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Neophilologus (2007) 91:525537
DOI 10.1007/s11061-006-9015-y
John Considine
Received: 13 March 2005 / Accepted: 21 July 2005 / Published online: 22 March 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract The phrases persona grata and persona non grata are widely used in English and other modern European languages, but their origin and development have never been fully investigated. They do not belong to classical or patristic Latin: rather, persona grata originates in the language of late medieval ecclesiastical diplomacy. After sporadic use from the 15th century to the end of the 18th, it and similar forms of words became very important in negotiations between the Protestant monarchies of Germany and the Holy See in and around the 1820s. Persona grata was then transferred to the language of international diplomacy, where it has ourished since the 1850s; the negative persona non grata, which is now more common than the positive phrase, appears to have developed in English-language contexts in the nineteenth century.
Keywords Medieval Latin Neo-Latin Lexicography Oxford English Dictionary
Where does persona non grata come from?
The Latin phrases persona grata and persona non grata are familiar in English and in other European languages. Both phrases were therefore registered in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED2). The etymologies in their entries identied them simply as from Late Latin, and when these etymologies were recently being revised for the third edition of the dictionary (OED3), an attempt was made, in keeping with the high standards of precision of OED3 etymologies, to identify their point of origin in the Latin language. The editors of the dictionary responsible for etymological research established that neither phrase is attested in classical Latin or in the medieval Latin of the standard dictionaries or the Patrologia latina, or in any of the texts in Latin or English searchable in the databases Early
J. Considine (&)
Department of English, 3-5 Humanities Centre, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E5e-mail: [email protected]
The origin of the phrases persona grata and persona non grata
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English Books Online or Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and then asked me to look into the possibility of a post-medieval Latin origin. Both phrases actually appear to originate in a series of developments in the laws...