A short history of the word "emotion"
Walking into a bookshop in Manchester, I am reminded of a delightful book about translators and end up discovering the history of the word 'emotion'.
1. The pleasures of the language section
In the last few days, I attended a conference in Manchester, a city much more interesting than advertised by my British friends. It was an opportunity to use my favourite trick to get to know a city. I chose a bookshop in Google Maps and walked there. There was a reward at the end: the smell of books.
I spent more time than I should wandering about the bookshop. One of the first sections I checked was (predictably) the Language & Linguistics one. Many of the books are well known to me, but there are always surprises.
This time, the first book I noticed was a book I would have loved to read again for the first time. It was the paperback version of Dancing on Ropes, by Anna Aslanyan, a book about translators, language and History (what a combination!).
Unfortunately, I already had the hardback version at home, so I didn’t buy the beautiful paperback version. But I picked it up anyway and read a bit there. Now, that specific section will be forever linked to Manchester in my mind…
2. A Worlde of Wordes
In one of the chapters, Anna Aslanyan tells the story of John Florio, who, among many other accomplishments, translated Montaigne into English and wrote an Italian-English dictionary with the wonderful title A Worlde of Wordes.
His version of Montaigne’s Essays is one of those translations which have secured a place of their own in the history of literature. It is still in print, normally with Florio’s name quite clearly stated on the cover. A recent edition is Shakespeare's Montaigne: The Florio Translation of the Essays.
As Anna Aslanyan says (pp. 70-71):
T. S. Eliot, too, thought The Essayes a great translation, putting it second only to the King James Bible. It was an important influence on many writers, most famously Shakespeare, whose debt to Florio includes such borrowings as the verbs ‘rough-hew’ and ‘outstare’, as well as an entire passage used in The Tempest with some modifications. That Shakespeare read The Essayes is beyond doubt: scholars have identified in his works about a hundred close correspondences and another hundred passages showing some similarities with Florio’s work.
3. Word-inventing translators
Florio was a contemporary of Shakespeare. They are both well-known creators of English words.
The knack of great writers to enlarge dictionaries makes us forget that most words are not invented by any famous person, but by ordinary speakers, who create, import and adapt (some would say mangle) words without thinking twice about it.
We also tend to forget the role of great translators in inventing new words throughout history. Florio was one of them. Many of those invented words were borrowed from other languages — if our mother tongue lacks a word and the source text has one ready to be imported, why not try our luck?
Some of the words invented or imported by Florio are quite common. He seems to have been one of the main culprits of inserting "its" into English grammar, as Anna Aslanyan tells in her book. Among many other words, he is credited with inventing words like “regret” — and “emotion”.
4. A short history of “emotion”
“Emotion” did not appear out of nowhere. It came from French, used by Florio to translate Montaigne. In French, it had predictable Latin roots.
After landing on British shores, the word went through a great deal of transformation. I found an article by Thomas Dixon that describes this word’s journey1:
In both its French and English forms [in Florio’s time], “emotion” was a word denoting physical disturbance and bodily movement. …
Increasingly, during the 18th century, “emotion” came to refer to the bodily stirrings accompanying mental feelings. …
Finally, from the mid-18th century onwards, “emotion” moved from the bodily to the mental domain. …
[I]t was in the early 19th-century lectures of another Scottish philosopher, Thomas Brown, that the term “emotion” definitively took on its new status as a theoretical category in mental science, replacing those “active powers” of the mind, the “passions” and “affections.”
What is curious is the way the word is now used in very much the same way (in different disguises) in many European languages. All these words (“emotion”, “emoción”, “emoção”, etc.) seem to have converged, probably through continuous discussion of similar concepts by scientists and by the power of modern English (as a scientific lingua franca) to project its meanings into other languages.
This convergence does not happen often with everyday words, which, even when imported into many languages, readily change their meanings in different ways in different places, but is a bit more common when dealing with scientific and technical terms.
So, Florio’s borrowing of the word into English ended up changing not only English, but also French — and many other languages.
5. A word of caution
Today, languages are much more standardised than in Florio’s time and translators seldom import or invent words that have not been imported or invented before. Some people even think importing words while translating is cheating.
In fact, I suspect even Shakespeare would hesitate before using an invented word and risk a Twitter storm about English-these-days — he would then proceed to use it anyway, I hope, as would Florio.
Shakespeare and Florio were both wordsmiths who used language with pleasure and without fear whether writing for the stage or bringing a French writer into English. When playing with language (or languages), sometimes they mixed things a bit. The English language became no worse for it.
Aslanyan’s book tells a whole lot more about Florio and his importance to English — and about many more translators throughout the world. It’s almost an History of the World through Translators. If you like languages and History, it’s a book for you.
Dixon T. "Emotion": The History of a Keyword in Crisis. Emot Rev. 2012 Oct;4(4):338-344. doi: 10.1177/1754073912445814. PMID: 23459790; PMCID: PMC3573683.