For Andrewa

1) "12-string" is vernacular, embedded in our business from the catalogues of the original manufacturers (the last people interested in logic or organology) and later "folk" nomenclature (never scholarly nomenclature). [The same holds for the B.C. Rich company's catalogue referring to its coursed instrument as "the 10-string guitar".]

2) Any instrument with at least one non-single string should use "course" for clarity by any serious musicologist.

3) Intruments with 10 single strings should be termed "10-stringed guitars" rather than "the 10-string guitar" because there is no one 10-string guitar (with the definitive article).

4) I suggest you start a new article and title it '10-stringed guitars' under which you differentiate the various types under sub-headings accordign to their number of courses. The baroque guitar would fall under 5-course, the B.C. Rich instrument would fall under 6-course. 

5) I suggest a non-guitarist baroque lutenist should mediate this and offer an opinion on the established musicological use of the terms course and string. 

6) We must recognise that "12-string guitar" is an exception to and deviation from a well-established musicological/organological convention, and not the rule according to which we should re-write the terminology. We should also recognise that the term 12-string guitar enters not via musicologists or scholars but via guitar manufacturers and was later taken up mainly by folk musicians. In contrast there is an extensive scholarly history of referring to instruments with at least one PAIR of strings as coursed, not (single) strung/stringed. Now, I am not suggesting re-naming "12-string guitars", but it is a mistake (and folly) to try to oppose centuries-old scholarly conventions and to take the exception as the rule and re-write the terminology of organology.