Abstract
The ancients, too, were keen to research the origins of words in order to shed light on their meaning. Roman jurists, in particular, were passionate about their research. Their hypotheses sometimes took the form of veritable language games, akin to puns, based on assonance - la paronomase - between terms with no real linguistic link, but capable of arousing associations of ideas.
Thus, furtum is linked to furvum (" dark "), on the grounds that theft is committed in secret, often at night ; supellex (" domestic furniture ") is interpreted as coming from sub pellibus, designating the indispensable objects that citizens took with them " under the skins of the tent " on missions to distant lands. Comparisons can also be based on paradox or conceptual opposition : militia (" soldier's profession ") is thus contrasted with mollitia (" soft life ").
These constructions come under the heading of paretymology : they are " parallel " explanations that replace etymology in the strict sense. Far from being reduced to mere mind games, they are mobilized by jurists as hermeneutical instruments, in the service of interpreting laws and resolving cases.
The study of these " jeux de mots sérieux " - often referred to today as " etymologies populaires " - reveals ideologies and social representations, as shown by the analyses of adulterium, soror and other terms examined in this lecture. We'll also be looking at the inner workings of these explanatory processes. The hypothesis defended is that paretymology operates like a metaphor in reverse : by associating words, it projects a conceptual content onto the term to be explained, just as metaphor transfers properties from the source word to the target word. The difference, however, is that paretymology introduces a connection that didn't originally exist.
These " metaphors a posteriori ", which are sometimes disconcerting, reveal less the truth of words than the thought structures - notably legal - of those who use them.
