Francis Mollica writes at The Conversation:
Legal language, or “legalese”, is notoriously hard to understand. Legalese contains more difficult linguistic structures and unusual word choices than most other styles of writing, including non-fiction, news media and even complex academic texts.
The convoluted structure of many legal sentences can make it tough to understand and remember legal obligations. Even lawyers don’t like legal language. So why does it work this way?
In a new study with my colleagues Eric Martínez (University of Chicago) and Edward Gibson (MIT), we found that even laypeople resort to legalese when asked to write laws – which suggests the complexity of legal language may be a kind of ritual that helps give the law its power.
He focuses mainly on “centre embedding”:
Centre-embedded sentences are difficult to process because readers have to remember what happened in the outside (bold) sentence while they’re reading the inside sentence. The reading difficulty increases with the distance between the words that depend on each other. […] In our new study, we analysed the 2021 edition of the US legal code, the official compilation of all federal legislation currently in force. We then compared the results with other genres in a representative body of writing in English.
We found centre embedding is far more common in these laws than in other kinds of text. […] These results suggest that the difficulty to process linguistic structures in legal text, like centre embedding, serve as a cue to the performative, world-altering, nature of the text.
Dubious but fun — thanks, Bathrobe!
I think “last and final boarding call” simulates the authoritativeness of a legal doublet
The seeming lack of self awareness among some academics is, if not charming, at least amusing.
“ Legalese contains more difficult linguistic structures and unusual word choices than most other styles of writing, including non-fiction, news media and even complex academic texts.”
CONTRACTS
Here in Australia we adopted “plain English” in legal drafting (including the drafting of contracts) at least 30-40 years ago.
In my experience, when dealing with US lawyers in commercial agreements, they are more comfortable with using one sentence jargon-laden approach to drafting contracts (ye olde legalese). Typically, US lawyers view Australian “plain English” contracts with some apprehension and suspicion maybe.
LEGISLATION
This is very much a niche area of legal practice. Parliamentary counsel are hired because of their excellent academic results. They then go through some 5 or more years of on the job training in drafting, understanding the statute book and the norms of language used in statutes. Each jurisdiction has its own drafting style. Every few years, there is some shift in the style.
eg. in my jurisdiction, there has been a trend for some years now in replacing “gendered language” with more “gender neutral language”. This typically involves replacing the masculine pronouns “he, him, his” with nouns. This a purely stylistic choice – there is no legal reason for this, because under the Interpretation Act references to “he, him, his” also refer to “she, her, hers” & vice versa. It can be a bit ad hoc: for instance, if you instruct the drafters to amend a particular section of an act, you will get back a draft with your requested amendments as well as all the pronouns changed in that section.
Even more recently, there is a greater acceptance of including diagrams and examples in legislation to aid understanding.
I don’t know that legal language is obfuscatory, only that it aims to be accurate in that it wants to say exactly what the writer means and precise so that as little extra meaning as possible is included. This leads to complexity, but not necessarily obfuscation.
In Max Gladstone’s greatly-to-be-praised Craft sequence of novels, magic has a very great deal in common with law, to the extent of being basically the in-universe equivalent.
I think it interesting to compare legal jargon and mathematical notation. A properly written piece of mathematics admits only one interpretation. Why don’t lawyers use mathematics?
Waiting for JWB to explain it all for us…
Me? Explain it? I’ve never drafted a statute in my life! Which means I agree emphatically with the implication in a prior comment that treating statutes as the default/prototypical genre of legal text is a mistake. I also think that federal statutes (the set used here) may for a variety of historical reasons be less clearly written than many statutes (not all) in many U.S. states (again, not all).
You could write e.g. criminal statutes in math-like notation if you had a mathematical model of future human behavior that was so good that it made accurate predictions at the individual level not merely the society-wide-average level. Call me back when you’ve gotten there.
Here’s a good example of federal criminal statute that’s a bit hard to read because it’s trying to do too much in one sentence. Instead of saying “here are five different things, which to some degree may overlap, any one of which would make you guilty of this crime,” it tries to cram all the permutations into one string of words:
“Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
Here, by contrast, is what I think is quite clear and straightforward language from regulations promulgated by the Securities & Exchange Commission (17 CFR § 229.601(a)(2)):
“Each registration statement or report shall contain an exhibit index, which must appear before the required signatures in the registration statement or report. For convenient reference, each exhibit shall be listed in the exhibit index according to the number assigned to it in the exhibit table. If an exhibit is incorporated by reference, this must be noted in the exhibit index. Each exhibit identified in the exhibit index (other than an exhibit filed in eXtensible Business Reporting Language or an exhibit that is filed with Form ABS-EE) must include an active link to an exhibit that is filed with the registration statement or report or, if the exhibit is incorporated by reference, an active hyperlink to the exhibit separately filed on EDGAR. If a registration statement or report is amended, each amendment must include hyperlinks to the exhibits required with the amendment. For a description of each of the exhibits included in the exhibit table, see paragraph (b) of this section.”
It is the last and final call; I must acknowledge and confess my manifold sins and wickedness.
ITYM many and manifold.
Let me add a different perspective on the “magic spell” angle. It is often the case that lawyers want to add wording to a document they are drafting that will ensure such-and-such result on such-and-such issue. Often there is a venerable form of wording handed down from many prior generations of practitioners that is widely believed to be efficacious in ensuring that result. If you look at that form of words in a vacuum, it is obviously convoluted, opaque, and overlong, full of seeming redundancies and archaisms. But it has been nonetheless been efficacious as previously used. There is a certain motivation, which is not entirely superstitious, to just copy the traditional wording exactly to make sure to get that efficacy. If you try to edit it, clarify it, rationalize it, etc., you are hubristically tempting fate and running the risk that some small and sensible-seeming bit of “improvement” will have inadvertently undercut the efficacy. Plus making it better would take more time and thought than just recycling the inherited form and in many contexts it’s hard to ask the client to pay you for that extra effort because it’s hard to explain why it was cost-justified.
The traditional wording invoked by Rodger C. is interesting because it in fact exists in two variants. Using the 1928 recension: 1. Toward the beginning of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, the Minister may (there’s a short-form alternative) say inter alia “the Scripture moveth us, in sundry places, to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness.” But 2. Right before taking the Sacrament, the “Priest and all those who are minded to receive the Holy Communion” say inter alia “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness.”
The “elegant variation” between “acknowledge and confess” and “acknowledge and bewail” seems to date back to 1552, when the latter variant was “knowledge and bewayle.”
I was about to write something similar from a client viewpoint when I read the following, which is stated more clearly than I could have, and with which I heartily agree.
I spent decades as a corporate drudge in the arenas of product development and mergers &acquisitions. Contacts with (1) technology sources or partners, (2) acquisition targets, (3) firms that wanted to be acquired, (4) intermediaries such as consultancies, lawyers, investment bankers were frequent. All required CNDAs, short for Confidential non-disclosure agreements. Copy/paste was, for the sound reasons JWB presented, standard operating procedure.
The language was arcane, gloriously self-referential, and viciously effective.
So perhaps not so much “magic spell” as “time-tested formula.”
@hat: but the notion that even a trivial deviation from the traditional wording is risky and might undermine its efficacy seems broadly consistent with the way magic spells are often conceptualized as working.
following on from what JWB said, to me the striking thing that links the legalistic register (in state-bureaucratic and NGO documents as well as statutes and briefs) is the profound belief by many of its users that deploying it makes their words self-actualizing. the idea that committing the right words to the right paper will automatically and without further action cause a change in the material world seems to me the essence of a particular view of magic.
I once wrote a lengthy text in legalese (with a long list of exhibits which was an inch or two thick on actual paper) for the reasons of cultural mimicry. Not being a lawyer, I nevertheless wanted to make an impression of being a professional, and we all know that generously applying professional jargon helps. I mercilessly lifted the jargon usage from the respective sections of the CFR. I probably need to explain that I tried using professional help first. But I was refused because, in their opinion, my case was hopeless (I was a J-1 visa holder with a home residency requirement and I was trying to get it waved on the grounds of hardship to my US citizen child, which, according to the lawyerly wisdom, never worked because just being marooned in poverty never qualified as hardship … but I conceptualized two rare, untested varieties of said hardship, and one of them actually worked).
Nothing ritual or magic. Just a variety of linguistic code-switching.
Hearty congratulations on your unexpected success!
99 times out of 100, a non-lawyer trying to deploy legalese simply makes it very evident that that’s who they are and that’s what they’re trying to do, often in a way that’s counterproductive. But Dmitry may have been the 1 in 100! (Plus immigration law is a specialized niche that I have spent an entire career remaining rationally ignorant of, so my instincts about what’s effective versus ineffective might not be accurate there.)
True, false pretenses are sometimes coming across as impolite, sometimes as nice. Like any cultural appropriation. Didn’t we recently discuss how in some cultures, saying a word in their language makes you a friend forever, and in others, a pretentious idiot? Whatever was the case with La migra, I took my gamble and won, and lawyers asked me to please share the how tos…
@Dmitry: If it works, it works! Working lawyers sometimes spend huge amounts of potentially fruitless time speculating about the best way to pitch argument X to judge Y before the deadline arrives and you need to make the argument in some specific way and thus necessarily not in other potentially-available ways, and … ultimately you either win or you don’t and you rarely know with any certainty whether a different approach you’d considered but rejected would have changed the outcome.
I don’t know whether the “professionals” who turned you down were people you were asking to help you pro bono as kind of a sympathetic charity case or regular immigration lawyers you were willing to pay, but if the latter it actually speaks well of them professionally that they didn’t want to take your money for what they thought (sincerely even if inaccurately in hindsight) was a sure loser rather than just smiling and taking your money and then losing because they didn’t see or believe in the angle that you saw and thus would probably not have presented it as convincingly as you did. (Telling prospective clients that you think their position is such a loser that you really don’t want to take their money without a reasonable prospect of getting them anywhere is IMHO an important part of being a good and ethical lawyer, but … not everyone does that.)
Hello, dentist, will you you give my teeth a cleaning?
Do you mean an abrasion and so on?
Here, for the sake of completeness, are two short extracts from a very long legal document freely apportioning some old church furnishings to the parishioners. It was written in England in 1857 and safeguards the rights of parishioners while at the same time protecting the church authorities. There’s an awful lot more of it. I think legalise has been simplified since then, though I’m no expert. If not, surely there’s a simpler way to say what’s said here:
And then and since to see and hear all and every the Judicial Acts, matters and things needful and by Law required to be done and expedited in and about the premises until a definitive Sentence in writing should be read signed promulged and given or until a final Interlocutory decree should be made and interposed in the said Cause or business if they or any or either of them should think it for her, his or their interest so to do With intimation to the parties so cited that if they he or she did not appear on the several days and at the times hour and place and to the effect and in manner and form as thereinbefore was mentioned or appearing did not shew and propound good and sufficient cause concludent in law to the contrary our Vicar General and Official Principal aforesaid his Deputy Surrogate or some other competent Judge in that behalf would proceed to do all and every the Judicial acts matters and things needful and by Law required to be done and expedited in and about the premises and to the reading signing promulging and giving a definitive sentence in writing ratifying and confirming the acts of you the said Commissioners or a majority of you and to the granting a Faculty Confirmatory to you the said James Charles Watson, William Harris, John Mitchell, Robert Clarkson, William Hodges and Richard King or to the making and interposing a final interlocutery Decree in the said Cause or Business the absence or rather contumacy of the said parties so cited as aforesaid in anywise notwithstanding.
…
And also do hereby so far as we lawfully can or may but not further or otherwise, approve of ratify and confirm the allotments appropriation and disposition of the several Pews Seats Stalls or Sittings erected in the Body Chancel and Aisles of the said Church mentioned and set forth in the said Return Willing that no person or persons whomsoever disturb or molest any of the said Parishioners and Inhabitants of the said Parish or Parochial Chapelry of Norton in the said Return mentioned in the quiet and peaceable possession of the said Pews Seats Stalls or Sittings so severally allotted to them in and by the said Return and hereby confirmed by us as aforesaid under pain of the Law and contempt thereof.
When I was buying my first house (in Edinburgh: stupidest financial move I ever made was to sell it when we moved away), our lawyer kept us fully apprised of the contract negotiations.
The bit of legalese I liked best was the (fairly frequent) note that such-and-such a clause was unacceptable and “is delete.”
Deleta est Carthago …
It’s dated — tested — a’ complete — The proper stamp — nae word delete.
Huh. The OED says dēlēre is “probably” related to ὄλλυναι. Wouldn’t have guessed.
dēlēre is “probably” related to ὄλλυναι
Etymology remains the redheaded stepchild of botany.
From there:
azo- Greek adzoos, azoos, lifeless.
Azolla (a-ZOL-la) modern Latin from Greek azo, to dry, and ollumi, to kill, or Greek azen, to dry, and ollynai, to slay; the plants are killed by drying. Possibly from a South American name thought to refer to its inability to survive out of water. (Azollaceae)
Heh:
On why can’ t lawyers be more mathematical:
Here is a recent statutory interpretation issue that I came across – Is hydrogen a mineral that can be mined?
If you’re mining minerals, you need to apply for a mining title, obtain environmental authorisations, native title authorisations, and other types of approvals. You also need to report your exploration findings and pay royalties on production.
Until a few years ago hydrogen was a byproduct of oil and gas production. Typically it was an undesirable byproduct. It was not regarded as a mineral with all the attendant consequenes in the legislation. Eg. You didn’t have to pay royalties on hydrogen that you got out of ground. Instead hydrogen was treated a bit like “overburden” – that is the rocks you need to dig up to get to the minerals you are really looking for.
More recently, with a drive towards green power, hydrogen has become a product people want to extract. It is now regarded as a mineral – without any change to the legislation – hydrogen fits the statutory definition of “mineral”.
So in this example, a word “mineral” did not change its meaning, but the legal consequences of its application changed due to context.
I could also give examples of the same words having different meanings in different acts ie. statutes. Also examples of the same words in a statute being interpreted differently by different courts.
When you draft legislation, it’s good practice to go through a process of proofing to see if there are any obvious gaps or ambiguities in the wording. But you can never anticipate all future events or interpretations.
A bit different to how maths works.
A bit different to how maths works
Not always: the introduction to Curry and Feys’s book on mathematical logic (the one with all the combinators) laments the way that serious logical ambiguities have passed unnoticed in works on the foundations of mathematics – including the authors’ own previous work.
?Que
?Que
DE may be saying that even in math, things get reinterpreted in unreasonable ways, leaving the homeys gasping for breath.
It is not until Chapter 5, on page 151, well over a third of the way through the book, that combinators appear.
Curry and Feys are to be congratulated for deferring that subject for as long as possible.
The authors also strive for the ultimate in abstractness and generality in presenting topics, so as to achieve the maximum breadth in applicability.
At best, this would produce a book that is difficult to read. This difficulty is greatly increased by a sort of casualness on the part of the authors. We shall cite some instances. …
Hydrogen, nothing.
“A bit different to how maths works”? I would rather say “A bit different from how maths works”. Allative is not ablative.
I saw that: first “illative”, now “allative”. What’s a girl to believe ?
It’s all relative.
So it depends on the specific case?
Nominally, yes.
Mathematicians do have a certain casualness about stating stuff, because stating it impeccably will not let things get done. That’s why Wikipedia mathematics articles are no good for either lay people or the priesthood.
And the underlying conventions of said casualness can probably change over time, a bit like whether hydrogen is a mineral.
A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors — very casual, but it’s not helpful until you get to page XXX of Categories for the Working Mathematician and all the conventions have been set out. It is an interesting observation that may let you leverage some more basic knowledge, but not magic. And 70 years ago there was noone using those conventions. (Maybe 50, don’t @ me. I’m not a historian of Category Theory).
Is helium considered a mineral, for extractive and legal purposes? It would seem likely, but I wouldn’t want to presume, given my deep ignorance of the topic of mining rights and related legislation,
As I understand it, (almost?) all helium currently on the planet Earth is the result of four and a half billion years of radioactive isotopes undergoing alpha decay, and the resulting alpha particles grabbing a couple of electrons to retire as helium atoms after their brief but highly energetic careers away from their parent isotopes.
Nominally, yes.
Seems rather subjective.
I take that as an accusation!
@Owlmirror: I don’t know if almost all helium on Earth came from α-decay, but a lot of it certainly did. The protoplanetary Earth contained a lot of helium, as the gas cloud out of which the solar system condensed was more than 20% helium. However, since helium is light and nonreactive, it was hard for the Earth’s weak gravity to hold onto it, so most (but probably not all) of the primordial helium was lost.
I can’t seem to come up with a genesis/genitive pun…
I’m a bit surprised that no-one has yet mentioned Sovereign Citizens (in the USA) or Freemen on the Land (non-USA legal jurisdictions), who do indeed seem to consider certain phrases and incantations to let them do whatever they want in various legal systems.
WikiP:
WikiP Strawman Theory:
This is starting to be a bit of a rabbit hole — so many weird legal beliefs to keep track of that connect to each other and to other conspiracy theories. I think I’ll back off for now . . .
Plus, the ever-misconstrued Citizen’s Arrest.
@Owlmirror:
part of the problem with those groups is that they’re entirely correct in theory – their explanations for their sovereignty and for the magical effects of their words are not different in substance from those offered by the u.s. as a state (or any other state). what’s wild to me is how they vaccilate between seeming to entirely miss the part where states’ self-explanations aren’t what gives them their power, and seeming to recognize that basic fact and attempting to exercise the practical functions that are what states derive their power from: the enforcement of legitimization (and de-) of forms and instances of violence and of resource distribution over a specific territory.
Owlmirror: most terrestrial helium is indeed from the alpha decay of uranium and thorium. There’s a little bit of primordial helium, which is recognized by the presence in it of ³He, which is all primordial. Helium with the highest ³He concentration comes from some deep mantle sources, and recent work suggests that there is a lot more of it in the earth’s core. Still, most terretrial helium is late and radiogenic.
I was taught that, for example, Sanskrit language rituals were thought to work only if spoken correctly, when the perfect language reached out and effected things. I made an analogy comparing largely ethnic religions that insisted on the appropriate language compared to religions that arose within those places, such as Buddhism and Christianity, that asserted that anyone, in any language, could get the full force of their teachings. One respondent dismissed that as “shower thoughts.”
When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer—and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later the “Maggid” of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers—and what he wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs—and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the story-teller adds, the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.
@Owlmirror
It is very likely that helium would fit the definition of “mineral” under the mining legislation in my jurisdiction. There are no helium projects yet; maybe there’ll be some when they can make it pay.
Part of what’s block-quoted in the OP sez “Legalese contains more difficult linguistic structures and unusual word choices than most other styles of writing” although the focus is then on one particular sort of syntactic structure rather than lexical issues. I just was thinking about one subgenre of “unusual word choices” because there was a flurry of news coverage late last week about the attempt (abandoned after it failed to succeed immediately) of celebrity tax evader R. Hunter Biden to enter an “Alford plea,” with different news stories doing jobs of varying quality in explaining to a general readership what the heck an “Alford plea” might be. It’s not particularly surprising that the jargon-label “Alford plea” arose etymologically because it’s the sort of plea (a variant on a “regular” guilty plea) that was discussed and found tolerable in a 1970 U.S. Supreme Court case named North Carolina v. Alford.* So on the one hand it follows a quite productive pattern of coining legal-jargon noun-phrases from short-form names of relevant precedents – “Miranda warning” and “Markman hearing” and “Bivens action” would be other U.S. examples (with only the first being widely known to outsiders), and “Mareva injunction” would be a non-U.S. example – but it still remains completely opaque unless/until you actually know what it means. Even if you can guess it must mean “the sort of plea discussed in some important precedent named Alford” that doesn’t by itself tell you what it is if you don’t know the case.
*Henry Alford, who in 1963 or maybe early ’64 entered the plea giving rise to the name before unsuccessfully trying to take it back, did so because accepting conviction for second-degree murder limited his worst-case outcome to a 30-year prison term rather than the life sentence or execution that could have followed from a conviction at trial of first-degree murder. Alas, he died in prison about 11 or 12 years into that 30-year sentence.
I’m already anticipating a modest cohort of Mandela Effect enthusiasts swearing that it used to be Alfred.
Sanskrit language rituals were thought to work only if spoken correctly
One of the implausibilities of Lovecraft is that some eavesdropping WASP transcribes and repeats the cultists’ chant “wgah’nagl fhtagn” with sufficient accuracy to summon Cthulhu.
@mollymooly: That’s not a plot hole, because it doesn’t happen. The wording doesn’t summon Cthulhu, and it probably has no role in summoning anything. Moreover, in “The Call of Cthulhu,” it takes some time for a group of academics to determine that transcriptions made by investigators from different ethnic backgrounds, of cultists from different parts of the world, actually represent versions of the same underlying incantation.
Alford plea
these can spiral out, lexically, in all kinds of ways: the Handschu decree, which putatively regulates the NYPD’s surveillance of and attacks on political organizin, has introduced all manner of “Handschu X” phrases to some new yorkers’ vocabularies. the most visible, probably, is “the Handschu lawyers”, referring to jethro (“jed” to friends) eisenstein and martin (invariably “marty”) stolar zts”l, who together anchored the plaintiffs’ legal presence in the Handschu process for almost forty years (i’m not sure what the situation is since marty’s death earlier this year).
as well as getting to say marty’s name, i’m glad to get to mention it because of “handschu”, which my yiddishy mind finds adorable. (though the dictionaries have “hentshke” for glove, which i can only ever remember because it reverses the hant/hent vowel-change in its plural “hantshn” – though i do suspect there’s a shu/shu[e]n buried in there)
@Brett I must be thinking the mythos works of later writers, lacking the master’s rigor
@rozele: That singular and plural must be a doublet, which suppleted back together. The different vowels suggest that, as does the fact that the shoe morpheme with a /k/ is (so far as I know) not otherwise preserved in West Germanic, so that form must have diverged fairly early. (The sound does still exist in North Germanic languages, which have “sko” or variants—apparently “skógvar” in Faroese—as the translation. The similarity to “ski” is completely coincidental, however. The latter comes from a Germanic root meaning “stick, log, board,” from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “split,” from which we also get schism.)
I see the conversation has moved well past center embedding, but let me toss in a SpecGram nugget, at https://specgram.com/CLI.2/03.bakery.disorder.html.
New speech disorder linguists contracted discovered!
An apparently new speech disorder a linguistics department our correspondent
visited was affected by has appeared. Those affected our correspondent a local grad student called could hardly understand apparently still speak fluently. The cause experts the LSA sent investigate remains elusive. Frighteningly, linguists linguists linguists sent examined are highly contagious. Physicians neurologists psychologists other linguists called for help called for help called for help didn’t help either. The disorder experts reporters SpecGram sent consulted investigated apparently is a case of pathological center embedding.
Sko is, at a guess, what established the Da sk- :: MLG sch- analogy in borrowings. MLG hantsche seems to be attested, OSax handskoh, though ODa went full retrofit with haandsko in some cases (which is more a calque than a borrowing). Modern is handske.
This may not be relevant directly, but I compare different roles for language in different religions.
In Brahman Hindu religion, to be effective, the rites must be performed in correct Sanskrit, whereas in Buddhism, any language can convey the teaching.
Similarly, in some versions of Judaism, Hebrew and sometimes Aramaic are essential, whereas in Christianity any language can convey the teaching.
whereas in Christianity any language can convey the teaching
At least for the rites, there were times when also Christian denominations found it important that they were held in a specific language (e.g., the Catholic church and Latin).
Certainly. And there are other configurations. Anyone can be a Muslim, even without Arabic, though to get the full experience of the Koran requires Arabic. My central observation is on the various ways a specific language in a given religion may or may not be thought to be somewhat-analogous to a “spell.”
Sanskrit, (Biblical) Hebrew and Arabic are all certainly regarded by the relevant religions as actual sacred languages, going with this insistence on ipsissima verba.
Curiously, there seems to be no Christian tradition of regarding Greek as a sacred language, presumably because the language had a fully established (and pagan) Classical tradition long before the New Testament. (Classical Arabic is not exactly based on the language of the Qur’an, either, but there the emergence of a standard was still very much linked with Islam specifically.)
Esperanto is a sacred language (and Zamenhof a god) in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oomoto
Did Jesus teach in Aramaic?
Are lawyers typically good at incantation, group hymnody, singing?
Various other Aramaic languages or dialects have been regarded as sacred, but first-century Galilaean Palestinian doesn’t seem ever to have undergone such an elevation.
The language of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Talmud
a bit later, was probably the high point of Palestinian Aramaic on that scale.
Right. Mandaic.
Although there is no single Buddhist sacred language, Theravadins regard Pali as such, and Mahayana Buddhists seem all to have that view of Sanskrit (especially when it comes to incantations and the like. Very much along with the Exact Words thing, too.)
Sure. And some Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists have preferences for chanting.
And some Zoroastrians have some liturgy they can’t translate.
Japanese Buddhists, too. Often based on Chinese Exact Words (as near as Japanese phonology allows), which in turn may reflect Sanskrit Exact Words (as near as Chinese phonology allowed.)
My sole Mandaean acquaintance knows some prayers in Mandaic, though she doesn’t know the language. (Mandaic is still – just – alive as a language, in fact: it probably wins the prize for the most conservative Neo-Aramaic language, and it is also the only one clearly descended from a specific known Middle Aramaic precursor.)
Christian liturgical language has varied. Early on translations were permitted from Greek into such barbarous tongues as Latin and (a bit later) Slavonic, as well as odds-and-ends like Armenian and Georgian (and Ge’ez and etc.). Then things would typically freeze up a bit before they got unfrozen. Most of the Arabic-speaking Christian communities, for example, have now had services in Arabic for some number of centuries but before that there was typically a centuries-long interlude where the service continued to be in Greek (or Coptic, or Syriac, depending on the community) even though no one in the congregation necessarily could speak that tongue. Albanian-speakers (the ones who stayed away from the Franks and the Muslims, religionwise) only got services in their L1 rather than Greek in the early 20th century, with diasporic nationalists in the U.S. pioneering the idea before it got implemented in the Mother Country.
The English court system, FWIW, only finally and “officially” switched over to the English language (versus a somewhat comical mix of Law French and Law Latin which might have been unintelligible to those who knew more regular varieties of those languages) in A.D. 1730.
Oh. I think that’s Handschuh with the second vowel dropped, allowing the whole thing to undergo the umlaut expected of German diminutives – but the diminutive suffix itself is Slavic. (Theoretically it could be Low German, but that seems unlikely in Yiddish.) And then the diminutive suffix didn’t make it into the plural.
*pretends being able to raise one eyebrow* Fascinating.
i am now belatedly remembering my professor in the required first-year law school class on “Property” (spring semester, 1990) referring repeatedly to “magic words” in a pejorative tone, reflective of a certain school of 20th century legal-academic scholarship that deprecated all inherited and traditional aspects of the legal system that did not seem progressive and sensible and rational to their (often blinkered and provincial) selves. Interestingly enough, this was a guy who had a Ph.D. in sociology on top of his law degree but he did not seem (in the context of that class, at least) particularly interested in a sympathetic anthropologist-like sort of scholarly approach that might illuminate why superficially irrational-seeming or “primitive” customs might actually make good functional sense for the relevant society.