![\"Banjo\"](\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/banjo.gif\")
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Last night a friend asked me about the origins of the word banjo<\/strong>. I wasn’t sure, so I did some investigating and discovered that banjo comes from the word bandore as pronounced by African slaves – ban’j\u014dre, ban’j\u014d<\/em>. <\/p>\n A bandore<\/strong> (\/b\u00e6n\u02c8d\u0254\u0259(r)\/ \/\u02c8b\u00e6nd\u0254\u0259(r)\/) is “a musical instrument resembling a guitar or lute, with three, four, or six wire strings, used as a bass to the cittern.” and arrived in English from the Spanish ban’durria \/ ban’dola<\/em> or the Portuguese bandurra<\/em>, which come from the Latin pand\u016bra<\/em>, from the Greek \u03c0\u03b1\u03bd\u03b4\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c1\u03b1<\/em> [Source<\/a>].<\/p>\n A Greek \u03c0\u03b1\u03bd\u03b4\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c1\u03b1<\/strong> (pandoura) was a kind of lute with three strings, and the word was used for other lute-type instruments. It possibly developed from and got it’s name from a type of Sumerian plucked lute known as a pantur<\/em> (lit. “small bow”). There is also theory that the Greek \u03c0\u03b1\u03bd\u03b4\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c1\u03b1 came from or was influenced by Ancient Egyptian instruments. <\/p>\n The \u03c0\u03b1\u03bd\u03b4\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c1\u03b1<\/em> became popular among the Romans, especially during the first centuries AD and among the common people – members of ‘polite’ society apparently considered it a vulgar instrument suitable only for taverns, frivolity, low merry-making and popular music. [source<\/a>]<\/p>\n The name Pandora (\u03a0\u03b1\u03bd\u03b4\u03ce\u03c1\u03b1<\/em>) isn’t related to \u03c0\u03b1\u03bd\u03b4\u03bf\u1fe6\u03c1\u03b1<\/em>, as far as I can discover, and comes from the Greek words \u03c0\u1fb6\u03bd<\/em> “all” and \u03b4\u1ff6\u03c1\u03bf\u03bd<\/em> (gift), and means “all-gifted” or “all-endowed” [source<\/a>]. I couldn’t resist using it as a punning title though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night a friend asked me about the origins of the word banjo. I wasn’t sure, so I did some investigating and discovered that banjo comes from the word bandore as pronounced by African slaves – ban’j\u014dre, ban’j\u014d. A bandore (\/b\u00e6n\u02c8d\u0254\u0259(r)\/ \/\u02c8b\u00e6nd\u0254\u0259(r)\/) is “a musical instrument resembling a guitar or lute, with three, four, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,111,118,10,15,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-french","category-greek","category-language","category-latin","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}