Etymology from Memory, #3

There are at least three distinct kinds of tartar, and I would very much like to know whether they are really all that distinct, or whether they may be traced back to a common ancestor. The first is what we today call a 'Tatar', that is, a Turkic, Muslim inhabitant of Tatarstan and the surrounding areas of un-Russified Russia; the second, the stony plaque that covers our teeth if we neglect to wage unending battle against it; the third, a culinary term associated with a certain way of preparing, or not preparing, steak. Now the first and the third are easy to deal with, along Lévi-Straussian lines. It was only over the course of the 17th century that the Russian empire succeeded in expanding and subduing the Mongol and Turkic nomads within their vast territory, but these people remained nomads, and thus, from the point of view of the sedentary Christians, entirely outside of the bounds of civilization. And what can be more uncivilized than to not even cook one's food? Already in a Paris note of 1676, thus some years before Nicolaes Witsen's monumental Noord en Oost Tartarije of 1691 made Tartary more widely known in Western Europe, G. W. Leibniz suggests that it would be interesting to study the effects upon health of eating only food prepared à la Tartare, which is to say, raw. (I do not quite know how to account for the 'tartar sauce' one is given at Long John Silver's and perhaps elsewhere when one eats fried fish.) Now, what about the tartar one battles with Tartar Control Aqua-Fresh? Is this an echo of Russia's own centuries-old Tartar-control problem? I think it might be, but again, since I am doing this all from memory --for that is the exercise-- I am not going to check. It is important anyway to note that dental tartar is only one variety of a vastly more widespread category of residues of interest to early chymists (to use the term Bill Newman has reintroduced in order to avoid the charged connotations of 'alchemists'), including tartar of wine (potassium hydrogen tartrate), cream of tartar, oil of tartar, and so on. Now there is also an Arabic word --I think it's darad--, meaning 'dregs' or 'sediment', from which the chymical notion of tartar may derive. And beyond that there is the Tartaros of the Greeks, which was a sort of Hell, and which was consciously invoked by the chymists in translating, for example, Sal Tartari as 'Salt of Hell'. Now, my suspicion is that the fortuitious convergence of these three independently derived notions of tartar --one Turkic, one Arabic, and one Greek, all with severely negative connotations, either for reason of what they refer to or simply of where they come from-- serves to increase the appeal of using the term to describe a vast category of disparate, lowly, damnable things over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries. How steak tartare later became a delicacy is a question for another time.

Comments

[Stephen Menn]

For the central Asian people, one of various groups forged together by Genghis Khan, my recollection is that the correct word is "Tatar," and that the Westerners (using it as a name for all the peoples led by Genghis Khan) corrupted it to "Tartar" in order to imply that they were an outbreak from Tartarus that had erupted onto the earth. That could be wrong, but I think anyway that was the story I picked up when I was studying such things 20+ years ago.

[Justin E. H. Smith]

I seem to remember hearing the same account, now that you mention it. So it looks like 'Tartar' as an ethnonym is an early modern conflation of the Turkic 'Tatar' with the Greek 'Tartaros', while 'tartar' as a chemical term is a transformation of the Arabic word for 'sediment' to the point where it matches the Greek too. In both cases foreign words that sound like a familiar Greek word, and that have the same connotations as the Greek word in the European imagination, are made to match the Greek word exactly. I know there's a linguistic term for this sort of incorporation through alteration, but I don't recall what it is.