Showing posts with label The Sentences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Sentences. Show all posts

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Fun with words. Why do criminal get "sentenced" to prison?...

...why is there a "sentencing" phase in criminal procedures? Why do judges get to hand down lengthy "sentences"?

So, I'm reading "The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard's 'Sentences' (Rethinking the Middle Ages")by Philipp W. Rosemann. It is very interesting work on the effect that Peter Lombard's book, "The Sentences," had on the course of Western Civilization.

The Sentences was the seminal work of theology that started the development of systematic theology. From the time it was written in the mid-12th Century until sometime in the 16th Century, the Sentences was the required text for the study of theology.

The Sentences was a development of a genre called the "sentence compilations." In this genre, the author would reference particular sources from church fathers and other authorities and arrange these citations thematically for contemplation and study.

Why was "The Sentences" called "The Sentences"? My naive assumption was that Peter Lombard had clipped quotations from other sources and "pasted" them into his work. The quotations thus were the "sentences."

But the fact is that there seem to be very few direct quotations in The Sentences. Rather, Lombard's strategy seems to be to distill the essence of the authority and to provide a more accurate citation for the student to find the place in the cited work for himself.

This raises the point that a "sentence" is not simply a unit of grammar that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period. In fact, it may have been the case that when Lombard wrote "The Sentences" this definition of a "sentence" did not exist. Lombard lived during the period when the revolutionary idea of putting spaces between words was invented. Likewise, the convention of an alphabetical order running from "a" to "z" was only invented after Lombard's death; prior to that things were indexed pursuant to some "natural" relationship that existed in the subject.

But "sentences" are also units of meaning, which gives us a clue as to the answer to our original question. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the origin of sentence comes from sentientem, from which we get the idea of "sentient", i.e., thinking, such as when we refer to human beings as "sentient":

sentence late 13c., "doctrine, authoritative teaching," from O.Fr. sentence (12c.), from L. sententia "thought, meaning, judgment, opinion," from sentientem, prp. of sentire "be of opinion, feel, perceive" (see sense). Loss of first -i- in L. by dissimilation. Meaning "punishment imposed by a court" is from c.1300; that of "grammatically complete statement" is attested from mid-15c., from notion of "meaning," then "meaning expressed in words." The verb meaning "to pass judgment" is recorded from c.1400.

So, essentially, a sentence is a unit of expressed meaning or thought, and which includes opinions and judgments. "The Sentences" is a book that compiles not just the expression of the judgments of theological authorities, but distills those judgments into a readily digestible format. The "judgments" or "opinions" are the "sentences."

Likewise, when a judge hands down a "sentence," the judge is expressing his "judgment" as to the penalty the criminal should receive. The judgment - not the time served - is the "sentence." Over time, of course, the penalty was conflated with the idea of the "sentence" and the original meaning was lost.

So, the idea of a "sentence" seems to have gone from a unit of "expressed meaning" to that of being a grammatically complete unit of meaning during the time that Western Civilization became a generally literate culture.
 
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