episodeWhat the word means first
Prick, strike, write, pattern
What it is
The word each tradition uses for the tattoo, and what it meant before it meant that.
The long version
Four families, and they line up with the method rather than with the geography.
Prick — Thai and Khmer sak, Inuktitut kaki-, Hindi godna, Kurdish deq, Croatian sicanje, Burmese htoe, Okinawan hajichi. Every one of them is a poking tradition, and the word is the verb for what the needle does.
Strike — Samoan and Polynesian tatau, Māori tā, Marquesan patu. Every one of them is a tapping tradition, and the word is the verb for the mallet.
Pattern — Austronesian batok, patik, burik; Northern Thai lai. The word is the design, and it is the same word used for the pattern on a pot or a cloth.
Write — Atayal ptasan; and in Lanna, the tool for tattooing is the same lek char stylus used to write a palm-leaf manuscript.
Inference — a language names the tattoo after whichever part of it that culture finds most salient: the movement, the tool, the design, or the literacy. Four answers, and none of them is "the picture".
Connected to
Named here by
- Deq Another word for tattoo that means to puncture.
- Godna Another word for tattoo that means to prick.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | inference | ||
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- Yantra tattooing — Wikipedia (en)
- Kakiniit — Wikipedia (en)
- Batok — Wikipedia (en)
- Tā moko — Wikipedia (en)
- Deq (tattoo) — 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