Monday, April 2, 2012

A2: From "Tharopes" to "tarochus"

One objection to a derivation from "Tharopes" might simply be the obscurity of the name. It is exactly such obscurity that is implied by the inability of those who speculated about its derivation in the 16th-17th centuries to come up with anything that made sense. There were only two, and both proposed Greek origins; other learned individuals confessed themselves baffled. The humanist Flavio Alberto Lollio, a translator of Latin, exclaimed in his famous Invettiva contra il gioco dei Tarocchi (Invective against the game of Tarot) (from http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=199&lng=eng):
Dove lasso quel numerar noioso
D’ogni Trionfo, ch’esca fuori?
(Where could that annoying enumeration of Triumphs have been permitted to be made?)
If Lollio didn't know the answer, it couldn't have been too obvious. Even today most etymological dictionaries do not give a derivation for tarot or tarocchi, and those that do (I have only seen the one in the Grand Robert Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise) make attempts at derivation at least as dubious as the one I am defending. (In the Robert's case, from an Arabic word tarah, meaning "discard";  the only evidence for this I've found is that there was a "discard" rule introduced at around that time, the beginning of the 16th century, and the Italian term had already been taken by another game, Scartino) In any case, I am not saying that the argument I am presenting should convince anyone. Sufficient confirming evidence is simply not to be had, for this or any other theory. All I wish to do is put out what evidence there is.

So I will begin.

Modern standard Italian doesn't have a "th" sound. Since it is derived from Tuscan, it seems to me that "Tharocus" would easily reduce to "Tarocus" for Poggio's readers. In Skelton I notice that the spelling of one name does alternate between "Th" and "T": it is "Tamyris" on p. 321 of Skelton, but "Thamyris" on p. 322. I am not sure why that is, since Poggio himself has "Thamyris" throughout.

How would this "taropos" have become "tarocco"? I have two explanations.

We know that Greek was in fashion during the second half of the 15th century. And people going to Greece then, to get out manuscripts or relatives or to study, had also to contend with Turkish.  We also know of this period in history, when vernacular languages were supplanting Latin among the literati, that a great many new words either were invented or at least appeared for the first time. This John Skelton, for example, was as of 1957 credited by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with at least 640 words (or particular senses of words, that had never appeared before in writing (vol 2 p. xxxii). In addition, the editors say that there are 816 more that the OED missed (p. xxxiii). The total, even allowing for inaccuracies, is impressive. We know that the literati didn't just use words that already existed but invented them. Shakespeare invented constantly; my favorite is "superflux" in King Lear, which is simply "overflow" in Latin.

New words most commonly came from Latin, because that's what the literati knew, but Greek was also much used. In late 15th century Italy, Greek was fashionable. In tracing the sources of possible allusions on the cards, I found that some of the best known authors made up Latinized words, i.e. words that would grammatically fit their Latin text, from Greek roots. The Venice 1499 illustrated book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is filled with such words, making it notoriously difficult to translate. Even the word hypnerotomachia itself is made up from three Greek words not so combined before: sleep, love, and strife, thus "strife of love in a dream." "Poliphili" similarly is made up from the words for "many" and "love"; and so on.Erasmus also made up words for a made-up genealogy for Folly in his Praise of Folly, 1514 Venice; see p. 16-17 of the 1993 translation, notes 15 and 19: his name for Folly's mother, "Freshness," is made up from Greek, as are those of Folly's nurses "Drunkenness" and "Ignorance." The translator does not say what Erasmus's words were or their relationship to Greek. A lesser known Ferrara humanist in the 1520s also made up words from exceedingly obscure Greek ones for a Latin poem that we will see later, in the section on Ferrara. I assume the practice was engaged in by many at that time, and the more obscure the Greek, sometimes, the better. These words, however, were never used again. Somehow, "tarocco" was different.

At least two 16th century authors cited in Andrea's "Etymology of Tarot" essay (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=220&lng=ENG) thought that the word "tarocco," meaning the game, was of Greek origin. Alciati's derivation, 1544, was fanciful, a supposed "hetarochoi," meaning "companions." The author of the Anonymous Discourse used a word that indeed had been adopted from Greek into Italian dialect, meaning "things made in compost"; but this meaning has nothing to do with the various meanings of "taroch-" in the late 15th and early 16th century. Andrea points out that there is a Greek verb tarichèuo, which means "to put something into salt to get it dried." This etymology of "salted" is also used by Cecci, who would be a third author, except he doesn't say it comes from Greek. Again, these proposed derivations don't have any relation to the word as used in any known contexts. They didn't know the origin, but they may have heard it was supposedly Greek.

Others thought it was of "barbarian" origin, i.e. not Latin. Andrea writes (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=263#) about how Vigilio (either the father or the son), sometime between 1532 and 1434, put on a play in Mantua called Italia and Mantua. It describes how first Italy was first ruined by the Sack of Rome, and then its people degenerated further by taking up foreign fashions. Even games are affected.
But now with the barbarian rite, without relationship to the Latin, they call it taroch: "Barbaro ritu, taroch nunc dicunt nulla latina ratione". But then why is that game is not called no less improperly bachiach? "Sed cur non minus improprie bachiach?"
This word "bachiach" is of interest, since it is rather similar to "bacchic." I will get to it later. But for now I am merely emphasizing how many people thought the "taroch-" words came from a foreign source, i.e. not Latin.

How foreign words got Italianized is described in another of Andrea's essays (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=262). He cites the linguist Massimo Zaggia in a study of the macaronic verse of Folengo. (Folengo is important to the history of tarot for his five "tarocchi" sonnets  in his 1527 Caos of Tiperuno; see http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Caos_Del_Triperuno.) Here is what Zaggia says about the the bizarre new words that appear in Folengo's writing, as Andrea quotes him:
According to the norm of Tuscan-based Italian handwriting, the h serves indicate the velar [using the soft palate] sound of c and g before a palatal vocal: and this use is also recognizable regularly in the macaronic language of Folengo, particularly for entries [voci] of Tuscan literary diffusion such as nocchia, nocchierus, pecchia, etc. (notice the geminated c, always from Tuscan literary use); again for the velar value of ch, we can recall trincher (from the German), or, finally, taroch (at Zan T 182, Zan. C 224) or tach tich toch...."
"Tach tich toch" is presumably another game. The point, I think, is that a word entered Folengo's "vulgar Latin," i.e. Tuscan, poetry by giving it a "c" or "ch" at the end. So that is one way we might have got "taroch": as a "vulgar Latinization" of a Greek word with a different ending, and a different spelling of the beginning, namely the name "Tharopes."

Along with this explanation there is another, separate but along the same lines. In Etymology of Tarot, footnote 12, Andrea cites, for "Taroccare" (I highlight the most important part):                
..the Vocabolario Universale Italiano, compilato a cura della Società Tipografica Tramater e C., Napoli, 1840: "(in modo basso) gridare, adirarsi [inquietarsi gridando forte, schiamazzare]. Lat. ira, excandescere. Dal greco Tarachos tumulto. In turco Taraka, tumulto, strepito, rumore. In persiano Tyrak vale per il medesimo".
(the Vocabolario Universale Italiano, compiled by Tramater & C. Typographical Company, Naples, 1840: "(in low manner) shout, become angry, [Troubled or angry loud shouting, clamour]. Latin: anger, excandescere. From Greek Tarachos, tumult. Taraka in Turkish, tumult, clamour, din. Tyrak in Persian, with the same signification".)
So we have an 1840 dictionary listing "tarachos" as Greek for "tumult." That was 1840. But what about the 1490s? Was the word even known then? In 1497 Aldus in Venice published a Greek-Latin Lexicon by . The Ransom Center of the University of Texas sent me a scan of the page that had all the Greek words beginning "tau alpha rho," i.e. "tar-" (I also got the pages for "thar-," but found nothing relevant.) Here are all the words of that sort, Figure A4 (be sure to click on the image, to make it bigger)


You will notice that there are a couple of words beginning "tarach-," words which have as their Latin equivalents perturbatio, turba, and turbatio. The primary meaning seems to be perturbatio, in English "perturbed." According to Wiktionary, perturbatio means "confusion, disturbance, disorder, commotion, revolution, perturbation, passion"; these meanings are in line both with Bacchanals, as seen by someone unsympathetic to the god, and with 16th century Italian meanings of "taroch-" as "irritated." "Turbatio" means "confusion, disturbance"; that fits the image of a group of riotous Bacchantes. "Turba" means "crowd," again of relevance; it is also the first word of a popular alchemical compendium of the time, although I can't think of how that fact would be relevant here.

In English, there are a few obscure words that derive from another form of this "tarachos," namely "ataraxia," also spelled "ataraxy," both meaning calmness of mind,  and its cohort "ataraxic," also spelled "ataractic," meaning "tranquilizing drug." According to Wiktionary (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ataraxia), it comes from the Greek ἀταραξία , ataraxia, itself deriving from the prefix a, meaning "not." plus ταράσσω  tarasso, meaning "trouble, disturb."  In Italian, the word corresponding to "ataraxia" is spelled "atarassia." The Greek letter after "tara-" is in one case a Xi (corresponding to the "x" of the English word), and in the other a double Sigma (corresponding to the "ss" of the Italian.). "Xi" is usually transliterated as "x," and Sigma as an "s"; only "Chi" (written like the Roman X) is tranliterated "ch." But it is precisely that letter Chi that the 1497 lexicon has, hence tarachos, or tarachus with a Latin ending.

According to Wikipedia, ataraxia wasa term in Epicurean and Skeptical philosophy for the goal of their philosophical endeavor, tranquility of mind no matter what the circumstances. As such it would have simply been incorporated into Roman philosophy as ataraxia, and into Italian as atarassia. But the line is not so straight to  tarochus, tarochi, and tarocchi.

 So we have this word "tarachos," corresponding both to non-tarot uses of "taroch-" words and also to the unsympathetic conception of the rites of Bacchus.

One possibility: our word-inventing literati, being piously misogynist Christian monks, take the Greek word and use it in a way based on their view of the so-called "rites" of Bacchus and Orpheus, with their flesh-eating, murderous women It now gets the same meaning as "mania": not only tumult but craziness, mass delusions, etc. In Euripides' The Bacchae, Dionysus creates illusions: to Pentheus, he creates the illusion that his palace burns and falls from lightning and earthquake (as in the "Fuoco ("Fire") card (later called the "Maison Dieu" or the "Tower) (for the text, find "totter" at http://classics.mit.edu/Euripides/bacchan.html; or lines 585-793 at http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/euripides/euripides.htm). Later Pentheus' mother thinks she is eating a wild animal when in fact she is eating her son's flesh (find "thy own son" at first site and read on through Agave's own version of the event; at the second site, it's lines 1397-1505; but the essence is at lines 1493-1502).

How did "tarachos" become "tarochos"? Here are three possibilities, not mutually exclusive: (1) Our monk-poets combined it with "Tharopes" and kept the "ch" favored by Tuscan. (2) They needed rhymes with "och" rather than "ach. (3) It had already mutated to "och" in the local dialect, which had previously borrowed the word from Greek and incorporated it into the local speech.

Now let us look at the first known instances of words that actually start "taroch-." One is from the Maccheronea (dedicated to Gaspare Visconti, d. 1499), by the poet Bassano Mantovano. Here it is, with Ross S. Caldwell's translation:
Erat mecum mea socrus unde putana
Quod foret una sibi pensebat ille tarochus
Et cito ni solvam mihi menazare comenzat. 
(My mother-in-law was with me, and this idiot thought he could get some money out of her, so he started threatening me.)
I don't know the lines before and after, so I don't know if tarochus is meant to rhyme with anything. I am told that this work was fairly definitely composed around September of 1495, because the poem elsewhere refers to the peace negotiations then going on between the Italian and the French. It is from the area around Asti, in the Piedmont region.

The second instance is in a type of song known as Frotula, discussed in another of Andrea's articles, Taroch - 1494 (http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=264&lng=EN). It, too, is from around Asti, but its date of composition is less certain.  Written by Giorgi Alione, it was published together with other "farces" and other works in 1521. But according to one critic, the farces "were written at the time of Charles VIII's descent into Italy, that is, toward 1494." Charles VIII seems to have been in Asti from Sept. 9 to Oct. 6 of 1494, after which he entered Lombard territory and descended toward Naples after concluding a treaty with Milan the same month (See Ross G. R. Caldwell's timeline for Charles at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=775&start=10#p11133). But that it was written then is admittedly just one person's opinion. There are many considerations.

Here is the relevant stanza.
    Marì ne san dè au recioch
    Secundum el Melchisedech
    Lour fan hic. Preve hic et hec
    Ma i frà, hic et hec et hoc
    Ancôr gli è - d'i taroch
    Chi dan zù da Ferragù.
Here "taroch" rhymes with "hoc" and "recioch." "Tarach" wouldn't have worked. No one knows precisely what the stanza means. But here is Andrea's commentary, first on the poem as a whole and then on the use of "taroch" (Andrea's original is in Italian, but he approved the translation below):
The author's misogyny manifests itself through accusations pointed at women and the clergy, above all the monks: the women of Asti adorn themselves to let men know that they are of easy virtue; the whores have increased their rates; all women betray their husbands, who have little sexual imagination, while the priests and above all the monks know its every variation and do the 'hic, hec hoc', where "hic" is to intend in a onomatopoeic sense to refer to the typical hiccup of the drunk, while "hec" and "hoc" allude to other scurrilous distractions to which the monks of the time dedicated themselves.
...
To understand the word taroch in this work we have made use of the translation that Enzo Bottazzo made of many words of the Frotula in the work edited by him, Giovan Giorgio Alione, L'Opera Piacevole (Giovanni Giorgio Alione, The Pleasant Work) (9), where for taroch he gave "sciocchi" (foolish) (10). So the verse with the word taroch, "Ancôr gli è - d'i taroch," must be translated as "there are still some fools" (probably in reference to betrayed husbands).
Ross translates "tarochus" as "idiot," and Andrea translates "taroch" as "foolish."  "Idiot" and "fool" mean pretty much the same thing in conversational English. But other English words, with a different meaning, would fit both, notably "deluded".  "Disturbed," which I get from Wiktionary's list for "perturbatio" might work, too. But the person in the frottola is not disturbed in the sense of "agitated"; but rather in the sense of not being agitated, due to his simplicity.

In the 16th century, tarocco and its variants had a variety of meanings. Here is Florio's 1611 English translation of da tarocco: "gullish, wayward, peevish" (http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio/search/153r.html). A gull is a dupe; that is close to the modern English "fool" (for which another term in the US, from the late 19th century on, is the term "patsy," which may derive from "pazzi"). "Wayward" is to say willful, perverse, unpredictable. "Peevish" means ill-tempered, contrary.

So it has a variety of meanings. "Dupe" fits an unsympathetic view of the rites of Dionysus, and also the Frotula. The last two wouldn't fit the Frotula, but would fit Ross's example. Later uses of "tarocco" fit "ill-tempered"--as in "perturbed"--and even "angry." For example there is Garzoni's Hospital of Incurable Madmen, where the "tarocco" madmen are not only irritable but angry, and not just deluded but crazy, i.e. "pazzi" and "matto." I quote from Vitali's essay, Italian and English versions, leaving the "tarocco" words untranslated:
Alcuni hanno nel cervello inserto un spirito sí fatto che, quando qualche volta avviene che si tengano offesi o ingiuriati da qualcuno, con una pazza volontà cominciano a un tratto a contender con quello; e secondo che dalla banda dell'offensore vanno multiplicando I'ingiurie e l'offese, cosí dalla banda sua crescono insieme con l'odio i dispetti continui; onde la cosa si riduce a tale, che taroccando col cervello bestialmente seco, acquista il nome di pazzo dispettoso e da tarocco.
(Some people have such a spirit inserted in their brain that when they think they are offended by someone, they start to contend with him with a mad willfulness; and if the offender multiplies the offenses, so on his part grow hatred and continual spiteful acts; whence the thing reduces him to such that, getting his brain taroccando in a bestial manner, he gets the name of Spiteful & da tarocco Madman.)
The published English translation of this book (by Daniela Pastina and John W. Crayton, Tempe Arizona 2009, p. 105) has "enraged" for taroccando and  "full of wrath" for da tarocco. It is not clear to me that any actual reference to tarot cards is asserted here, although of course by then the word tarocchi, as applying to the game, was well known.

In the writings about Bacchus there is also the word "furore," fury or frenzy, which seems to me easily interpretable as "anger."

It is in the context of "foolish" that linguists have understood the term "bacchiach." Here is the quote from Vigilio again, cited by Andrea at http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=263#
But now with the barbarian rite, without relationship to the Latin, they call it taroch: "Barbaro ritu, taroch nunc dicunt nulla latina ratione". But then why is that game is not called no less improperly bachiach? "Sed cur non minus improprie bachiach?"
Andrea goes on to observe
If according to Dionisotti, bachiach is for bachioch, that is, bachiocco, foolish, Cherubini also suggests the Milanese baciaccol, marking off tarocch for tarlucch, a term that in the Milan dialect means sloppiness, a bad way, justifying in such a way the joking proposal to change the name of the game, bachiach in substitution for taroch.
In other words, it is like the use of "taroch" to mean "foolish." But where did bachiocco come from? The linguists don't say. Andrea adds:
In our opinion the term bachiach could derive from Bacchus, the God of folly, as we have emphasized in the essay Tharocus Bacchus Est. In such a sense the term Taroch, with the meaning of folly, should be connected with the Fool card, from which the name of this card game would derive.
Tarocchi, in other words, is the game with the Fool card, the card of taroch, folly, but in a Dionysian context, where "folly" doesn't just mean stupidity. That is why the word starts "bachio-."

If we look at the early tarot cards, the range of meanings that Florio lists for non-tarot contexts exactly fits what we see--not just folly in the sense of stupidity, but fury as well.. Every early list of the titles of the trumps calls the unnumbered card (which in English we call "the Fool") "Il Matto." That word is usually translated, for example in the book by Garzoni, as "Madman." Garzoni's examples are of people who are agitated and irritated. Yet the Matto as depicted in the early tarocchi is, in the d'Este tarocchi of 1473 (below left) and the Charles VI tarocchi (below center), probably of around the same time, is a simpleton, someone who doesn't realize the implications of what is happening, letting small boys either put their hands on or near his penis or ignoring them as they throw stones at him. In Florence at that time it was a common practice for children to kill wandering madmen or simpletons by stoning, at least judging from Florentine stories of the time (see Michel Plaisance, Florence in the Time of the Medici, pp. 176-181, quoted at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=609&p=10573&hilit=children#p10573).
On the other hand, the Leber tarot (above right) shows an angry Matto. As Ross G .R. Caldwell and M. J. Hurst have explained, he has all kinds of weapons with him, but nothing for combating the insects buzzing around him (see http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2009/04/witless-warrior.html). The motto, Ross says, is "I wish that a net would be given to me." He is a clear example of the angry but ridiculous madman. And not only are his genitals exposed, but he is urinating uncontrollably, as Hurst points out.

To summarize: It is possible that the word tarocco already existed in the Milanese and Piedmontese dialects with a variety of meanings. (The title of the Alione collection suggests as much: Commedia e Farse Carnovalesche nei dialetti Astigiano, Milanese e Francese misti con Latino Barbaro composte sul fine del sec. XV da Gio. Giorgio Alione (Comedy and Carnival Farces in Asti, Milanese and French dialects mixed with Barbaric Latin written at the end of the XV century by Gio. Giorgio Alione). "Barbaric Latin" suggests words of non-Latin origin but Latin endings. The word probably didn't come from Latin. If it had, many humanists would have known its derivation. So it is likely that its derivation is from a word not known even by many humanists, and if known, different enough in spelling so that it is not easy to make the connection. So we have two possible Greek derivations, both of them sufficiently obscure. Sometimes, for some reason, such Greek gets into a dialect. Or, as was happening frequently then, it is an invention, combining a Greek word with a context from Diodorus Siculus. Or, as Andrea's source Ernesto declared, there was a Diodorus text that actually had "Tharocus."

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