Cīvitās: aligning technological and sociological transformation

Abstract

The Latin word, cīvis, which, according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary, has the primary meaning ‘a fellow citizen, fellow countryman’ and the secondary meaning ‘a citizen, countryman, considered in his relationship to the state’. The nature of that state is aptly described by the word cīvitās, which means not only ‘an organized community … to which one belongs as a citizen’, but also ‘the rights of a citizen, citizenship; … the gift of citizenship to single persons’ (Glare, 1983, p.330). In their semantic travels and transformations through Latin, Old French, Anglo-French and Middle English, cīvis and cīvitās have reached modern English in an abundance of forms, including ‘civic’, ‘civil’, ‘civilian’, ‘city’ and, of course, ‘citizen’ (Simpson and Weiner, 2001, pp.249-56).