Words about Words—Tariffs and Imports

Issue 263

Capri 2016

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If you happen to live during a time of uprisings and marauders and invasions, yet you also happen, unfortunately, to earn a living by lending money, you’ll probably want to ensure that your front door is secure. In fact, you might prefer to conduct your business outside while leaving your money inside. In Florence, during the Renaissance, you might stroll across town and set up shop on a bench near the market. Whenever there’s a riot, you can, like everyone else in the city, scurry home and lock your doors. Eventually—because business is mostly good, because you’ve funded a few notable frescoes and churches—the Italian word for that bench where moneylenders worked, banco, transforms into the modern word bank.

And one reason that those Florentine moneylenders avoided bankruptcy—which translates literally as banca rotta or broken bench—is because the artistic renaissance corresponded with a banking renaissance. These stories are symbiotic, really, so that innovations in accounting, ledgers, and numbers funded innovation in the arts. Thankfully, for those moneylenders underneath the Italian sun, increased trade across the Mediterranean brought the latest in banking technology: from the Arabic diwan or double-entry bookkeeping, to the Arabic number system that was astoundingly more practical than Roman numerals, to the first use—in a way that’s tricky to even comprehend today—of the number zero.

So it is the Arabic word ṣifr that triggers the Italian zefiro and, eventually, our zero. And the language balloons with other commerce words from this period. Average is a little tricky to trace, but it might have started as a maritime word, referring to how lost and damaged goods were assigned a value, and probably connects to the Arabic awariya; Jar originates as the Arabic jarrah and refers to water-vessel, which is obviously a maritime trade word, too, and then enters English, deliciously, as a word specifically for vessels that carry olive oil.

Understanding the Florentine Renaissance in its literal meaning—with Renaissance describing a rebirth—is probably best, as this was a period when much of Greek antiquity, its philosophy and arts and narratives and legal theories, reemerged in intellectual life. From our vantage there are two curious aspects of this rebirth: First, there’s the curious truth that much of Europe had overlooked, or forgotten about, the lessons of Greek antiquity. There’s less of a straight line between Athens and today than it might appear—there’s a gap in the record, a period when that history was mostly lost. Second, there’s the curious truth that those lessons were preserved and even advanced in the Arab world while Europe busied itself wearing armor and storming castles.

So the Greek past that shaped the Italian Renaissance was, in some ways, imported by travelers from the Arab world. Import, as a word, enters English right around this time, which seems fitting because it is the age of exploration. In or en for into, along with portare for to carry. This is straightforward enough and portare hasn’t changed a letter in Italian after five hundred years—so if you’re in a Japanese restaurant in Florence today, and you spill some French wine, you’ll probably conjugate the verb portare when asking a server to bring more napkins. It’s a fitting word to describe the period, as any history of the Renaissance certainly involves a lot of travel, a lot of trading, a movement across borders in a way that’s part of the vibrancy of the age. And there’s no surprise that this period also brings us the Arabic word taʿrīf—originally meaning a list of fees, or prices, even an inventory—which transforms into the Italian tariffa and the English tariff. Of course there’s a certain irony in importing a word for taxing imports. But language shifts over the centuries, so a term for listing prices now describes a term for raising prices.

A word like market, for instance, would have once described nothing more than the place where traders met in person. Mercatus is the Latin for market, though it is worth knowing that Mercurius is the Roman god of commerce. From Roman times much of the world has become monotheistic, but Mercurius still seems to be where so many send their prayers. Today, interestingly, we can add an article: The Market refers to countless markets. Instead of one man screaming about the apples in his cart, we’ve got the bond market, the oil market, the commercial paper market, and those are just a few of the major financial examples. We’ve got market prices, market value, market research, and the market economy—or at least we have, at a minimum, words for those concepts. There are more abstract uses, too, with new examples imported into the language each day: the SaaS market, the creator market, the advertising market. Although the word can stretch into even more elusive ideas. As there’s a market for charisma, supposedly, a market for authenticity, and a market for attention—with the latter closely related to the distant meaning of someone yelling at a stall while trying to sell goats.

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Trade—which brings all of these words to the language—probably comes from something akin to trace or tread, and is also nautical in origin. Using the word trade for commerce and commodities is understandably linked to the age of packing ships with as much cargo as possible and transporting it back home. For transport, take trans to mean cross or across and combine it again with portare. Trader, then tradesman, come from the same period, though we don’t get trade-war in English until the 19th Century, a period that’s not typically described as calm and pleasant and innovative. Trade-off, hilariously, also doesn’t come into the language for a few centuries—because deciding between limited options isn’t exactly intuitive.

But there’s a coda to all this trade that ignited the Renaissance. For centuries, while much of Europe isn’t learning Greek, the Arabic world is a conduit of knowledge—translating, preserving, expanding, giving back to Europe the knowledge it forgot. Cities of scrolls and scholars—Baghdad, Alexandria, Cairo—have bustling libraries that surpass the dreary, chilly castles in Europe, brimming with Greek philosophy, Persian mathematics, Indian astronomy. One loose rule: if you see an al word, the origin might be from Arabic and this period—such as algebra, algorithm, alcove, with the al prefix signifying the Arabic definitive article.

After exporting that knowledge to Europe, the doors, rather surprisingly, shut. A spirit of inquiry, exploration, and cosmopolitanism degrade into, at best, caution. Europe starts to look outward just as the Arabic world starts to turn inward. Goods slow. Politics fragments. Intolerance builds. The printing press is dismissed by many as corrupting—although, to be fair, that was true in the best sense of the word. For the impassive, restrictive centuries that follow, the word stagnation comes to mind—originating in Latin, stagnare, meaning to cease flowing, to stand motionless. Another irony from this distance is that the most valuable goods exported during this period, gold, spices, grains, weren’t as valuable as the methods of accounting that were imported.