Note {3} — Chapter XX

Note 3.—Abraham Roger gives from the Calendar of the Coromandel Brahmans the character, lucky or unlucky, of every hour of every day of the week; and there is also a chapter on the subject in Sonnerat (I. 304 seqq.). For a happy explanation of the term Choiach I am indebted to Dr. Caldwell: “This apparently difficult word can be identified much more easily than most others. Hindu astrologers teach that there is an unlucky hour every day in the month, i.e. during the period of the moon’s abode in every nákshatra, or lunar mansion, throughout the lunation. This inauspicious period is called Tyâjya, ‘rejected.’ Its mean length is one hour and thirty-six minutes, European time. The precise moment when this period commences differs in each nákshatra, or (which comes to the same thing) in every day in the lunar month. It sometimes occurs in the daytime and sometimes at night;—see Colonel Warren’s Kala Sankatila, Madras, 1825, p. 388. The Tamil pronunciation of the word is tiyâcham, and when the nominative case-termination of the word is rejected, as all the Tamil case-terminations were by the Mahomedans, who were probably Marco Polo’s informants, it becomes tiyâch, to which form of the word Marco’s Choiach is as near as could be expected.” (MS. Note.)[2]