Tartar

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

Dogster’s answer to the question about tartar sauce, steak tartare, and tartaric chemicals need some comment. He wrote:

<BLCOKQUOTE>"…warring Mongolian and Turkic tribes known as Tartars. These violent fellows derived their name from the infernal abyss of Greek mythology, Tartarus."</BLOCKQUOTE>

That’s wrong. Actually, Tatar was originally the name of a Mongol tribe, and later came to be used for the members of the Golden Horde, the forces of Genghis Khan’s son Batu Khan who ruled over Russia. Most of these forces were Turks (while the commanders were Mongol, the rank & file of them were Turks). That’s why present-day Tatarstan on the Volga is a Turkic-speaking nation. It was the Europeans who changed the name to “Tartar” because of the accidental similarity to the Greek name of Hell. It was a folk etymology used as an ethnic slur.

The chemical name tartar comes from an Arabic word, tartir, referring to the tartar of wine, which is unrelated to Tatars, tartar sauce, or Hades. It was one of many scientific terms that Europeans acquired from the Arabs in the Middle Ages. The resemblance to the other names is coincidental.

(Come to think of it, the correct name of that Asiatic people, Tatar, reminds me of “Tater Tots” – potato nuggets which my Mom used to serve along with fish sticks & tartar sauce.)

2

The link to the article is: What do steak tartare, tartar sauce, and dental tartar have in common?

Please, if the Original Poster of a topic will include a link, it’ll help keep us all on the same page in responding.

Dogster cites Panetti as a reference and authority. If you would cite a reference or authority, Ish, we can try to track it down. It is not uncommon that word origins are lost in the murky past.

3

My own, humble, Webster’s Dictionary shows that Tartar (meaning the people) is really Tatar, which derives from the Persian Tatar. According to the Compton’s Enclyclopedia Online, Tatarstan is the Autonomous Republic on the Volga River that was settled by the Tatars in the 1200’s, and later conquered by the Russians in the 1500’s. The Tatars were lead by Batu Khan, grandson of Ghengis Khan (through Ghengis’ son Juchai). The Tatars settled in the area, with a capital at Sarai. Eventually, they split into three hordes of their own, with settlements surrounding Kazan, Astrakhan, and Crimea.

It’s not clear that Dogster got the tidbit about the naming of the Tartars [sic] from the book cited. In any event, I don’t think Panetti was attempting to truly establish the etymology of the name of the people, just the name of the dishes in Europe that had origins in the culinary practices of the steppe peoples.

Perhaps someone could run down the etymology of the Persian word Tatar?

4

I just want to add that the Tatars and the golden horde are not the same thing. The Tatars were not mongols, they were another nomadic warrior race from the steppes that joined up with the mongols. When Ghengis Khan invaded Europe the Tatars covered his northern wing.

5

DSYOUNGESQ says, “It’s not clear that Dogster got the tidbit about the naming of the Tartars [sic] from the book cited. In any event, I don’t think Panetti[sic] was attempting to truly establish the etymology of the name of the people, just the name of the dishes in Europe that had origins in the culinary practices of the steppe peoples.”

Well, here’s the exact quote from Panetti: “The hamburger has its origin in a medieval culinary practice among warring Mongolian and Turkic tribes known as the Tartars.” (Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, p.399). While I can’t read his mind, it sure sounds like he’s naming those tribes as Tartars. Me Dogster, me read good. Grunt.
As for the Tartar-Tatar angle, the OED lists them under the same heading (Tartar, Tatar) and offers this footnote: “The original name (by which the people in question either called themselves or were designated by their neighbours) is generally held to have been, as in Persian, etc, Tatar, as to the language and meaning of which various conjectures have been put forth; but in Western Europe, they appear from the first as Tartari, Tartares, or Tartars, their name being apparently associated with Tartarus, hell. . . the form Tatar and its derivatives are now often used in ethological works in sense 1, but the long established Tartar is always used in the derived senses, and is also held by some to to have been the original name: see quot. 1885 and its context.”
The quote it refers to is as follows: “E. Pairs, Fall Constantinople 15 note, ‘I write Tartar instead of Tatar because I agree with Dr. Koelle that first is the form which the Tartars themselves used until they came into contact with foreigners, like the Chinese and Russians, who had changed the form of the word.’”
The primary definition the OED gives for Tarttar/Tatar: “A native inhabitant of the region of Central Asia extending eastward from the Caspian Seas, and formerly known as Independent and Chinese Tartery. First known in the West and as applied to the mingled host of Mongols, Tartars, Turks, etc., which under the leadership of Jenghiz Khan (1202-1227) overran and devastated much of Asia and Eastern Europe; hence vaguely applied to the descendants of these now dwelling in Asia and Europe; more strictly and ethnologically, to any member of the Tatar or Turkic branch of the Ural-Altaic or Turanian family, embracing the Turks, Cossacks, and Kirghiz Tartars. (In all of these uses, but esp. the last, now often written Tatar.)” OED, p. 2012

So the OED seems to (somewhat) support Panati’s take, but what Ismintingas offers sounds plausible. As CKDext alluded to earlier, it would sound even more plausible with sources to back it up. I won’t claim to be any sort of expert on this subject (no, dammit, I won’t!), I just did the research, so I’m very happy to keep an open mind.
Finally, the while the OED mentions that Tartar is perhaps of Arabic origin, it makes no mention of the spelling tartir. But your sources might be better than mine. ::shrug::

SDSTAFF Dogster

6

Sorry, misspelling Panati was my problem, picked up by the others. I was writing from the office. Mea culpa.

7

Actually, Dogster, your OED cites and the added references seem to back up the points made by Ish and me. The ethnic group in question may have called themselves tartars or tatars, the truth appears unclear (frankly, I bet it isn’t unclear at all to Asian scholars, but I don’t read Chinese! :slight_smile: ). But the Persians called them Tatars, and the Europeans called them Tartars. The term Tartar then got related to the name Tartarus, a Greek word, but rest assured that a people from the steppes of Asia wouldn’t be calling themselves the People From Greek Hell. :slight_smile:

As for the rest of the info on the Mongols, where the hell is Temujin?? :slight_smile:

8

In Polish and Russian they are called tatars, so not all europeans call them tartars. The eastern europeans are the ones who had the most contact with them so it’s more likely they’d get the name right.

9

Nah, it could still be quite confusing to Asian scholars, too, especially if they are only reading Chinese sources.

Among the problems:

  1. Chinese writing is largely independent of the spoken language; that is, one written system largely covers many different spoken languages. Or to put it another way, since the pronunciation of a written ideogram is controlled by the language one speaks, the way a given scholar would read a name might be quite different from the way it was pronounced by the original writer.

It IS true that attempts have been made to use the ideograms phonetically/phonemically to represent other languages, but AFAIK this practice was quite rare. (Supposedly, some historical records of the Mongols survived destruction by succeeding dynasties (Ming or Ching) because they were written “phonetically” with Chinese ideograms rather than - apparently - in the more common Uigher-derived system most often used for transcribing Mongolian.)

  1. The official language of the government can change when the government changes. It is unlikely that the Song, Yuan, and Ming scholars making records around those times spoke Mandarin (which AFAIK came in with the Manchurian Ching). Even if a Chinese ideogram phonetic representation of “Tatar” exists, the original pronunciation would have to be reconstructed and would be affected by conjecture.

  2. [WAG alert] The Beijing version of Mandarin, which would affect modern (say, the last 2 or 3 centuries) scholars, has the habit of adding an “r” sound throughout sentences. The word which elsewhere might be “Tata” might be pronounced “Tatar” or even “Tartar” by the Beijingese, perhaps.

10

I dunno about Tatars, but my pet peeve is when people call Temujin “Ghengis Kahn” or pronounce “Genghis” as “gheng-giss”–{IPA |gen’ gis| ).
His name was Temujin, but like Octavianus Cæsar (“Cæsar Augustus”) he is best known to history by his title: GENGHIS KHAN; also spelled JENGIZ KHAN, which is how it should be pronounced. Actually, the Mongol title is pronounced more like “CHING-GIZ Khan” (I’m not real sure about that h in Khan), but the English spelling follows an apparently Italian form and spelling (…and no, I don’t know exactly why, but I think the first major Western European emissary to the great Khan was from the Pope.) In Italian orthography (and orthography played backwards is phonics) “Genghis” is pronounced “jengiz” or “jengis” (sorry that’s not in IPA, but I can’t seem to do the yogh [or IPA “zh”] on this keyboard); “Ghengis” would be “genn-jiz”. This may not seem like a big deal, but I’ve heard people in educational contexts consistently mispronounce it, which annoys me, and makes Anglophones (or is it Yanks?) sound stupid. “Ching-giz Khan” means roughly “Universal Overlord” or “Ruler of the world”. I don’t know of what “Ginn-giss Khan” would be ruler, but I bet it’s not much!

“One night your shoulders will ache/The next day when you wake/You’ll sprout wild wings and fly/Just like in Swan Lake”–the Church, “Swan Lake”

11

foolsguinea said:

See web site on Marco Polo: http://members.aol.com/analander/essays/polo.html

It goes on to describe how Marco’s father and Uncle traveled to Mongolia and China, became advisers to Kubla Khan, and eventually returned to Europe with a request from Kubla Khan for the Pope to send 100 missionaries. They picked up Marco to return to the orient, but had to make do without the missionaries.

He left Italy at 17 and didn’t return until 44, then telling amazing tales the Europeans didn’t want to believe. Marco wrote a book later in his life detailing many bizarre and unusual notions and events from his travels. "Fearing for his historical reputation, friends of Marco Polo even asked him to recant his story on his deathbed in 1234. Polo refused, reportedly saying, ‘I have not written down the half of those things which I saw.’ "

12

The analysis by foolsguinea of the Italian spelling of Genghis is correct. The original word is Chingiz, which means ‘ocean’ in a Central Asian Turkish dialect. In other Turkic dialects, the same word is tengiz, and in Istanbul Turkish it’s deniz (In Turkey, the initial t- changed through voicing to </I.d-*; the initial t- changing to ch- happened through palatalization, and this came sound shift occurs in Irish and Japanese, where ti is pronounced chi. That’s how we got Chingiz. The initial voicing of ch- to j- probably came about because the Uyghur alphabet used for writing Mongolian used the same letter for the two sounds, so they could not always be distinguished. The title khanalso came from Turkic, but may have originated as a loanword from the language of the Xiongnu (the people of Shan-yu in Mulan).

The ethnonym Tatar was originally the name of a Mongol tribe in eastern Mongolia, before the rise of Chingiz Khan. For reference, one could cite any history of the Mongols, such as The Mongols by David Morgan (Blackwell, 1986). A good history of Tatarstan is The Volga Tatars: a profile in national resilience by Azade-Ayse Rorlich (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1986). I copied down this note from it:
<BLOCKQUOTE>It has been suggested on philological grounds that in the context of the Mongol Empire, “Tatar” carried the implication of “people who have become (politically) Mongol.” see O. Pritsak, “Two migratory movements in the Eurasian steppe in the 9th-11th centuries”, in Proceedings of the 26th International Congress of Orientalists, New Delhi 1964, vol. 2 (1968), p. 159."</BLOCKQUOTE>

The name had to have been originally Mongol, but was later transferred to the descendants of Turkic peoples who formed the majority in the Golden Horde. A philological note: in the 19th century it was common to expand the definition of “Tatar” as a typological linguistic term to include all speakers of agglutinative languages, i.e. all Turks, Mongols, Manchu/Tungus, Finno-Ugrians, and even Dravidians. This usage is obsolete, though JYDog1 cited it in this sense from the OED. The etymology that traced the origin of Tatar only as far back as Persian didn’t go far enough. The Persian language was just a waystation, since this name originally came from eastern Mongolia.

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Also, I think {:-Df was probably right in speculating that the original form of Tatar was Tata. In Mongolian, the -r suffix was a plural ending. The form Tartar with both rs could have arisen through a process called “assimilation” by linguists–two different syllables becoming similar. But I still think it was Europeans who originated the name “Tartar” as a punning ethnic slur.

14

The etymology that traces the chemical word tartar back to Arabic is in Webster’s New World Dictionary of the English Language. That etymon tartir is found in An Advanced Learner’s Arabic-English Dictionary by H. A. Salmoné (Beirut, 1889), p. 497.