T&T: Anchoring and Clearing and French

[Sean Welsh]

Candy Chapman wrote:
> Throughout much of the last several hundred years, french has been the lingua
> franka -- the common language of international diplomacy -- beginning well
> before Napoleon's time.  Prior to that latin was the universal language of
> intellectual and diplomatic conversation because the Roman Catholic church
> then dominated europe.  ...  Lingua franka literally
> means "French language" in latin.

Hmm.  If you're going to pontificate (another Latin root) on etymology, 
you ought to at least check your facts.

As someone who once, many moons ago, was fluent in both French and Latin 
(well, at least as fluent as anyone can get with a dead language), I 
need to point out that:

(1) There is no "K" in Latin.  Instead, all "C's" are hard.  The correct 
original spelling is "Lingua Franca"

(2) The reason this phrase means what it does has little to do with 
international diplomacy.  It referred instead to the Frankish (not 
French) language that was common throughout the Mediterranean.  This 
language was a bastardization of several Romance languages, including 
French.  It thus was the "common language" of the region, and this is 
what the phrase means today: common language.  Today we often call such 
a bastardized language a "patois" (another French term).

(3) Italian is the predominant underpinning of (original) Lingua Franca, 
not French.

You are correct in that French was once the Lingua Franca of 
international diplomacy, even being so stipulated in official documents 
of the United Nations.  But you've made a bad leap from that to the 
etymology of the phrase.

FWIW.

-Sean
http://OurOdyssey.BlogSpot.com
"mister language person" (with apologies to Dave Barry)
"not bad with science, either"