French

amitié

amitié · ah-mee-TYAY (modern [amitje])

friendship

What the gloss loses: “Friendship” in contemporary English can mean the safer love, the one that does not count. Amitié, as Montaigne uses it, is the love that counted, the one for which he could not give a reason except the two people in it. The gloss sounds like a remainder. The French is not.

Etymology

From ami, “friend,” and that from Latin amicus, built on amo, amare, “to love.” French amitié is a love-word by birth. It does not have to borrow intensity from elsewhere.

English friend takes another road: Old English frēond, from a Germanic verb of loving and of setting free (frēo, “free”). The English noun can sound like a downgrade from love because its root is not love’s verb. Montaigne did not have that problem, and still had to argue for a rank.

Morphology · Feminine noun. Ami, amie; aimer. In the sixteenth century the word can name ordinary liking and also the rare, entire bond Montaigne isolates in De l'amitié. Context does the ranking; the essay is one such context.

Historical use

Before Montaigne, amitié already covers fellowship, political alliance, and affection. The Essais make one instance of it famous by refusing every borrowed model: not marriage, not the Greek erastēs and erōmenos, not usefulness, not pleasure as a purpose.

He writes that this amitié has no business and no traffic except with itself. The famous reason is later still, added in his own hand on the Bordeaux copy: because it was he, because it was I. Cause is declined. Rank is not.

Later French keeps amitié as the ordinary word for friendship. The essay remains the document that will not let the ordinary word mean a lesser love.

Semantic range

Friendship, from the daily to the entire.
A bond Montaigne ranks above the loves that have other business.
Not, in his usage, a polite name for desire he will not speak.

Semantic change

English “friendship” often arrives as what remains when romance has been declined. Reading Montaigne through that habit turns his chapter into a closet. The French root is already aimer. The essay is a ranking, not a refusal of love.

Source · Montaigne, Essais, I.28, De l'amitié, especially the autograph addition on the Exemplaire de Bordeaux, fol. 71v.

Greek philia is a neighbor, not a translation. English friend, with its root in freedom, is another neighbor: close, and the reason we keep asking whether friendship is “really” love.

An open question

If the word is already made from love, why does the essay still have to defend its rank?