Dear Huck,
Thank you very much for your warm welcome and thanks a lot for all your explanations!
Thanks a lot also for clarifying that “truth” is not the right category for your field of knowledge (sorry for that, I am from a kind of mathematical background), it is more about –if I understood correctly—well-founded opinions which make sense to other readers (to quote your nice quasi-Shakespearian “correct or not correct, that is a matter of the taste of the reader”).
I do find your Macaronic composition “Tarocus” quite interesting – “Taro meaning a river near Fornovo” – however, I did not fully understand the connection of “somehow somebody who has something to do with Taro” with the poem of Bassano Mantovano – and why “Piscina (1560s) and Berni (1520s) were too long after 1495 to understand the joke.”
Could you please elaborate on this a little bit more?
And if you allow, I throw in my humble two cents to the etymology, which is perhaps not even a well-founded opinion as yours is, but rather an hypothesis (I am not at all as scholared as you and others are in this form). What might perhaps please you -and other members of the forum--, is, that it is also a kind of Macaronic construction:
I asked in this forum about the etymology because I came across –or stumbled over -- about a new etymological meaning of “tarocchi” –“new” to my best knowledge after scanning intensively the Internet and reading your articles. This hypothesis is based on the little Italian I know, and it is so clear and obvious to me that either this is already known in the literature --and I just couldn’t find it-- or it is even straightforwardly wrong.
May I kindly ask you and the other members of the forum to check carefully the hypotheses you find below – I will formulate them all as hypotheses since I have no proofs in a mathematical sense. And either the hypotheses are wrong, known in the literature, or --by chance and luck—new.
The idea which struck me is that it does not make sense that a name of a game does not make sense to the players in their time: no one wants to play something, especially in times of great change, with not a sure meaning.
H0: I am considering the time span ca. 1450 to 1494, admittedly a time span where “tarocchi” do not appear in the literature, however I do think that first there is the spoken word –and the oral history which goes with it--, before you can find it in a written text.
And since Renaissance is not so far away in time, even we should understand it today. And furthermore this name should come from the gameplay as the “trionfi” in the “naibi di trionfi” name of the game (triumphing over the others at one trick). My hypothesis follows this rule: it stems from the gameplay and it even says in actual Italian what we could straightforwardly understand today
H1: Etymology is: tarocchi = tar‘occhi = tarh‘ occhi or tara/tari occhi = tara eyes or tare eyes
[I propose this also in light of the earlier spelling version “tarochi”, which is “only” a question of spelling in these times in this region with the respective dialects – if “only” is appropriate here]
The novelty of the hypothesis is therefore mainly the “eyes” not so much the “tara(re)”: “Tarare” stems from the Arabic Tarh’ or Tárah, which is already known in the Tarot context, see for instance the article of Andrea Vitali on the etymology of “tarocchi” on [
http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=220&lng=eng]
“One of the etymologies that had more credit, even in etymological dictionaries of other European languages (as the cards for the game of tarot made their appearance in Italy, the corresponding word in English, French, German, etc, is almost always derived from Italian) (17) is one that leads the tarot, as cards, back to the Italian word Tara, whose origin seems now established in the Arab Tárah, colloquial form of Tarh “detraction,deduction”, thing which has been put on the sidelines, which has been taken away; then also "defect, imperfection". This derives from the Arabic verb Taraha, meaning "remove, subtract", from which the Italian verb tarare (most likely the opponent's cards or points in the game) (18).” The endnote (18) points to the fact, that also this etymological possibility was seen in 2006 by Jess Karlin.
The same question on “Tara” is discussed even in this very forum:
[
search.php?keywords=tara&terms=all&auth ... mit=Search]
e.g., the contribution of mikeh referring to Depaulis: [
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=849&p=20454&hilit=tara#p20454]
Based on the above opinions, my (perhaps) new hypothesis w.r.t. the Tarh-part of the word is that tarare is close to but not exactly meant as “most likely the opponent's cards or points in the game”, but first in its original meaning:
H2: The Tarh-Part of “tar’occhi” follows the original meaning of tarare of a pair of balances: it means to detract or to deduce the weight of packaging from the weight of the good plus packaging, such that you get the weight of the good -- what really counts at the end, if you are a merchant. [see H5 for further details]
And wasn’t the situation in the cities of Northern Italy in the respective (early) Renaissance times a merchant situation, in which the Italian merchants even borrowed the term Tarh or Tárah from their Arabic counterparts for taring their respective pair of balances? And doesn’t it make sense that they transferred this foreign word to a card game in light of the first deck of cards coming from the other culture, materializing in every deck being composed of batons, swords, cups, and coins?
This leads to
H3: The tar‘occhi stems from the scoring of points ---perhaps implicitly in, but certainly after the game for determining the winner. There eyes have to be tared, as is formulated in
H4: The points were called „eyes“ as the „eyes“ on a dice. The games present in Nothern Italy before the cards arrived were mainly chess, tables (backgammon) and dices. People were used to count points when playing with dices and transferred the counting of „eyes“ of dices to counting of „eyes“ of tarocchi.
[Side remark: there are dices present on the table of the bagatella of later decks as the Budapest deck, see e.g. [
https://cards.old.no/t/] ]
The points of dices are still called „eyes“ in German („Augen eines Würfels“) and Italian („occhi di un dado“).
Hence: eyes had to be tared for determining the winner:
H5: The name denotes the new element in the gameplay and hence makes sense as a signifier: a balance has to be tared w.r.t. eyes:
The new element –new w.r.t. naibi trionfi-- in the gameplay is that some cards have a higher value, especially the court cards and some trump cards. This leads to a scoring at the end of the game, where still each trick counts 1 point (as in naibi di trionfi, if I am right) but other cards count additionally points:[
https://www.tarocchigratuiti.it/approfo ... rocchi.php]
Thereby the value of all additional points from special cards is in sum 52 points. If only two players played, the additional value of all tricks is 35 points (following the 5 x 14 cards deck and the respective theory [
http://trionfi.com/0/f/] –in this case Lo angelo –I use the Steele manuscript’s names-- is the highest card having a value of 4 points-- or 39 points (if already played with the 78 cards deck). The more players, the less the value of all tricks; e.g. for four players: 17 points or 19 points, depending on the respective deck.
Hence, what had real weight at the end were the additional points of the special cards -- and the points from the tricks had not a real significance (since only by winning tricks a player had the respective special cards at the end. This led to the actual counting of points which raised the values of the special cards by one point: “Common card values” in [
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot_card_games]). For determining the winner, all players had to strip off the special cards with higher value of their „packaging“ of the respective tricks, and the winner was determined by balancing out the points of all players: the one with the highest weight of points from the special cards was the winner.
H6: the name represents what it even means today (“taring eyes”) – it stems from the gameplay as „trionfi“ did (which for the latter indicates the triumph of one card over the others at one trick)
H7: the name of the game “tarh’occhi” follows in a Macaronican way the scheme of „naibi di trionfi“: arab word plus italian word, in order to denote the foreign origin (mamluk cards)
H8: The origin is thus the plural tarocchi, since points in plural had to be tared. The singular tarocco is a resingularization. The Sizilian orange „Tarocco“ has its name from the cards: you tare the eye (of the orange which is like the eye of the sun) by taking of the packaging of the peel. The italian name „Taroch“ for a fool or foolish [
http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=220&lng=eng] stems from the card game, since the fool played such an important role in it (hence etymologically it is the other way round). Also the parrot “Tarochino” given as a reason at the same website has its name from the Taroch: the parrot Tarochino is dumb/foolish by just repeating the words you say or speaking whenever it is inappropriate.
H9: The transition in the name of the game from naibi di trionfi to tarocchi marks the transition from a pure trick-taking game to a point-trick-taking game.
H10: Tarocchi is the fathermother of all point-trick-taking games due to its inner point logic and its history.
A possible verification of the hypothesis tarocchi = tar’occhi is perhaps given when reading [
http://trionfi.com/trumps-trionfi-tarots]
and considering Section 7. Fabriano law on card games – 1507, the table contains
2) ad ludum derectum chiamato chi fa più iochi.
H11: “chi fa più iochi” stands for “chi fa più occhi” [at least I read it like that knowing that correct spelling in these times was quite fluent. And from the little French I know, “les yeux” start with the same sound as “iochi”].
H12: “ludum derectum chiamato chi fa più iochi” might even be tarocchi under a different name, since tarocchi do not appear in the list and in 1507 tarocchi is already very present. Tarocchi are directly played as it is pointed out for diritta in [
http://trionfi.com/diritta-pilucchino]
[Ok, H11 and H12 are a little bit dared. What do you think?]
H13: The etymology of “tar’occhi” was fastly forgotten –at least already in 1550 (“Lollio, in his famous Invettiva (3) defines in this way his beloved and hated hobby “quel nome bizzarro / Di tarocco, senza ethimologia,”, 3 - Flavio Alberto Lollio, Invettiva di F. Alberto Lollio accademico Philareto contra il giuoco del tarocco, ms. 257, cc. 30, 1550, Ferrara, Ariostea Library.), see again
http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=220&lng=eng —due to its Macaronic combination of an Arab word with an Italian word. Hence it could not easily be deciphered.
What do you think about it?
I would be very glad to receive an answer and if possible to stipulate a discussion amongst members of this forum.
In this sense I humbly ask you for advise. Thanks a lot.