A look in the Dictionary
When occupied with terms, it is often useful to consult a dictionary. A dictionary I can wholeheartedly recommend looking into frequently, is Emile Benveniste’s ‘Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society’ (Vocabulaire des Institutions Indo-européennes). The English translation was recently republished by HAU Books with an exceptional foreword from Giorgio Agamben, who applauds the Vocabulaire as ‘a totally unique work, which no research in the humanities [and, I might add: the social sciences] could do without.’ (p. XIII)
Looking up the word ‘commerce’, which is of interest to us this week, we find first of all that it is not particularly interesting, except perhaps that, as Benveniste informs us, it is not linguistically related to the notions of buying and selling. It stems from Latin ‘commercium’ that is derived from ‘merx’ (‘goods’, ‘merchandise’, more exactly: ‘object of trade’), for which we have no further etymology, except a postulated proto-italian root *merk- ‘trade’, ‘exchange’ (cf. the Leiden Etymological Dictionary of Latin). What is more interesting, however, is that Latin knows another word for commerce: ‘negotium’. This word can be analyzed a little further: it is composed of the negation ‘nec’ and ‘otium’, leisure, thus meaning literally the ‘absence of leisure’. It is a calque on Greek ‘askholia’, which is grammatically identical: negation ‘a-‘ and ‘skhoia’, leisure. While the Greek term means ‘private or public business’, it does not carry the ‘distinct implication of commercial business which “negotium” has’. Indeed, the initial grammatical calque of ‘negotium’ was followed by a second, semantic one, in which ‘negotium’ became modeled after the greek ‘pragma’ (cf. pragmateutes: ‘trader’, negotiator: ‘trader’). ‘negotium’ thus came to mean, like ‘pragma’, thing’ and even ‘person’. What is fascinating here, is that none of these words positively denote a specific occupation. Indeed, it seems instead that ‘negotium’, already grammatically modeled on a vague term in Greek, became semantically modeled on an even vaguer term. Greek and Latin are no outliers here: though linguistically unrelated, the English word ‘business’ equally signifies little more than the absence of leisure (although not as a negative formation). French ‘affaires’ comes from ‘à faire’, which means nothing more than ‘to do’, as in ‘j’ai quelque chose à faire’, ‘I have something to do’. German ‘Geschäft’ is derived from the verb ‘schaffen’, which means ‘to make sth.’, ‘to create’, ‘Unternehmen’ from ‘unternehmen’, ‘to take action’, ‘to do sth.’. The list could go on (for example: Spanish ‘negocio’ and ‘comercio’ obviously stem from the Latin words; Italian ‘affari’ is similar to french ‘affaires’). There is no specific term in the Indo-european vocabulary for commercial activity, it ‘cannot be positively defined’. Benveniste explains this through Dumézil’s argument that indo-european society was structured by a tripartite social organisation of priests, guardians and farmers (cf. also Book III, Chapter 1 of the Vocabulaire): there is no place for ‘commerce’ as a distinct activity in this organization, it must be a later introduction that was, importantly, often relegated to foreigners that could not fit into a group’s different classes (for example the metoikoi in Greece). This finds further evidence in the indo-european vocabularies by the fact that each language came up with its own terms to signify ‘commerce’. Thus, while Latin ‘negotius’ was modeled after a Greek term, the Greek equivalent did not designate ‘commerce’. Instead, the Greek word for a large-scale merchant is ’emporos’, a term derived from the verb ’emporeuomai’, ‘to voyage by sea’, because in Greece, large-scale commerce was ‘necessarily of a maritime character’.
What is especially important, is, that ‘commerce’ was in Indo-european societies not understood as a simple increase in scale of previously ongoing exchange, because then it would have in all likelihood been derived from already existing terms within that semantic field. It is a specific ‘occupation’ distinct from the exchange that is necessary in all society (cf. community < *mei- 'exchange', p. 69).
This summary of a chapter that is only six pages long hardly does justice to the complexity of Benveniste's analysis of Indo-european terms related to economy, to which the first book of the Vocabulaire is devoted. I can only repeat my recommendation, especially the chapters on 'Gift and Exchange' and 'Purchase and Redemption' have important implications for the study of economy. Because the book is already a few decades old, however, I would suggest referencing it with more recent etymological dictionaries like the Leiden series. The original french text can be found on archive.org (https://archive.org/details/levocabulairedes0000benv). Unfortunately, the copy of the Bodleian Libraries is stored offsite, but if anyone wants a .pdf of the whole text, I would be happy to oblige.
Contributed by NiklasHartmann on 31/01/2022
