Page 154 - IANUS n. 26 - Fideiussioni omnibus e intesa antitrust: interferenze e rimedi
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VALENTINO CATTELAN





               the French risque, the English risk, the Spanish riesgo and the German Risiko, all
               derive),  a  more  ancient  etymology  of  the  word  ‘risk’,  in  contrast,  remains
               uncertain.  The  Latin  forms  may  have  derived  from  the  Greek  ριζα,  meaning
               ‘root’, ‘stone’, ‘cut of the firm land’, which was also used as a metaphor for a
               ‘difficulty to avoid in the sea’.  For the ancient Greeks the uncertainty of survival
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               in the Mediterranean was caused by the whims of gods like Zeus and Poseidon,
               and the ‘stone’ of the firm land as well as the ‘root’ of a tree were symbolic images
               of a lifeline, securing the sailors from the perils of the sea. Quite interestingly, the
               classical  Greek  ριζα  seems  to  find  (at  least  phonetically)  an  equivalent  in  the
               Arabic rizq (ﻕﺯﺭ), from which the word ‘risk’ may derive, too: the term may have
               been  absorbed  by  ancient  pre-Islam  Arabic  from  Greek,  via  Mediterranean
               contacts, or vice-versa. The rich legacy of such contacts is also witnessed by the
               word ‘hazard’, that moved into English from the French hasard and the Spanish
               azar, both (certainly) coming from the Arabic ﺮﻫﺯ zahr, meaning ‘dice’, thus the
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               chance of human luck.
                  But, apart from this digression on probable linguistic transmissions through
               the Mediterranean, if rizq on the one side expresses the idea of ‘fortune’, ‘profit’,
               ‘gain’, ‘blessing’ (thus, safety from the perils of life, as in the etymology of ριζα
               and later ‘risk’), on the other side, and quiet remarkably, this fortune is depicted
               and conceived in Arabic language in the particular sense of «a sustenance that is
               given by God for livelihood».  Accordingly, the verb razaqa is always used in the
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               sense of ‘God providing somebody with means of subsistence’; ﺍﺯﺮﻟﺍ ar-razzaq, ‘the
               Maintainer’, ‘the Provider’ is one of the ninety-nine attributes of God; and ﻕﻭﺯﺮﻣ
               marzuq is the ‘person blessed by God’, thus ‘fortunate’, ‘prosperous’, ‘successful’.
               At a very preliminary glance, therefore, the secular nature embedded in modern
               Western  ‘risk’  stays  far  apart  from  the  Arabic  rizq,  where  the  future  and  its
               fortunes are given by God.
                  To the extent to which the phonetic connection between the Greek ριζα and
               the Arabic rizq may been tentatively suggested and is certainly thought-provoking,
               it seems to me that their distant meanings may also offer a clue (or at least an
               intellectual  temptation)  to  broaden  Bernstein’s  history  of  risk  by  adopting  a

                  15  In this sense, for instance, SKJONG, Etymology of risk. Classical Greek origin - Nautical expression -
               Metaphor  for  “difficulty  to  avoid  the  sea”,  2005,  available  online  at  the  following  address
               http://research.dnv.com/skj/Papers/etimology-of-risk.pdf.  Indeed,  it  is  of  interest  that  «these
               lexical borrowings happened in the end of the middle-ages, when mentalities woke up and people
               dared to discover the world. So that from the 16th century on, the term got a benefit meaning, for
               example in middle-high-German Rysigo … a technical term for business, with the meaning “to dare,
               to undertake, enterprise, hope for economic success”» (ID.).
                  16  BERNSTEIN, Against the gods: the remarkable story of risk, cit., 13. Both the Greek ριζα and the
               Arabic rizq (ﻕﺯﺭ) may even find a common Indo-European or Semitic root (a hypothesis of ancient
               comparative linguistics which is, of course, far beyond my expertise and the aims of this writing).
               Speaking  of risk (and my personal risk-aversion), anyway, I would not put my money neither on
               ριζα nor ﻕﺯﺭ as the very first origin of the term and its related meaning(s).
                  17  WEHR, A dictionary of modern written Arabic, ed. by J M. Cowan, IV ed., Wiesbaden, 1994.

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