Well I'll admit to defeat on the Bouzouki front. Louis (de Bernieres) explained the history to me, but it went over my head rather. The modern instrument has yet to settle down in terms of tuning IMO.

People choose to call short scale instruments (which might be Octaves) Bouzoukis, perhaps because they tune them differently (DGBE etc), and people tune the long ones (which might even be Madocellos) lots of ways too - including DADA, CGCG, CDGA, DAEB, and GDAE.

Certainly playing tunes in 5ths on the long ones is impossible if you have small hands like me, and tuning them GDAE is asking for trouble re strings. It's a straight matter of physics getting a decent tension on a string of a given thickness over a given length. This is how the 'conventional' pitches were arrived at - but some people seems to prefer the unconventional - specially fans of the Sitar!

I wouldn't use Mandolin strings on a Mandola (at least not in the same places). They'll be nice and soft to the fingers, but slack as knicker elastic.

The 'true' Bouzouki is Turkish (not Greek - though they've been playing them a long time) and is very distrinctive - plus it originally only had three courses. The Irish Bouzouki (© D Lunney) seems to be anything you choose to call by that name.

I tend to use the B word for any octave-strung 'modern lute' instrument, because a lot of them are.

Tom