IT's a Gut-tar !! Guit-tar ! Yes ? !
 

Not aware of how many or how little think, realize, or know this, that the word guitar is really referring to a 'tar' (which probably is in the family of non bowed, 'necked' type instruments, like the Sitar. 'Guit' is a Euro or Afro reference to gut, as in cat gut; thus the gut-tar..becoming guit-ar in other languages..maybe Moorish or maybe olde Germanic..
Also funny is one sits to play the sit-tar/sitar. Could it actually be related to sitting, and the word internationally possibly having similarities this way ??!
I'm sure some will chime in with the actual etymology of 'guitar'..This sprang from my cerebrum as just a passing thought...Maybe I'm way off....

Off topic here.

I did a little research on the guitar many years ago before the internet age and i don't recall the guitar having evolutionary relations with the sitar. The sources i found credited the lute as the predecessor of the guitar.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/guitar

This is essentially the etymology I've seen. The origins are Latin/Greek and possibly derived earlier from Persian or Sanskrit. Modern English words like gut and sit have their own (unrelated) lineages.

As most of you know, guitar-like instruments and their similar-sounding names have been around for thousands of years.

It seems a safe bet that “guitar” in English comes from “guitarra” in Spanish. Most of the information in Spanish that I’ve seen suggests as etymological sources the Arabic word qīṯārah and the Greek words kithára and kettarah. The related words cithăra and κιθάρα, in Latin and Greek, respectively, refer to the harp-like instrument called zither in English.

This bit from the Spanish Wikipedia entry seems interesting, although I make no claims as to its accuracy:

En la India estos instrumentos eran conocidos en idioma sánscrito como sitar (instrumento descendiente de la vina), palabra que proviene de dos palabras indoeuropeas que darían origen a la palabra española "guitarra": la raíz guīt (que produjo las palabras sánscritas guitá: ‘canción’ (como en el Bhagavad-guitá, la ‘canción del Señor’), o sangīt: ‘música’) y la raíz tar, que significa ‘cuerda’ o ‘acorde’.

(translation) In India, these instruments were known in Sanskrit as sitar (instrument deriving from the veena), a word that comes from two Indo-European words on which the Spanish word guitarra is based. The first is the root guīt (which gave rise to the Sanskrit words guitá, which means "song" (as in the Bhagavad Gita, or song of the Lord) or sangīt, which means "music," and the second is the root tar, which means “string” or “chord”.

Interestingly, one of the meanings of the Spanish word guita is “string” (made from hemp fibers), although the above text assigns this meaning to tar.

My parents, both born in Greece, early in the last century, taught me that the Greek word for guitar is κιθάρα, which pronounced phonetically is keethahrah (accent on second syllable). The spelling listed as kithára would not be Greek, as the "th" sound in English is translated into Greek as the letter theta, θ.
(Would my parents be proud of me, or what? And yes, I play and sing several Greek songs, yet.:).

Interestingly, cat gut was never used.

Cats were revered and viewed as somewhat magical. People would never dare harm a cat. The then-common myth was that the good guitars were made with cat gut strings which carried some magical property, but no builder would actually touch cat gut. I can't remember the specific details - I read it in a really good history-of-guitars book once. It was all an urban legend (back then).

It was more commonly sheep intenstine.

Hi zeeway (or Angie; I'm not sure if that's your name),

Thanks for the clarification. A couple of online translation sites confirm what you said in your post (κιθάρα means guitar, not zither). In the translation of guitarra provided by the sites, the word kithára also appears in a smaller font, and I'm not sure if it's supposed to indicate the pronunciation for English or Spanish speakers or if it appears for some other reason (look at the Google Translate result if you're interested). The fact of the matter is that it seems that you're right. Nearly all of my post was taken from Wikipedia and I guess I should have double-checked before posting. I am sure about the Spanish word guita, though (means string).

If I'd had the opportunity to study for a degree, it would have been anthropology and primatology, but I also considered philology.

The English language is, like we Brits ourselves, the most mongrel of all.

We have drawn heavily from Latin, Greek, from the many languages of the Indian sub continent, and from Africa, the middle and far east.
Most Indo-European languages have individual pronunciations of essentially the same thing.

We don't know where the instrument originated, but I believe that it has so many forefathers (ok, and mothers), from the many early civilisations probably in Asia and the middle east, but most regions have developed some sort of chordophone.

I have always been impressed that someone in each pocket of mankind figured out how to make a stringed instrument with a sound board to make it louder. As SM said, our modern guitar had many fathers and mothers.

More information on the etymology of guitarra from the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, which is probably a reliable source:

From Arabic qīṯārah, which derives from Aramaic qiṯārā, which derives from Greek κιθάρα kithára 'cítara'.

In the same dictionary, cítara is defined as “an ancient musical instrument similar to a lyre but with a wooden resonance chamber. In modern versions, the chamber has four sides, none of which are parallel, and the number of strings ranges from 20 to 30. Played with a plectrum.” This seems to refer to a zither.

My understanding it that strings were made from the intestines of "cattle" or generically livestock. Cattle got truncated to "cat". But the strings were never of feline origin. Forget exactly where I read that, but I've seen it more than once. I just wish that I could stop always typing [gutiar] and at least sometimes spell it correctly on the first pass.