I was going to include this as the intro paragraph of my next post (which is about the “American” concept of freedom) but given that the topic pertained to word histories it unsurprisingly got too long and I have decided to instead make it its own post.
Before discussing freedom, I cannot resist sharing an interesting linguistic note. They say that generally speaking about half of English vocabulary is Germanic in origin and half is from Latin (many times by way of French). This is largely why English’s vocabulary is so rich in comparison with other European languages; we have two word pools from which to choose our vocabulary while the vast majority of languages have just one (their original). In the case of English our original was Germanic but after the Normans invaded the British Isles French became the dominant language and English was drastically changed. This interestingly provides us with double names for many concepts. Here are a few interesting examples:
Germanic Latinate
Midday - Noon
Wild - Savage
Ache - Pain
Yearly - Annual
Want - Desire
Feeling - Sensation
Anger - Rage
Nightly - Nocturnal
Holiday - Vacation
Forbidden - Prohibited
The list literally goes on and on; indeed anyone curious to see more examples would find the above as well as many more here:
Even given the wealth of examples, perhaps my favorite (because it had never explicitly dawned on me until I heard an Argentine professor lecturing on freedom mention this as an interesting characteristic of English) is the noun form of the adjective free. The first and most obvious thing to come to mind is of course freedom, but think for just a moment longer and you will likely recall freedom’s just-as-suitable synonym: liberty. Liberty comes to us by way of Latin and can still be seen in the Spanish libertad or the French liberté. Freedom is our very own Germanic version and can be seen in the German Freiheit or the Norwegian Frihet.
It‘s fascinating then that the famous gift from the French to the Unites States is called the Statue of Liberty; perhaps if it had come Germany or the Netherlands it would be the “Statue of Freedom.” The Germans and the Dutch both actually refer to our Statue of Liberty as, respectively, Die Freiheitsstatue and Het Vrijheidsbeeld or to Anglicize them both “The Freedomstatue.”
On another very brief side note, it is much more Germanic to just stick two words together (which is why German words are so notoriously long) whereas Latin's modern descendants many times link them with “of” (or de). Once again, in English we were thoroughly exposed to both systems and as a result there is nothing more than a slight stylistic difference between “The Statue of Freedom” and “The Freedom Statue.”
It is also particularly interesting to note how some dictionaries use the terms liberty and freedom to define each other due to their semantic scopes being so similarly aligned. Dictionary.com (the dictionary I find myself using more often than not) defines them like this:
Freedom – The state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint
Liberty – Freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control
Anyway I have already likely paid this essentially trivial matter too much attention; it just fascinates me how liberty and freedom are two words with equivalent meanings which can many times be considered interchangeable and yet this perhaps obvious concept can go wholly unnoticed by native speakers.
Even given this, it would certainly be strange to hear set phrases reworded. Imagine if Patrick Henry had cried “I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me freedom or give me death!” The quote all of the sudden seems slightly less elegant, almost more the words of a warrior than an orator. Or what if we talked about “liberty of speech” or “liberty of religion”? Am I alone in hearing that to be more pretentious or perhaps even less direct? The nuances allotted to us by our vocabulary are many times much more complicated than we realize; now anytime you hear someone discussing “the state of being free” pay attention to the stylistic use of the two words liberty and freedom and appreciate the diversity of your native tongue!
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