This is Part 14. Go to Part 1
Eng. conspire and Sp. conspirar
Finally, the cognates Eng. conspire and Sp. conspirar
are close friends, since they both mean ‘to make secret plans jointly to commit
an unlawful or harmful act’ (COED), as in All
six men admitted conspiring to steal cars (DOCE). Synonyms of the first
sense of these verbs are to plot and to scheme in English and confabularse and maquinar in Spanish. This is obviously a figurative sense derived
from the original literal verb conspīrāre, which was something like ‘to blow or breathe
together’, formed with the prefix con‑
‘with, together’. This Latin verb did have a figurative sense, but it didn’t
seem to have the ‘secret’ or ‘illegal’ sense that its descendants have. The
figurative sense of Lat. conspīrāre had was ‘to harmonize, agree, accord’. The current
connotations of this verb of acting ‘secretly’ or ‘illegally’ seem to have been
added to the verb in French, which borrowed it from Latin first, at the end of
the 12th century, and then passed it on to English and Spanish.
The sense of Eng. conspire
and Sp. conspirar we just mentioned
refers to people conspiring secretly
for some purpose. There is also a second sense that both words have in which it
is not people’s actions but rather circumstances or events that ‘join forces’
or ‘act together’ to produce a result, typically a negative one. This sense can
be described as ‘to seem to be acting together, especially with unfortunate results’
(COED), as in Pollution and neglect have
conspired to ruin the city (DOCE). Synonyms of this sense of conspire are join, collude, or combine. The
preposition used in Spanish for this second sense to indicate the result of the
conspiracy is different from the one used for the first sense. For the first
sense, the preposition is para, whereas for the second sense it is a, as in La malicia y la ignorancia conspiran a
corromper las costumbres ‘Malice and ignorance conspire to pervert customs’
(VOX).
English borrowed the verb conspire [kən.ˈspaɪ̯.əɹ] in the 14th century from French, where it was a
12th century loanword from Latin (Mod. Fr. conspirer
[kɔ̃s.pi.ˈʀe]). Spanish conspirar [kons.pi.ˈɾaɾ] is attested by the 16th century, also most likely a
French loan.
Spanish has a noun with the suffix ‑ción associated with the verb conspirar,
namely conspiración, which is attested
even earlier than the verb, in the 15th century. This noun was undoubtedly borrowed
from French, just like the verb, which itself had borrowed it from Latin in the
13th century. Interestingly, English too borrowed this word, in the early 14th
century, as conspiration [ˌkʰɒn.spɪ.ˈɹeɪ̯.ʃən]. This noun, however,
has been pretty much fully replaced in Modern English by its synonym conspiracy [kən.ˈspɪɹ.ə.si], which appeared in the
language soon after its synonym, in the mid-14th century. It is not clear how
the suffix switch from ‑tion to ‑cy took place in this English word. If
it had happened in French, the word in that language would have been conspiratie, but that does not seem to
have been a word used in that language.
The nouns Eng. conspiracy
and Sp. conspiración can refer to
both ‘the act of conspiring’, as well as ‘a secret plan by a group to do
something unlawful or harmful’ (COED). Most dictionaries do not mention the
English noun conspiration though,
interestingly, those that do, typically (but not always) mention that it is
obsolete.
A person who conspires with others is known in Spanish as conspirador/a. A cognate of this word, conspirator [kən.ˈspɪɹ.ə.tər],
is also used in English with the same meaning, though its synonym is noun plotter, derived from the verb to plot, is probably more common. Both
Eng. conspirator and Sp. conspirador are loanwords from French,
which borrowed it first from Lat. conspirator.
Another English synonym is the word conspirer
[kən.ˈspaɪ̯.ɹəɹ], which is also a loan from Old French conspireur. Perhaps more common than conspirator is the derived word co-conspirator, which translates into
Spanish as cómplice, related to Eng. accomplice.
Both of these words derive from Lat. complĭcem,
accusative wordform of complex,
meaning ‘allied, partner, confederate’. (The ‘prefix’ ac‑ in Eng. accomplice is spurious and not in the
original French sourceword, which was complice,
so it must have been added in English perhaps
by a mistaken association with the verb accomplish.
English has also derived an adjective from the noun conspirator, namely conspiratorial [kən.ˌspɪɹ.ə.ˈtʰɔɹ.i.əl]. It translates into
Spanish also as conspirador/a, an
adjective that is identical to the noun
we just saw, or more commonly, as the phrase de complicidad ‘lit. of complicity’, e.g. Eng. a conspiratorial attitude = Sp. una
actitud de complicidad. The noun complicidad
is, of course, derived from the adjective/noun cómplice we just saw.
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