English to French translation

Totality

January 12, 2004

Tony Blair: "I stand by the totality of what I said at that time."

This choice of words by the British Prime Minister has been ridiculed by his political opponents, who have taken great delight in accusing him of playing with semantics in answering questions about the death of Dr Kelly.

A commentator on Radio 4 on Sunday morning was arguing that Tony Blair had used this word because it is often found in a mathematical context. In choosing this precise word and not the more common whole (from Middle English hole, unarmed), the Prime Minister was trying to surround his speech with some sort of “logical aura” which might make him more credible. In doing so, he only provoked the fury of the Tories, who repeatedly used totality in increasingly ridiculous sentences.

I agree that Tony Blair was probably trying to make his argument more convincing by using a word that is not as commonly used as others expressing the same concept.
However, I will go a bit further and argue that this is a general reaction to words of Latin origin (totality comes form the Latin word totalis). I think it is true that words of Anglo-Saxon origin are more directly and easily understood by native English speakers than words of Latinate (either direct from Latin, or indirect through Norman French) origin. I was always taught at school that to maximise communication with English people, I should try and use words of Germanic origin as much as I could (and offer lots of cups of tea). However, my native language being a Latin one, I suppose it is no surprise that I will tend to use more words of Latin origin than your average English speaker.

When looking to express a concept, I might tend to use commence (from the Latin word comminitiare) rather than begin (from the Old English beginnan), or come to someone’s aid (from Latin adjutare) rather than their help (from Old English helpen) because it’s the word that first comes to my mind. When using such words, I’ve often encountered hilarity and mockery and been accused of trying to impress everyone with my big words, supporting my theory that generally, English speakers are more at ease with Germanic words.

I think the same happened to Tony Blair. I might send him a little note of support from a fellow Latin word lover.

For those who like statistics, here is the proportion of English words of French, Latin, or Germanic origin:
· Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
· French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
· Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%

Comments

I was thinking about this just the other day, when I was in France. I noticed how many words are roughly the same in French and English and that we just use different bits of our vocabluary in everyday speech. A lot also rests on accent (it's amazing what a difference it makes). It occurred to me that some of your wide English vocabluary is just your French vocabluary with a different accent.

Exactly. It's also why I'm good at scrabble and regularly beat native English speakers (with great glee). I've got a bigger pool to draw from. HA!

Yes, it's true that the words we get from Germanic sources are shorter, (perceived as) more direct, and (most important) more commonly used. I have even seen a book on composition ("Write to the Point", by Stott) which explicitly says to avoid words of Latin/French origin whenever possible.

I suppose that this is to be expected, given the relative positions of the Saxon peasant and the Norman lord after the conquest. I have read that English is a creolized language that has developed into a complex language by dint of its age and material success of its culture. Though we have a thick veneer of Latinate culture, the ancestral memory is firmly Germanic.

As for Tony Blair's usage of 'totality', the only time I can recall having heard the word is pertaining to a eclipse. Perhaps Blair's training as a lawyer led him to choose this word over "whole" or "taken as a whole". He must have struck many as attempting to avoid the issue, saying in effect that he would not try to defend individual statements he may have made, all by use of a latin-based term instead of a germanic one.

So, in that sense, 'commence' is a subtle kind of faux ami; its basic meaning is not different, but the frequency and usual context (a formal gathering, say, of lawyers or graduating students) of its usage is quite different.

BTW, I come from Georgia, USA, where less-educated people use 'commence to' as an alternate to 'start/begin', as in 'she commenced to whuppin' on me'. I've no idea how this type of usage got started, but perhaps it was an attempt to make one's speech sound more elevated.

And in America, "commence" and "begin" are replaced with "start"...

In the space of a couple of hundred years Norman French changed English so much that it's hard to imagine the grandparent constraint applied! (As explained in another commentary the grandparent constraint governs the rate of language change so as to ensure intelligibility over generations). The result looks to those of us who have a passing acquaintance with French and Latin (or some other romance language) very much like a grafting of vocabulary wholesale and the erosion of Olde English Grammar. So, some preference exists for what we perceive to be Germanic rather than Romance vocabulary. But what about people who don't know whether a word is Germanic or Romance? Can they tell the difference? It seems to me more likely that the preference is more likely based on something that doesn't require explicit knowledge of historical linguistics. Word length? Morphological regularity (in say plural formation or commparison)? Phonological markedness? Frequency begetting frequency? I'm not comfortable with the notion that ancestral memory plays a role. If it did would we not expect the French to have developed a taste for borrowings from Breton?

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