Corpus, this everyday Latin word

"Finished set of texts chosen as the basis of a study"

, this is what most of us refer to this word, meaning attested since 1809 (in a context referring to Germany), and 1855 (Silvestre de Sacy) but entering with this meaning in the French dictionaries only in 1968, for the first lexicographic attestation in the Larousse encyclopédique.

The flesh, the person, the corpse, and the whole state

Let's go back to the traces of the linguistic past of corpus.

, for the Latins it is the body: the flesh (Cicero Nat. 2, 139);

the person (Sallust C.33.2);

the corpse (Caesar G.2,10);

the whole state (Livy 1.17, 2).

During the reign of Emperor Justinian (527-565) the

appeared , the name given to the collection of Roman civil law comprising seven works, the main ones being: the

, collection of imperial constitutions (529);

(533);

(533);

(565).

However, during the following centuries, corpus will most often be used only in its Latin Christian sense of host, from the end of the 12th century –

(Mort Garin), beginning of the 13th century –

(Guiot, Bible , 1223) until the 17th century.

Read alsoDo you speak 21st century Latin?

The dictionary of Furetière (1690) still gives this definition of it:

Synonym of one of the meanings of “body”

In the middle of the 19th century, here it is again, with our Belgian neighbors, in a geographical bulletin to define a collection of inscriptions from Antiquity:

and in Littré, 1872-1877, it is still a

Let's finish with this interesting study by Eliana Magnani: "The use of corpus in the sense of a 'set of data of a certain type (particularly in letters) brought together with a view to their scientific study', attested in 1809 would not come from no generalization of meaning and analogy with “corpus juris”.

It would rather be a linguistic transfer from the German Corpus/Korpus, attested in 1787, because in French the word “corps” was then used.

“

” in French therefore appears as a synonym of one of the meanings of “corps”, a term that it “will compete with and then oust”.

»

Note:

, more precisely

et

,

, a law passed in 1679 by the English Parliament, is a legal concept which sets out a fundamental freedom, that of not not be imprisoned without trial, the opposite of arbitrariness which allows anyone to be arrested without a valid reason.

Excerpt from

.

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