[lit-ideas] Pesanteur, Pensateur (Was: Geary's French)
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 21:01:28 EDT
In a message dated 8/11/2004 2:32:57 PM Eastern Standard Time,
atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes in a post entitled "Le pensateur et la grace":
I wish you guys would restate your initial positions. ... I wanted physics
to hand
me the God particle, but physics doesn't know God from Speranza . ... Mike
Geary
weighing in with grace
----
Geary signs off with a pun on French author Simone Weil's book-title: "Le
pesanteur et la grace" (tr. as "Gravity and Grace").
Incidentally, what I thought was a great gaffe on my part is _not_: both
'penseur' (French for 'thinker', as in Rodin's sculpture of that title) and
'pesanteur' (the word in S. Weil's book) come from Latin,
pe(n)sare
which gave both 'think' (as in 'pensee') and 'weigh' (as in 'pesanteur', a
weigh). This is a unique Romance semantic development (thus found in Italian,
French, Spanish, etc), but not really in English, I would think? (It somewhat
compares with the etymology of 'essay' -- L. assagium -- which _also_ has to
do with the weighing and the thinking.
I think it says a lot about the speakers of Romance language that they
associate _thinking_ with _weighing_ (and thus a burden). Maybe it's the
Mediterranean climate?
Cheers,
JL
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