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I wonder why in all Romance languages the word "war" ("guerra", with their multiple intonations) is a term that comes from Germanic languages, and that no modern language resembles the Latin "bellum". In English it actually came from Old French, which in turn came from Frankish.

It seems to me particularly curious since "war" is a term so significant for Latin tradition, and also the contrary, "peace", is inherited in almost intact form in all Romance languages and even in English from the Latin "pax".

Sir Cornflakes
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Daniel Castro
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3 Answers3

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A why-question is almost unanswerable, the answer is "because it happened so". But there was a strong trigger for the replacement of bellum, namely the homophony with the word for "beautiful", in Latin bellus, bella, bellum. So for the stem bell- the meaning "beautiful" won over "war", and the word for war was replaced with a borrowing from Germanic or, as in the case of Romanian, other languages.

Sir Cornflakes
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    The OED supports this theory, saying the Romance-speaking people "were obliged to avoid the Latin bellum on account of its formal coincidence with bello- beautiful" (the entry is dated 1921). – Stuart F May 18 '21 at 10:20
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    The Romans were a very warlike people. I can easily imagine that they regarded "war" as "beautiful". – fdb May 18 '21 at 15:03
  • Why are the words homophones in Latin? – posfan12 May 18 '21 at 18:26
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    They are homophones because they have the same spelling and there are no other hints that they aren't homophones. But they have different etymologies and were different in earlier stages of the Italic languages. – Sir Cornflakes May 18 '21 at 18:30
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    How much regarding these "earlier stages" is known or just speculation? (Would it be more correct to start a new question instead? I'm a newbie to this project.) – posfan12 May 18 '21 at 20:18
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    @jk-ReinstateMonica; Actually, there are reputable scholars (e.g. de Vaan) who believe that bellus "beautiful" and bellum "war" are etymologically the same word. – fdb May 18 '21 at 20:56
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    @posfan12: Asking this as a separate question is a good idea. And there is [latin.se] dedicated to the Latin language. – Sir Cornflakes May 18 '21 at 21:12
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    @fdb: I quickchecked with wiktionary that gives different etymolgies. Interestingly, for both words the initial b- comes from an earlier du- /dw/. – Sir Cornflakes May 18 '21 at 21:15
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    If you celebrate war, you're thinking with your cerebellum, not your cerebrum. – Kaz May 20 '21 at 03:33
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    Maybe some Roman guy said Bellum bellum est at some point... – EvilSnack May 20 '21 at 18:09
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The basic meaning of the Germanic *wirr is “disorder, chaos” etc. The shift in meaning to “warfare” originated in Frankish and is attested since the 9th century in High German, English, but not Frankish, spreading to French and then to other Romance languages. So this really has nothing to do with Roman soldiers. It bears witness to the fact that in the Frankish kingdom Latin was the language of religion and administration, but Frankish was the language of the army.

Tristan
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fdb
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My Latin book in high school contained the theory that bellum referred to the well disciplined style practiced by the roman legions, while warra was the less disciplined fighting style adopted by the german tribes.

With the fall of the empire, warra was the mainly adopted style, and thus also the word took over across the former territories of the empire.

Community
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PerAsperaAdAstra
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    Could this also explain why the period after the US Civil War is called "antebellum"? Did they consider this an "orderly" war? – Barmar May 18 '21 at 14:31
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    @Barmar, the war happened in the waning years of the Neoclassical period, when the elites of the US and Britain borrowed heavily from Latin and Greek for all kinds of cultural references and neologisms. According to Merriam Webster the term was coined in the 1840s and later applied to the pre-Civil War period. I'm guessing that the style of the war was not relevant, but rather the people likely to use the term were of the social and academic classes that would esteem Latin over Anglo-Saxon terms. Further speculation may lead us into the murky waters of white supremacy tied to Neoclassicism. – wordsworth May 18 '21 at 15:12