An often-overlooked aspect when it comes to what makes understanding languages and translation difficult, today’s word phraseology is all about expression. Typically, when we think about language – notably foreign languages – and what makes understanding each other so difficult, we think about the basic language mechanics, such as word placement, noun gender, verb tenses, stem changes, etc.; however, to a large extent, it’s not the mechanics of what we’re trying to express, but how we’re expressing it. Language is more than just a set of words strung together to form a coherent idea, it is a window onto the psychocultural understanding of an individual, a group, a country, or even, in the case of English, a civilization.
Coming from the merging of the Greek terms phrasis (φράσις), meaning ‘way of speaking’, and -logia (-λογία), meaning ‘study of’, phraseology, originally as the Latin phraseologia, is the study of, essentially, why we say what we say. To narrow that meaning down a bit, phraseology, as opposed to structure and word origin, deals with the idioms and terminology that we use which has a meaning outside of what is specifically being said. For example, the German phrase “seinen Senf dazugeben” (“to add their mustard”) and the French “mettre son grain de sel” (“to put in one’s grain of salt”) aren’t really related to the use of condiments – they’re just another way of expressing how some people have to give their opinion, even if it’s unsolicited; nevertheless, the sentiment is being expressed through terms (culinary, to be specific) that are relative to each individual culture.
The first usage of the term, in Thomas Bilson’s lengthy-titled 1604 work, Survey of Christ’s Sufferings for Man’s Redemption and of His Descent to Hades Or Hell for Our Deliverance, attempts to define Henry Jacob and his group of Brownist church separatists by their language, stating: “Therefore this place must stand for good, till you or your friends bring better helps to anoint it, then your and their idle phraseology gainsaying the whole Church of Christ for your private novelties and vanities.”
The term did, for awhile, represent actual handbooks which explained phrases and idioms in a particular language, the first example being William Walker’s 1655 book, A Treatise of English Particles Showing How To Render Them According To the Proprietie and Elegance of the Latin. Unfortunately, much like the books themselves, this usage is now considered obsolete.
Finally, though the term is most often applied to language, it can conceivably be applied to any form of communication, such as when composer and musician Charles Burney wrote in A General History of Music that: “The want of symmetry in the phraseology of his melodies.”
So, to make a long story short, it’s important to let the cat out of the bag about phraseology: when you understand what someone means and how they are saying it, understanding a language is not rocket science; moreover, when dealing with a language’s phraseology, a little learning is a dangerous thing.
