Chapter TANGUN to TANK of T by The Hobson Jobson Dictionary

nor indeed could it have been borrowed from Guzerat and Rajputana, to which the quotations above ascribe the vernacular word. This Portuguese word best suits, and accounts for that application of tank to large sheets of water which is habitual in India. The indigenous Guzerati and Mahratti word seems to belong rather to what we now call a tank in England; i.e. a small reservoir for a house or ship. Indeed the Port. tanque is no doubt a form of the Lat. stagnum, which gives It. stagno, Fr. old estang and estan, mod. étang, Sp. estanque, a word which we have also in old English and in Lowland Scotch, thus:

1589.—“They had in them stanges or pondes of water full of fish of sundrie sortes.”—Parkes’s Mendoza, Hak. Soc. ii. 46.

c. 1785.—

“I never drank the Muses’ stank,
Castalia’s burn and a’ that;
But there it streams, and richly reams,
My Helicon I ca’ that.”—Burns.

It will be seen that Pyrard de Laval uses estang, as if specifically, for the tank of India.

1498.—“And many other saints were there painted on the walls of the church, and these wore diadems, and their portraiture was in a divers kind, for their teeth were so great that they stood an inch beyond the mouth, and every saint had 4 or 5 arms, and below the church stood a great tanque wrought in cut stone like many others that we had seen by the way.”—Roteiro de Vasco da Gama, 57.

„ “So the Captain Major ordered Nicolas Coelho to go in an armed boat, and see where the water was, and he found in the said island (Anchediva) a building, a church of great ashlar work which had been destroyed by the Moors, as the country people said, only the chapel had been covered with straw, and they used to make their prayers to three black stones which stood in the midst of the body of the chapel. Moreover they found just beyond the church a tanque of wrought ashlar in which we took as much water as we wanted; and at the top of the whole island stood a great tanque of the depth of 4 fathoms, and moreover we found in front of the church a beach where we careened the ship Berrio.”—Ibid. 95.

1510.—“Early in the morning these Pagans go to wash at a tank, which tank is a pond of still water (—ad uno Tancho il qual Tancho è una fossa d’acqua morta).”—Varthema, 149.

„ “Near to Calicut there is a temple in the midst of a tank, that is, in the middle of a pond of water.”—Ibid. 175.

1553.—“In this place where the King (Bahádur Sháh) established his line of battle, on one side there was a great river, and on the other a tank (tanque) of water, such as they are used to make in those parts. For as there are few streams to collect the winter’s waters, they make these tanks (which might be more properly called lakes), all lined with stone. They are so big that many are more than a league in compass.”—Barros, IV. vi. 5.

c. 1610.—“Son logis estoit éloigné près d’vne lieuë du palais Royal, situé sur vn estang, et basty de pierres, ayant bien demy lieuë de tour, comme rous les autres estangs.”—Pyrard de Laval, ed. 1679, i. 262; [Hak. Soc. i. 367].

[1615.—“I rode early … to the tancke to take the ayre.”—Sir T. Roe, Hak. Soc. i. 78.]

1616.—“Besides their Rivers … they have many Ponds, which they call Tankes.”—Terry, in Purchas, ii. 1470.

1638.—“A very faire Tanke, which is a square pit paved with gray marble.”—W. Bruton, in Hakl. v. 50.

1648.—“ … a standing water or Tanck.… ”—Van Twist, Gen. Beschr. 11.

1672.—“Outside and round about Suratte, there are elegant and delightful houses for

recreation, and stately cemeteries in the usual fashion of the Moors, and also divers Tanks and reservoirs built of hard and solid stone.”—Baldaeus, p. 12.

1673.—“Within a square Court, to which a stately Gate-house makes a Passage, in the middle whereof a Tank vaulted.… ”—Fryer, 27.

1754.—“The post in which the party intended to halt had formerly been one of those reservoirs of water called tanks, which occur so frequently in the arid plains of this country.”—Orme, i. 354.

1799.—“One crop under a tank in Mysore or the Carnatic yields more than three here.”—T. Munro, in Life, i. 241.

1809.—

“Water so cool and clear, The peasants drink not from the humble well. * * *

Nor tanks of costliest masonry dispense
To those in towns who dwell,
The work of kings in their beneficence.”