There was quite a bit of talk about ventriloquism on an episode
of QI I watched recently, mainly because one of the guests was a
ventriloquist. The word ventriloquism comes for the Latin words
venter (stomach, belly, womb) and loquī (to speak) so it means
“to speak from the stomach”. It was known as εγγαστριμυθία
(gastromancy) in Greek, which means the same thing. In other
languages the word for ventriloquist is either from the Latin,
e.g. ventriloquia (Spanish), ventriloque (French), ventriloquo
(Italian), or a calque of the word: Bauchredner (German – ‘belly
speaker’), Brzuchomówstwo (Polish – ‘belly speaker), 腹語術
(Chinese – ‘belly language art/skill’). In Welsh though, the
word is tafleisydd, from tafle (to throw), llais (voice) and
-ydd (suffix for a person or tool), so it means ‘voice thrower’.
Ventriloquism apparently started a religious practice.
Ventriloquists were thought to be able to speak to the dead and
predict the future, and the voices that seemed to come from the
stomachs were thought to be th