Latin etymology
1)A cutting: a piece of leaf, stem or branch or leaf detached from a plant to propagate it.
2)The young plant unfolding and growing from the cutting.
In architecture
A tenon, a joint maintaining two or more pieces of wood (or other material) together.
In musicology
A talea is a rhythmic structure.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, the development of polyphonic music made it necessary for the different rhythms and vocal parts to harmonize. As the vocal parts in a song or hymn were unfolding, one of the composer’s tasks was to hold them together within a clear rhythmic structure. Hence, talea came to denote a rhythmic structure underlying the living play of the different vocal and instrumental parts- just as a tenon holds an architecture together.
Later musical forms based on talae are counterpoint and its most refined offspring, the fugue and there are contemporary musical forms, too. In these the different vocal and/or instrumental parts are expressed by and for themselves, and yet they answer and spill over one another, enriching one another with harmonics. And they are perfectly synchronized throughout by the rhythmic structure.
Why not in systems engineering ? EIRIS Conseil’s point of view
By analogy, talea also suggests an iterative development sequence which keeps the different fields of expertise synchronized (by means of milestones) and coordinated (by means of common architectures) throughout the project.