seaports, immigrants, northern invaders, people attempting to suppress local languages. Trouvere, troubadour, trovatore - a hundred dialects, but they understood dodgy lyrics in all of 'em. Take into account multiple languages and dialects, pronunciation shifts, the different approaches to pronouncing Latin and Greek, misreading or miswriting of words, attribution of a generic word to any new instruments, confusion between instruments, use of a local name for a new imported arrival... I suggest we refer to them all as 'axe' from now on! David To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
