More on tattoos

[Yoram Meroz]

Dear AN-LANGers:

About a month ago there was a query here about the etymology of the word
'tatoo', so here's more.
As it last stood, the etymology required the Tahitian /tatau/ to become the
english /tatu/. Two unsatisfactory possibilities stand:

1. The French spellings of the word follow the same shift, from
Bougainville's tataou to the later tatoue, first manifested in the 1778
translation of Cook's journeys (according to the Tresor de la Langue
Francaise). One can surmise that the English Tattow got transliterated to
the w-less tatou in French; that the pronunciation followed the spelling
(like the German taetowieren, /tetovi:rn/, never mind the umlaut), and that
the French pronunciation was later re-exported to England (and other
European countries) and phonetically spelled tattoo. This is a complex, but
plausible scenario, but the spelling 'tattoo' in English occurs as early as
1774 (according to the OED), well before the first French occurrence of
'tatoue'. So there are problems here, unless someone can suggest a
different chronology.

2. Several dictionaries (the New Shorter OED, Webster's, Random House)
claim tattoo comes from Marquesan /tatu/. As it happens, though, tatu does
not seem to be a Marquesan word with this meaning. I checked Dordillon's
1904 dictionary, as well as a few other sources, and they all agree on the
word _tiki_ meaning both the action of tattooing and its result. _Tatu_ is
only mentioned as some kind of an illness (with a cognate in Mangarevan).
POLLEX does not mention _tatu_ meaning tattooing in any Polynesian language
(Jeff Marck, if you are reading this, does the irregular shift /au/>/u/
occur anywhere in East Polynesia?) I have no idea, then, where the
dictionaries I mentioned got the idea for a Marquesan source.

In hope of more elucidation,

Yoram Meroz