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No mistake - one word with one root | 112 comments | Create New Account
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No mistake - one word with one root
Authored by: kuroshima on Friday, November 16 2012 @ 03:50 PM EST

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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