Nuj a Juj and See a Baj

Last week we began looking at words formed from the Latin word for law, ius, and its cognate iurare.

Iurare may not look like it, but it is the root of many English words having to do with the courtroom. There was no letter J in old Latin, and the Latin word for law was ius. Many of these words came to English through French, who changed the I to a J, hence we have words like jury and jurist and jurisprudence, all words describing part of the legal system.

The jury is the panel chosen to decide a court case, and arrived in English in the early 1300s, from the Anglo-French juree, which was the adaptation of the Medieval Latin word iurata, a form of the previously mentioned iurare. 

Jurist arrived in the mid-1400s, although the Middle French used juriste in the prior century, having adopted it from the Medieval Latin word iurista. While iurista originally was the term for a religious cult, it eventually came to refer to the person who is well-versed in the law, like the judge and your lawyer (you hope).

Jurisprudence didn’t develop in English until the 1620s, coming from the French word jurisprudence, which they got directly from the Latin word iurisprudentia, which meant the science of law. It was formed by adding the genitive form of ius (law) to prudentia, which meant a knowledge or foreseeing, or practical judgment. But the use of the word jurisprudence to describe the philosophy of law was first attested in only 1756.

Which brings us to the word, or should I say name, Prudence. While now used more often as a Christian name, it has been a surname since about 1200. But in the mid-1300s its meaning of intelligence or discretion, of wisdom to see what is suitable or profitable, became used to refer to individual traits. It was also one of the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy, and the first of St. Thomas Aquinas’ list of virtues. The Catholic catechism has a list of seven cardinal virtues, adding faith, hope, and charity to the four Greek ones.

So how did we get a dg as in judge or where did judicial – without the g - come from?

Judicial came into English in the late 1300s from the Latin word iudicalis, meaning “belonging to a court of justice” and was kept much like it was in Latin. Pretty simple. Not so for judge.

Judge as a verb has been used in English since about 1300. The noun form, referring to the person, came into being after the word was adopted as a surname in the early 1300s. While in Hebrew it refers to military leaders who had temporary power (read the book of Judges, a Latin transliteration of the Hebrew word shophet, which is a recounting of a series of military leaders and the enemies they encountered and defeated) the earlier verb form came from the Anglo-French word juger, which came from the Old French word jugier, which came from the Latin word iudicare, which was a compound word formed from ius, law, and dicare, to say. 

So judging is saying something related to law. Somewhere in the mid-1400s the word juge had a d added to make our judge. How it happened I don’t know, but somewhere along the line it was decided that we couldn’t end a word in English with the letter j, but instead had to approximate the j sound with a –dge construction, like in badge or fudge. 

Wouldn’t it have been easier on elementary school spellers to just go with baj, fuj, juj, and nuj?