Words from One Book Review

I was reading a review of Daniel Hannan's Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World and within two paragraphs came across the word tendentious and the phrase "English is the world's lingua franca." (The review was by Jay Weiser in The Weekly Standard.)

My first thought about tendentious was how similar it is in sound to contentious but how very different in meaning. 

Tendentious is an adjective meaning having or showing a purpose or bias or tendency, the word to which it is related. Contentious is an adjective related to contend, and defines anything that causes contention or strife or arguing.

Tendentious was, according to etymonline.com, not formed from contend or contention, but from the German word tendentiös, which the Germans got from the Medieval Latin word tendentia. It probably will not surprise you to read that tendency also comes from the Medieval Latin word tendentia. Tendency has been use in English since the 1620s, while tendentious first appeared in 1871. The use of tendentious is a relatively "new tendency," which in Portuguese is "bossa nova."

Contend and contentious came to English much closer in time. Contend arrived in the mid-1400s, while contentious came about 1500. Contend came from the Old French word contendre, which the French got from the Latin word contendere that meant to strive after. Contentious came from the Middle French word contentieux, which the Middle French got from the Latin word contentiosus, meaning quarrelsome.  

The phrase "English is the world's lingua franca" got my attention because lingua franca was not italicized as a foreign word or phrase usually would be. Is it now common enough, I wondered, that italicization is unnecessary? I guess so, since it has been in use since the 1620s. It is from Italian, and means “Frankish tongue.” The phrase, if capitalized, refers to the Italian-Provençal jargon, an admixture of Spanish, French, Greek, Arabic, and Turkish. The jargon was spoken throughout the eastern Mediterranean, especially in ports. According to etymonline.com it was originally used in the Levant, and “is probably from the Arabic custom (that dates back to the crusades) of calling all Europeans Franks.”

Lingua franca now refers to any language that is widely used as a means of communication among speakers of another language. For instance, in the court of Europe French was the lingua franca. In the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church Latin was the lingua franca. In Britain lingua franca can also refer to any language that contains elements of several other languages.

Later on in the review Weiser used the word admixture (as I did above), again sending me to my dictionary. What's the difference between admixture and mixture? Admixture is the noun for the act of mixing or the state of being mixed. Mixture is the result of the act of mixing. Admixture arrived in English in about 1600, comes from an earlier word admix, which was a back-formation of admixt that came from the Latin word admixtus that means “mixed with.” Mixture had arrived about 100 years earlier from the Old French word misture, and also directly from the Latin word mixtura.

Today’s admixture is probably not a contentious post, though I can be a tendentious poster.