Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.

What is the capital of Tunisia?

Please type your username.

Please type your E-Mail.

Please choose the appropriate section so the question can be searched easily.

Please choose suitable Keywords Ex: question, poll.

Type the description thoroughly and in details.

What is the capital of Tunisia?

Why does “droit” have the same two meanings in both English and French?

The same reasons gave the same meanings to a similar concept in both languages, may I guess.

Both senses are driven by the correctness of something. The right to do something is obviously matching the fact that it is right for one to do so, and on the same hand, it’s the right arm that shall be used to do anything among decent men. Not that I’m able to document it in any way, but i’m pretty sure left-handed people were hunted down for sorcery or something in some ancient time.

Similarly, the rightful mind matches un esprit droit (the opposite of un esprit mal tourné), still within the same semantic concept.

Droit et right ont la même racine indo-européenne, ainsi que l’allemand Recht, l’espagnol derecho, l’italien destro et les mots équivalents dans beaucoup d’autres langues issues du germanique ou du latin.
La consultation d’un dictionnaire – ou en ligne des différents wiktionnaires – indique que l’indo-européen h₃reǵtós (aller en ligne droite) a donné le germanique rehtaz, le grec ὀρεκτός d’où a dérivé le latin dirēctus et le français droit.


Both words have the same Proto-Indo-European root meaning “move in a straight line” that has given the Germanic rehtaz (hence the German Recht and the English right), the Greek ὀρεκτός and latin dirēctus (hence the French droit, Spanish derecho, etc…).

See Proto-Indo-European h₃reǵtós on wiktionary.

We have a similar usage in Italian for the word ‘sinistro’, from ‘sinistra’ (left in English, gauche in French): ‘sinistro’, just like the English word ‘sinister’, indicates something “threatening or portending evil, wicked, bad”, so I suppose it may be the same principle underneath this form of double usage in Italian, French and English (and many more languages): just like the right hand is the hand of any pure action (religiously speaking) and skills and, more precisely, the Hand of God, the left one is associated with suspicious behavior and has become metaphor for everything that’s out of the norm.

Latin is the root that I know of – certainly re ‘sinistra/left’. And it’s from there that the connotations left=shady and to be suspicious of, or unlucky’. That’s why left handed people have had such a bad time over the ages. And that’s why don’t shake hands with our left hand.

Droit comes from the Latin for ‘direct’ and, in Greek and Latin, their words and phrases were often metaphorical, so a good man would speak the truth; be direct; be on a true course – a direct line, like an arrow. Sharp. Adroit (à droite). On the ‘Right team’ as opposed to the ‘Left team’. A professional, skilled, to be trusted – therefore ‘right’. Like a ruler (rectus), unbending. All sorts of metaphors and similes connect up. And ‘having the right to do something/having rights’ may come from having ‘straight/unbending morals’and therefore the moral right?

 

Leave a comment

What is the capital of Tunisia?