Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org posted a Big List entry for tarot focusing, as always, on its history in English, but he says “The name is a borrowing from the French tarot, which in turn is from the Italian slang/dialectal *tarocco (plural tarocchi) meaning fool or foolish,” and I wondered if it could be taken farther back. Wiktionary told me that the Italian word was “Borrowed from Sicilian taroccu (‘Citrus sinensis’), from Arabic تُـرُنْج (turunj, ‘citron’),” the Arabic entry said it was “أُتْرُنْج (ʔutrunj) with epenthesis,” and that link said:
Borrowed from Aramaic אַתְרוּגָּא (ʾaṯruggā, ʾaṯrungā), from Old Persian [script needed] (turung), from Sanskrit मातुलुङ्ग (mātuluṅga). Cognate to Classical Syriac ܐܛܪܘܓܐ (ʾaṭruggā, ʾaṭrungā).
And the Sankrit word was “Borrowed from Dravidian, compare Tamil மாதுளம் (mātuḷam), மாதுளங்காய் (mātuḷaṅkāy, ‘pomegranate, citron lemon’).”
I thought that was interesting enough to pass along; note that only the t is left of the etymon.
I suppose Hebrew ‘etrog ‘citron’, familiar to many Jews from the holiday of Sukkot, is a cognate. But I don’t see an explanation of why a citrus fruit meant “fool” and why a slang word for “fool” meant a card game.
I once had to do a translation at university which had a random list of items on sale at a market including “tarocchi canori”. Neither “singing tarot cards” or “singing Sicilian oranges” seemed plausible but interesting to see the claim that they could have been etymologically related.,,
I suppose Hebrew ‘etrog ‘citron’, familiar to many Jews from the holiday of Sukkot, is a cognate.
Apparently so; see this 2011 post for details.
For a proposal relating to the sense ‘Tarot card’, see for example the TLFi here and the FEW on Middle French tarau here, the end of the article for Arabic etymon Arabic ṭarḥ (see especially the very end of the article). The reference to G. de Gregorio ‘Nuovo gruzzoletto di voci arabo-sicule’ Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 49, p. 531 can be found here. The article on tara ‘parte de peso que se rebaja’ (< Arabic ṭarḥ) in Coromines and Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico is also worth consulting, but the Internet Archive is down, so I won’t link there.
I don’t think anyone knows where tarocco ‘variety of blood orange’ comes from.
The Fool is an important Tarot card, from what little I understand, so maybe that’s the connection.
As for the link to citron, maybe people back then thought only fools would suck on a lemon, as the expression goes.
the Internet Archive is down
Apparently there was a big data breach, and the user name/email address/password file was leaked. Many are rushing to change their passwords (a good idea), making the site unresponsive.
From the Xxixxer feed: they are fighting off a big DDoS attack.
The passwords in the file were salted-encrypted.
Data were not corrupted.
They are upgrading the systems.
אַתְרוּגָּא (ʾaṯruggā, ʾaṯrungā), from Old Persian [script needed] (turung), from Sanskrit मातुलुङ्ग (mātuluṅga)
There is no Old Persian turung ‘citron’. There is however a Middle Persian ⟨wʾtlng⟩ wādrang ‘citron’ (New Persian بالنگ bālang). The Aramaic is doubtless a loanword from a related Middle Iranian form. And the Middle Iranian words are doubtless loanwords from India.
Mandaic has trunga with no initial vowel, and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic apparently has similar forms: תרונגה. Syriac has ܛܪܘܓܐ ṭruggā (with ṭ !) as well as ܐܛܪܘܓܐ aṭruggā. I wonder if such ‘aphetic’ forms actually represent the older form, and other Aramaic varieties show prosthesis of a-. Was a Middle Iranian initial wā- segmented off in transmission as Aramaic wa- ‘and’? Maybe more tomorrow morning.
The Fool is an important Tarot card, from what little I understand, so maybe that’s the connection.
Oddly enough, one of the OED’s citations for “taroc” is
“1816
The pack of cards with which Tarocco is played, consists of two parts; the first is fifty-six cards of the usual Italian suits, Spade, Coppe, Bastoni, and Denari… The other part consists of twenty-two cards,..twenty-one of these are called Tarocchi, and the twenty-second Il Matto, or the fool.
S. W. Singer, Researches into History of Playing Cards 236″
So if that was true when tarocchi was first used, they were all the trumps except the Fool. But it’s a long way from Italy to England, and a long time from 1419 (from the Big List article) to 1816, so maybe that wasn’t so true.
Not to be confused with durak.