I was reading a New Yorker piece in which “tasseography” was used as if it were a perfectly normal word (no explanation provided); having never seen it before, I doubted that, and did some research. The Wikipedia article begins:
Tasseography (also known as tasseomancy, tassology, or tasseology) is a divination or fortune-telling method that interprets patterns in tea leaves, coffee grounds, or wine sediments.
The terms derive from the French word tasse (cup), which in turn derives from the Arabic loan-word into French tassa, and the respective Greek suffixes -graph (writing), -mancy (divination), and -logy (study of).
OK, in the first place, it’s an ill-formed word: -graphy/-mancy words need Greco-Latin bases, not modern French ones. In the second place, I can’t trace it back beyond the 1970s, which of course isn’t to say it doesn’t occur before then — to have a real idea about that, I’d need to consult an OED entry, but there isn’t one, which is another nail in the coffin. No, I don’t like this alleged word. Why not just say “tea-leaf reading” and “reading coffee grounds,” as our revered ancestors did?
Furthermore, “the Arabic loan-word into French tassa” is a bizarre little handwave at an etymology; Wiktionary tells us:
From Arabic طَاس (ṭās) (a shortening of طَسْت (ṭast)), from Middle Persian tšt’ (tašt), ultimately from the past participle of the Proto-Iranian verb *taš- (“to make, construct; to cut”), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *tā́ćšti, from Proto-Indo-European *tḗtḱ-ti ~ *tétḱ-n̥ti, from *tetḱ- (“to create”).
Much more interesting, if true!
The Wictionary article seems to contradict itself. For the first entry, English tasse, the etymology is:
“ Etymology
From Middle English tasse (“armor plate protecting the hip”), from Old French tasse, tasche (“purse; pouch”), from Frankish *taskā (“pouch”), from Proto-Germanic *taskǭ, cognate with Old High German tasca (“pouch”), German Tasche (“pocket; pouch; bag”), Dutch tas (“bag”).”
So if the Old French tasse is from Frankish, how can it be from Arabic?
My Larousse etymological dictionary, surprisingly, has no entry for tasse (in this sense) at all …
I’ve always found it a good rule of thumb that if you can’t immediately see the etymology of an everyday French word, it comes from Frankish.
Wiktionary claims that Catalan tassa is from this Arabic طاسة too.
It looks to me as if this Arabic word is borrowed from Romance, not vice versa. This “doublet of طشت” supposed “etymology” seems pretty hand-wavey to me.
One might have hoped for the more classically correct theomancy, but on reflection, I can see that the term might lead to confusion. Or possibly infusion.
From the Le Robert Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (2010, sous la direction de Alain Rey):
Greek appears to have φλυτζάνι [Wiktionary: From Ottoman Turkish فنجان (fincan), from Arabic فنجان (finjān), from Persian پنگان (pengân)], κούπα (anciently κοῦπα, “barrel”), and κύπελλο (anciently κύπελλον) for cup or goblet.
David E:
OED offers this for theism²:
Pathology
A morbid condition characterized by headache, sleeplessness, and palpitation of the heart, caused by excessive tea-drinking.
The first of its two citations is a jeu de mots (not a bergamot, mercifully) effusion:
1886
It is customary to speak of acute, subacute and chronic ‘theism’, a form that has no connection with theological matters.
Science vol. 8 132
(Deists prefer dea, of course.)
Ulr:
Dictionnaire historique de la langue française
Snap! A treasure on my shelves.
Le mot est passé dans l’argot parisien au sens d’«urinoir», probablement par extension du sens populaire de «pot de chambre»
They omit the vital information, helpfully provided by Hérail and Lovatt’s Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French, that this is “Homosexuals’ slang.”
The Trésor de la langue française thinks the two tasses are unrelated.
tasse, “purse, piece of armor,” which only survived in modern French in the diminutive tassette:
Dimin. en -ette (v. -et) de l’a. subst. ta(s)che « id. » (fin du xies., Raschi, Gl., éd. A. Darmesteter et D. S. Blondheim, t. 1, 985: tasche), forme att. surtout en Suisse, Franche-Comté, Bourgogne et Champagne (v. FEW t. 17, p. 322b), à côté de ta(i)sse, ta(i)sce « id. » (ca 1350, Dialogues fr.-flam., éd. J. Gessler, I, p. 19: taisse) et que l’on rattache au germ. *taska « poche », cf. le m. néerl. tassce, a. h. all. tasca, all. Tasche « id. ». La forme ta(i)sse, ta(i)sce est prob. un empr. plus récent au m. néerl. tassce.
tasse, “cup”
Empr. à l’ar. ṭāsa, ṭassa « coupe, tasse, écuelle », lui-même empr. au persan tašt « tasse, soucoupe ». Le mot est très prob. parvenu en fr. par l’intermédiaire du prov. et/ou de l’ital.
au sens d’«urinoir»
In Ulysses
Haines sat down to pour out the tea.
– I’m giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don’t you?
Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman’s wheedling voice:
– When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.
– By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.
Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:
– So I do, Mrs Cahill, says she. Begob, ma’am, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot.
He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife.
Later on:
MRS BREEN The dear dead days beyond recall. Love’s old sweet song.
BLOOM (Meaningfully dropping his voice.) I confess I’m teapot with curiosity to find out whether some person’s something is a little teapot at present.
MRS BREEN (Gushingly.) Tremendously teapot! London’s tea pot and I’m simply teapot all over me. (She rubs sides with him.) After the parlour mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.
BLOOM (Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon, his fingers and thumbs passing slowly down to her soft moist meaty palm which she surrenders gently.) The witching hour of night. I took the splinter out of this hand, carefully, slowly. (Tenderly, as he slips on her finger a ruby ring.) Là ci darem la mano.
MRS BREEN (In a onepiece eveningfrock executed in moonlight blue, a tinsel sylph’s diadem on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside her moonblue satin slipper curves her palm softly, breathing quickly.) Voglio e non. You’re hot! You’re scalding!* The left hand nearest the heart.
* Cf. Molly’s earlier command that Leopold “scald the pot”.
@LH, the list of “borrowings” in the WP entry is mind-blowing.
50 positions, two of which suggest to consult their respective entiries for more.
And weirdly, it is not in Russian in this sense. The fact that I did not remember this French word is odd too (sometimes it happens to me that I don’t know a word that every beginner learner knows). Maybe my Russian blood (which did not let us borrow it) made me forget it?
As for divination with drinking vessels, I can find a few results for cylicomancy, though a κύλιξ was a wine cup.
The OED has lecanomancy, which seems to involve dropping things into a dish (λεκάνη) of water.
I don’t hold with these modern fads.
What’s wrong with good, old-fashioned hepatoscopy, I’d like to know? Eh?
Sure, it’s expensive, but who said divination should be cheap?
You gets what you pays for.
The Chinese started the rot, with those oracle bones of theirs.
The Royal Spanish Academy, some three centuries ago, believed vulgar Latin Tacea to be the source of taza. Their current thinking points to Hispanic Arabic from Arabic from Persian.
REAL ACADEMIA ESPAÑOLA
Diccionario de Autoridades – Tomo VI (1739)
TAZA. s. f. Vaso, que sirve para beber, y otros usos: son de diversas figuras, como anchas, y extendidas, de campanilla, y otras. Covarr. le dá varias ethymologías; pero es mas verisimil venga de la baxa Latinidad Tacea, que significa lo mismo. Lat. Patera. PRAGM. DE TASS. año 1680. f. 33. Cada taza de Fraile con una R. à veinte y ocho maravedis. CERV. Persil. lib. 1. cap. 15. Llenaronse de regocijos los pechos, porque se llenaron las tazas de generosos vinos.
Current Dictionary:
taza
Del ár. hisp. ṭássa, este del ár. ṭassah o ár. clás. ṭast, y este del persa tašt ‘cuenco’.
What’s wrong with good, old-fashioned hepatoscopy, I’d like to know? Eh?
@DE. I’ll see your liver and raise you seventeen head bumps. —Phree Nologist
Heh, tas gets around. It’s “bag” in Indonesian too, and Hungarian has táska (/ˈtaːʃkɒ/). Estonian and Finnish have tasku. Reminds me of the δίσκος-desk-dis[c,k]-dish-Tisch-dais complex.
The list of many borrowings is here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/طاس Not in the French entry.
“-graphy/-mancy words need Greco-Latin bases, not modern French ones.” – Medieval Latin.
“beyond the 1970s,” – google books’ earliest quote:
Google books does not have it, but the a href=”https://archive.org/details/dli.scoerat.2836thecompleteillustratedbookofthepsychicsciences/page/366/mode/2up”>Archive does.
Surely the Indonesian word is from Dutch tas, and Hung. táska is from some other descendant of PGmc. *taskǭ.
But where that came from is anyone’s guess.
Ooops, sorry
Google books does not have it, but the Archive does.
Phyllomancy? Nah, too generic. Not Phancy enough.
Israeli Hebrew borrowed finjan — with the wrong meaning. Everyone knows it’s Arabic, and everyone uses it to mean the small pot used for boiling the coffee.
I (and, I suspect, Roman folk-etymologists before me) had some vague idea that augur might be connected with aves*, but, alas, it appears not.
Michiel de Vaan relates it to augeo. How dull …
* Quia esse nolunt, bibant!
Huh, I thought task was the English descendant of *taskǭ, but apparently not. Instead it’s from an Old French word going back to a doublet of tax.
Why not just say “tea-leaf reading” and “reading coffee grounds,” as our revered ancestors did?
Because it’s fun to make up pseudo-erudite words. And “hypoborboriomancy” is clear and elegant, don’t you think?
Me: I thought task was the English descendant of *taskǭ, but apparently not. Instead it’s from an Old French word going back to a doublet of tax.
I wonder if that’s correct. The supposed Late Latin tasca < taxa would be homonymous with a Lombard or Franconian *taska < *taskǭ. I’ll suggest that Gmc. borrowed the word from Latin in a specific sense “official’s purse”, or perhaps Latin borrowed it from Germanic with a metonymic sense “responsibility” (ref. portfolio).
Tsk.
Hypostathmomancy? From υποστάθμη = “dregs, lees, residuum, settlings”. Or catacathismatomancy for that matter, from κατακαθίσμα[τα] with similar meanings. Out of an unfortunate reconstructed Latin calque we’d get faeceodivination, I suppose.
And this in Petit Robert, for a second théisme: “Ensemble des accidents aigus ou chroniques dus à l’abus de la consommation de thé”. A consommation devoutly to be wished, say I.
What’s the palatal click for? I used a perfectly good dictionary to make up for my ignorance of Greek. Does “hypoborborion” have something to do with belly rumbles?
Silly me, I was thinking you meant borborygmomancy.
The poor man’s hepatoscopy.
Google books does not have it, but the Archive does.
Thanks! So it goes back at least to 1966.
Quia esse nolunt, bibant!
A trenchant ambiguity. Works either way for those chickens:
Either way they get thrown in the drink. The poululating sea, see? Si. This maximal valerian tea brings something more permanent than sleep. A consommé devouredly to be nished, je soupçonne.
This and a wealth of related matters are analysed in atomic detail by Christoph Konrad (The Challenge to the Auspices, Oxford, 2022). Abstract:
Although attacks on augural rulings still occurred in 217 BC, the catastrophe at Lake Trasumene and the disaster at Cannae in 216 combined to effectively render further public questioning of the auspices politically indefensible. The appointment of a Dictator in both years, as well as back in 249, should be seen as a response not merely to a military disaster but to a perceived rupture in the peace with the gods (pax deorum) caused by violations of the auspices and other religious rules. When in 215 M. Claudius Marcellus in his second consulship was found vitio creatus by the Augurs, he abdicated without delay and complaint, thus publicly demonstrating support for the rule of auspices. (As in 223, modern claims of augural manipulation run counter to the evidence.) Fabius Maximus in his actions as Consul in 215 and 209 further reinforced acceptance of the practice. Scattered instances of indifference to auspices are found in the second century BC, but no outright challenge. The augural finding in 162 that both Consuls were elected under flawed auspices (vitio creati) prompted their immediate abdication, without resistance. Instead, in the second and first century the debate over the efficacy and desirability of auspices shifted from the realm of practical politics to that of historiography and philosophical discourse.
Ran out of time. That abstract was for Chapter 8. The abstract for the book as a whole:
A typical excerpt:
“Random loss of appetite” or an ebbing away of the will to be? Chicken-hearted or -livered
ThelmaHamlet, low in the pecking order for most of the play, would have much to corntribute here. A taxing thought.I (and, I suspect, Roman folk-etymologists before me) had some vague idea that augur might be connected with aves*, but, alas, it appears not.
I remember coming across someone etymologizing it as being a compound with a form of the root PIE *geus- “taste”, meaning “bird-taster”.
“Thanks! So it goes back at least to 1966.” – @LH, as you must have noticed, this line actually belongs to another comment. If you fix that other comment and delete it (to make comments less disordered), I won’t object. (I don’t care but…).
I think the authors easily could invent those names. “Psychic sciences” sounds to me like 60s (maybe I’m wrong?) but Litzka Gibson (a magician and harpist who co-authored the book) was 65 back then. No hippie. (or a very олдовый hippie using Russian hippie slang:)) I remember some science fiction story where in Russian translation a slur used for people with superhuman extrasensory abilities was парапсихи. I suppose the English original sounded differently: in Russian “psychic” is used in much the samae way as “mental” in “mental condition”:)
Silly me, I was thinking you meant borborygmomancy.
I should have linked to the definition in the first place.
I (and, I suspect, Roman folk-etymologists before me) had some vague idea that augur might be connected with aves*, but, alas, it appears not.
Michiel de Vaan relates it to augeo. How dull …
Etymonline mentions that suggestion but adds ‘The more popular theory is that it is from Latin avis “bird,” because the flights, singing, and feeding of birds were important objects of divination (compare auspex). In that case, the second element would be from garrire “to talk.”‘
“Thanks! So it goes back at least to 1966.” – @LH, as you must have noticed, this line actually belongs to another comment. If you fix that other comment and delete it (to make comments less disordered), I won’t object. (I don’t care but…).
I don’t know what you mean. The “Archive” link goes to The Complete Illustrated Book of The Psychic Sciences, which is copyright 1966.
link
I wonder how far back (neolithic? paleolithic?) this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex
sort of thing goes; is the labyrinth an image/echo of the intestines?
Who invented sausage? I think we should be told…
link
In the comment I quoted, you fixed the link that was screwed up in your earlier comment. I am not sure why you want me to quote the screwed-up one.
Ah. No, I don’t “want you to” do anything, I just meant if this sequence of a screwed up comment and the correction is inconvenient for readers you can fix (not ‘quote’) it. I don’t know how to put it, I just know that I have no problem with screwed up comments and corrections and everything, and I know that you (likely) can’t edit other people’s comments without a permission and I don’t know if such sequences bother you or anyone.
I think a certain amount of mess and confusion is necessary so we can tell we’re not living in a simulation.
Same here.
That must have happened before Arabic shifted its [ɬ] to [ʃ].
Gastronomy for starters!
Any good simulation will include a fine-tuned mess-and-confusion module
I can’t decide whether I find “tasseography” more or less irritating than “coulrophobia”.
What do they mean by “abnormal fear of” when they give definitions of such things?
On top of the “normal fear”?
Also if arachnophobia is just “fear” and some other phobias are abnormal fears, maybe tey need two suffixes instead of one -phobia for both?
the vital information, helpfully provided by Hérail and Lovatt’s Dictionary of Modern Colloquial French, that this is “Homosexuals’ slang.”
huh! i didn’t know there was a french parallel to english “tearoom” – which has been dubiously claimed to come from “t[oilet]-room”, and from the sociable/social atmosphere therein (sociologically accurate, but not necessarily etymologically so). it makes me wonder whether they’re independent emergences, or borrowed in one direction or the other, or some slang equivalent of cognates.
Another entry for the roster of unfamiliar words: Today’s NYT magazine has a very entertaining story, America Must Free Itself from the Tyranny of the Penny, which refers to the pennies churned out with trochilidine vigor by the Mint.
Not a word I have seen before. It means, per M-W, characteristic of hummingbirds. Having learned that, I am not so convinced that it is le mot juste
Yes, “colibrine vigor” would be just mo’.
I am not so convinced that it is le mot juste
Indeed not. It’s like saying “as iridescent and insubstantial as an ox.”
The learned author needs to have another stab at their thesaurus.
@DM: That must have happened before Arabic shifted its [ɬ] to [ʃ].
Huh — thanks for that. I hadn’t realized the shift happened so late (Middle Persian = first few centuries AD), but Al-Jallad confirms it.
@Y, I too thought about the shift, but realised that I dont know when they reflexes looked like what and where to fidn a discussion of those. Does al-Jallad also discuss reflexes of borrowed š, and if yes, where?
As for tašt, the form is almost same in Avestan (-a) and same today, so I’m not sure if “from MP” means much… I guess they only call texts “MP” starting from the third century (and into the second millenium) but that’s merely a written language of attestation.
https://archive.org/details/a-manual-of-the-historical-grammar-of-arabic-notes-on-key-issues-in-phonology-an
There’s a newer edition at academia.edu as well.
Aha, thanks.
al-Jalad has publshed a lot of interesting stuff recently, and I have only leafed through this manual (and maybe read some places of interest).
Maybe I should have chosen a career of professional arabist:) Because these guys (from al-Jallad to van Putten -about Quranic manuscripts and the dialect of the Quraan) publish lots of great stuff these days*. Still little new about where the modern dialects came from.
(or maybe now? like: start owroking ike mad and than say something clever, like “all is vanity”… unless someone has already pubished this result:))
*I wonder why. Convergence and collaboration between Arab arabists and European scholars? This does happen (or at least massive emigration and also highly successful teaching of European linguistics in the Arab world) but I’m not sure how it contributed in the particular cases.
Back to hat’s original complaint about the “ill-formed” word, which is not only a complaint about the specific coinage but about the supposition that there was a lexical gap to be filled. I take it that the word fills a perceived gap because it’s a hypernym, lumping together more specific practices like tea-leaf reading, coffee-ground reading, and wine-dreg reading into a single broader category, which might include some additional practices involving other stuff-left-in-the-bottom-of-a-cup-of-beverage-post-consumption. I might have favored a coinage ending in -mancy, although maybe -graphy is more palatable to enthusiasts because these days it has less of an implicature of bogosity?
I do sometimes find classification for the sake of classification annoying. Bascially my objections to the dialect-language distinction have to with that: it is an attempt to impose “small boxes within larger boxes” model convenient to people-who-love-to-classify on linguistic reality – and thus to obscure this reality.
But if the objection is formal, then LH should clarify what he means by “Greco-Latin bases” and do these include Medieval Latin or even new coinages as in biological taxonomy. If yes, then the only problem must be -eo-.
And if it is social, I believe Litzka, a magician (in the sense of stage performance rahter than that of Gandalf) and harpist has every reason to take interest in such things.
Science takes little interest in them (even as elements of culture), so if you prefer names originating from this community, go, defend a thesis, found a school and make scholars discuss forms of divination. If you’re lazy then don’t complain that some hobbyists aren’t.
@David L: I see that story quotes my old lab partner Jeff Gore. He’s a friend and an excellent scientist, but I don’t think he, as a devoted libertarian, is a very good judge of public policy.