Lost me there. Banjo has a neck, disqualifies it as a zither. There are the badly misnamed "zither banjos," which were British-made five-string banjos that often had six-string quasi-guitar necks, and where the fifth string, rather than being pegged at the side of the neck five frets from the nut, entered a "tunnel" at the fifth fret and was tuned from the headstock like the other strings.
Zither banjo website.
Doesn't it get a little
Alice-In-Wonderland-Humpty-Dumpty-ish to categorize instruments by how we think they
sound? Given the signal processing technologies available now, instruments can make a wide variety of sounds. I don't hear "zither" when I hear a banjo, but each person's ears are, to some extent, unique, and I wouldn't argue that others may hear differently. But if I choose to name instruments by "what I think they sound like," I may come up with nomenclature that's of limited use to others who don't hear things as I do.
I've seen a zither-isn instrument, from a century ago, called a "Mandolin Guitar Harp," though it had few features of any of those instruments. It did make a sort of tremolo sound, which I guess was enough for the maker to use the term "mandolin" -- though I felt it was probably more to evoke the name of a then-popular instrument for commercial purposes. But to me it was a zither-family instrument, neither mandolin, guitar, nor harp, and I based my classification on its construction, rather than its sound.
Just my 2˘.
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