Les innovations sémantiques dans le grec et le latin des chrétiens

Abstract

The problem of semantic changes should only be studied in relation to certain fundamental conceptions of the general mechanism of the human language. Semasiology is concerned with a change in the relationship between the word and its content: between the symbol and the signification. One must always, therefore, examine two elements : the structure of the language of which the word (the symbol) forms part and which defines its existence as a word; and the thing denoted by this word (the signification). Semantic changes or changes in meaning have, as often as not, taken place in speech communities which begin to use a word of the common tongue in a specialised sense. It was in this way that many words in the common language, Greek or Latin, were employed by the Christian community in a new and specialised sense determined by Christianity. Since Deissman’s time it has been known that the Greek of the New Testament and that spoken by the first generations of Christians was based on the Greek koine. It was wit hin the compass of the koine that the first semantic changes in the Christian idiom took place. Often they were brought about by a twofold extraneous influence: that exercised by the language of the Septuagint and that emanating from the Jewish areas in which the Gospel was first preached. In Christian Latin semasiological changes are less numerous than in Greek, whilst borrowings and lexical neologisms are more frequent. Christian Greek, as also Christian Latin, rarely uses the technical terms of pagan religions as a starting-point for semantic changes. From the time of Clement of Alexandria and Origen onwards certain words in Greek philosophy take on a Christian meaning, but these are usually words belonging to the common language which, having a broad and vague meaning, assume a specialised Christian meaning whilst conserving their usual meaning in the common idiom.