origin of the name tarot

l'appeso

to me the simplest explanation still is
tarocco = stupid person
taroccare = to fool someone (as it was/is much too common with card games!)

let's take the minchiate---same meaning here:

minchione = stupid person
minchionare = to fool someone...
(and this is more a southerner expression)

note that still today both meanings are widely used!!!
 

Huck

thanks huck, this is really interesting as I live near Vercelli!
I was thinking of a piedmontese dialect word "tardoch" that means "fool", which could be assimilated to taroch...

Nice ... but possibly not reliable, cause generally Italian card playing seem to be connected to grumbling, cursing and using bad words ... :) ... I don't know, if this is really so. So it might be, that, once the game name Tarocchi was born, that this naturally caused words, which are similar.

Well, the deciding point is likely, what Alfonso d'Este had in mind, when he used in 1505 "Tarochi" instead of Ludus triumphorum or Trionfi for the card deck, which he ordered. If he thought of an "idiot", okay. But I doubt that, that would be rather strange. Others (his own sister) opposed the word, others called it an idiotic name (Berni). Okay. This doesn't give the meaning "Idiot" from beginning on.

But it's nice, that we have with us somebody from these locatios, which in practice naturally are a little foreign to us ... :)
 

kwaw

to me the simplest explanation still is
tarocco = stupid person
taroccare = to fool someone (as it was/is much too common with card games!)

let's take the minchiate---same meaning here:

minchione = stupid person
minchionare = to fool someone...
(and this is more a southerner expression)

note that still today both meanings are widely used!!!

Me too. I am not sure why it should be considered a strange name, considering the distinct role of the fool card I do not consider it odd that it should be called 'the fool's game' or something similar. I think it is the simplest and most convincing of all the options.
 

Huck

to me the simplest explanation still is
tarocco = stupid person
taroccare = to fool someone (as it was/is much too common with card games!)

let's take the minchiate---same meaning here:

minchione = stupid person
minchionare = to fool someone...
(and this is more a southerner expression)

note that still today both meanings are widely used!!!

But we have the point, that Minchiate was already used in 1466, 1471 and 1477. Then the Trionfi cards were addressed "Ludo triumphorum etc., so quite with another approach and name.

Alfonso was 1505 in the situation, that he got the Ferrarese dukedom from his father. The production of a trionfi deck had been already Ferrarese custom for former Ferrarese rulers (Leonello, Borso). The "own deck" was a symbolic act like choosing heraldic symbols or impresa, things connected to some personal pride. Would you think, that Alfonso would have used "Idiot" as a name for this symbolic game?

For Minchiate in Florence has to be considered, that Florentians were proud on the republic, not on the power of noble houses, like the Visconti-Sforza in Milan or the Este in Ferrara.
There's the suspicion, that Minchiate expressed symbolic the "republic state of Florence". Would Alfonso use a connection which expressed a republican state?
 

l'appeso

In the Milanese dialect Tarocch is synonymous with words meaning a trunk, a stock, a log, a block, a stump, a stem without boughes. Also a body without a head. Also a truncheon or a bat. A foot, a base, a foundation, the stock or root of a tree or any thing else, a foot-stool, a support or supporter, a stake or fork to bear up any vine, hops. Used also as figurative* for a mans off-spring, stock, lineage, blood, or descent, the main stock, family tree* or direct line of a pedegree, progeny, or family; figuratively a loggerheaded fellow, a block-headed dunce.


DISCLAIMER: rude words!

I very much suspect that tarocch could also be used as a synonym for the male genitalia! nowadays the Milanese would say "tarello" for it (-ello being diminutive) which has also the meaning of log/stock...

the analogy with "minchia" (originally sicilian but now used everywhere in italy) is obvious!

it may sound strange but in italy the male organ is usually associated with stupidity and with worthless things (more or less the way the English would use the female genitalia)

but maybe I said a "minchiata" :)
 

kwaw

DISCLAIMER: rude words!

it may sound strange but in italy the male organ is usually associated with stupidity and with worthless things (more or less the way the English would use the female genitalia)

We have stupid p****s and d**k-heads too...
 

MikeH

Reading over these posts (I think I was on vacation when most were done, and I'm still catching up), I see one sentence in the Dummett quote that I typed out that I don't understand in the least. It is the second sentence in this paragraph. I didn't highlight it then, but I will now:

If Scartino did influence Tarocco, it is possible that the practice whereby the dealer took extra cards and made a corresponding discard was not an original feature of Tarot games, but was incorporated into them about the beginning of the sixteenth century, in time for it to be imported, as a feature of the game, when Tarot arrived in Switzerland. In that case, the French games described in the Maison academique may represent a yet more ancient tradition; if our conjecture that they were derived from Piedmont is correct, Tarot playing in that region may go back to the very earliest times, the players remaining exceptionally conservative. But the hypothesis that the important feature of the discard was borrowed from Scartino should be treated with great caution, since it implies a continued mutual influence between the style of Tarocco play in all four great early centres, Ferrara, Milan, Bologna and Florence.
Given the centrality of Piedmont to the first documented use of the word "tarocco" (or "taroccus"), it might be an important sentence. Can anyone explain what it means? Is it saying that the "discard" rule, or the game of tarot itself, might have originated in Piedmont--unlikely, I know--or what?
 

Yygdrasilian

Primavera

Like Chloris to Flora, One must understand "nothing" to reckon how the Fool's deck may be used as a Cipher.
 

Ross G Caldwell

Reading over these posts (I think I was on vacation when most were done, and I'm still catching up), I see one sentence in the Dummett quote that I typed out that I don't understand in the least. It is the second sentence in this paragraph. I didn't highlight it then, but I will now:


Given the centrality of Piedmont to the first documented use of the word "tarocco" (or "taroccus"), it might be an important sentence. Can anyone explain what it means? Is it saying that the "discard" rule, or the game of tarot itself, might have originated in Piedmont--unlikely, I know--or what?

I forgot about this. I'll say that I think the discard has a high probability of being original to the game, on the strength of Trotti's statement in 1456 that the game is played by four in pairs.

Four doesn't divide into 78 evenly (or 70, either), so there will always be a discard.

Arguing that perhaps all the cards weren't dealt out would be baseless speculation, with no precdent in Tarot games.

So, there has to be a discard, from as early as we can tell. Most likely, it is an original feature of the game, and therefore deriving "tarot" from another word for "discard" (tare) is implausible.