Thanks for clearing that up. :)
Do the two words in
Spanish equate, more or less, to the difference between
the verb forms of
prejudice and prejudge in English? Just a guess there - I
don't have a
reasonable understanding of Spanish, obviously, although I'm
passable in French
and once was so in Latin (and I am fluent in English, of
course).
Damn english, using the same word for verb and
noun forms ;)
I'll tell the truth, I'm not sure on the differences
between those two verb
forms. In my mind, to prejudice someone (in the
non-legal meaning), means to
instill prejudices (as in against X) in that
someone, while to prejudge
someone means to apply your own prejudices against
that someone. If so, no,
the difference between those two Spanish words is that
one. "Prejuicio" (verb
"prejuzgar") means to have preconceived ideas.
"Perjuicio" (verb "perjudicar")
means to damage, to hurt, to hinder. Damages,
in the legal meaning, are called
"daños y perjuicios", and that means not only
direct physical damages, but
also indirect damages. Example: I crash my car
against your shop. This causes
you "daños", as I've destroyed your property and
"perjuicios", since I've
hindered your commercial activity. As a verb form,
"perjudicar" is (in)famous
for appearing on tobacco boxes "El tabaco
perjudica seriamente a la
salud" (tobacco seriously harms your health,
though I'm sure this is
enunciated differently on the other side of the pond).
In fact, "perjuicio"
has the same meaning as prejudice in "terminate with
extreme prejudice".
It does seem to be a quirk of Spanish that
the per- prefix
replaced pre- in perjuicio, since per- and pre- have very
different meanings
in Latin (one means "away from" and the other
"before").
Non-autoritative sources (the RAE I linked is the
body responsible for
defining what's correct Spanish) seem to believe that the
per- in "perjuicio"
comes from the latin per- (through, completely), so
perjuicio would
etymologically mean the fines and other results of having a
trial go against
you. I believe this is more like folk etymology, but the RAE
can be wrong too,
It is not all that surprising that English
and French have the
same set of meanings for prejudice since the word came into
English by way of
Old French from Medieval Latin from Latin. I would expect
that Spanish would
have it's own derivation directly from Medieval Latin (which
was quite a mess
in terms of spelling and word formation compared to Latin, so
maybe that
explains the quirk).
Trust me, I know about how English
took parts of French (and so you ended up
with lamb and mouton) during the
middle ages, when the Duke of Normandy as the
ruler of England, and so French
was the court language while English was the
commoner language. Again it's
interesting that in Catalan (a language
that is closer to French than to Spanish, but that has taken a lot of
vocabulary from Spanish - check the language families in the linked Wikipedia
article) you have "perjudici" ("perjuicio") and "prejudici" ("prejuicio")
too.
In any case, thanks for bringing it up. I find these kinds of
discussions quite fascinating, and I always manage to learn something from
them.
I hope I didn't bother anyone with this, as it is severely
off topic here -
then again, this is the off topic thread.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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