episodeHow the word got in
Tahiti, 1769 — tatau becomes tattoo
1,769 – 1,774 · Cook's first voyage, and Mai in London
What it is
English had no single word for the practice until Cook's crew brought one back from Polynesia.
The long version
Tatau went into English as tattoo and swallowed everything else. Every tradition on this site is now described in English with a Samoan word, including the ones that had their own perfectly good nouns: irezumi, godna, deq, kakiniq, sak.
Inference — that is not only a linguistic accident. It is why the English-language record treats Pacific tattooing as the default case and everything else as a variation on it, and it is visible in the coverage count on this site: the traditions with the most language editions written about them are mostly the ones the eighteenth-century voyages reached first.
Connected to
- Tatau The word.
- Who gets written about And what it did to the record.
Named here by
- Tatau How the word got into English.
- Who gets written about Why the English-language record is shaped this way.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Peʻa — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- James Cook — Wikipedia (en)
- Peʻa — Wikipedia (en)
- Joseph Banks — Wikipedia (en)
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there