Etymologies are often entertaining, but it is not always obvious what they mean. Take the case of Old Frankish *sal, meaning a single-roomed dwelling. The word was taken over by speakers of Vulgar Latin as sala, and by 1100 CE it had become a word of Anglo-Norman French, since in The Song of Roland it crops up as sale, meaning the living area of a castle. Some time later, it wandered into Italian. Renaissance architects wanted to make a new word for the increasingly grandiose spaces they were designing, so they added an augmentative suffix, producing salone. In the seventeenth century, French translations of Italian works on architecture reproduced the new term, only dropping the final e so as to keep the masculine gender of the Italian. French salon came into English in the early eighteenth century, initially as a word for a large and...
Émigrés: French Words That Turned English
David Bellos, an officer of the French National Order of Arts and Letters, is the Pyne Professor of French Literature and professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, where he founded and for many years directed the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. His books include Georges Perec: A Life in Words, for which he received the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie; The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of “Les Misérables,” for which he received the American Library in Paris Book Award; Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything; Romain Gary: A Tall Story; Jacques Tati: His Life and Art; Balzac Criticism in France, 1850–1900; and a translation of works by Ismail Kadare, for which he received the Man Booker International Prize.
David Bellos; Émigrés: French Words That Turned English. Common Knowledge 1 September 2022; 28 (3): 459–460. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-10046725
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