K etymologii českého vinařského termínu tarant

The topic of this paper is an etymological interpretation of the Czech wine term tarant. On the basis of the linguistic and cultural-historical analysis, it’s possible to conclude that it is a Germanism of Romance origin, at the beginning of which stands the Italian taranta (or Old French tarante) denoting the poisonous spider ‘Lycosa tarantula’. The semantic development seems to have been along the lines of ‘spider’ → (‘scorpion’) → ‘colour of spider’ → ‘colour variability’ → ‘type of colour-changing wine’, with the original meaning being ‘a type of wine whose colour oscillates between white and red’. The same motivation for the naming based on the changing colour of the wine was found in the corresponding German term Schiller, which is often found in Middle Czech monuments as a translation equivalent of the Czech tarant. The family of the Romance word, borrowed into a number of european languages, also proved to be richly branched, covering a number of words with original meanings as well as meanings metaphorically or metonymically transferred. For some of them, however, a clear affiliation to this etymological family is difficult to determine, as shown, for example, by the Polish hipological term tarant.