John Fairburn, British Sailors Boarding an Algerine Pirate, ca. 1825. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
“The most beautiful word in the dictionary,” Donald Trump called “tariff” in remarks made to an audience of business executives shortly before last November’s elections. Since the incoming president had in mind the word’s meaning rather than its sound, there’s no need to argue with him that other words are more mellifluous. It is ironic, however, that “tariff,” a term associated in our minds with national borders, national interests, and the putting of national before international priorities is in fact the most international of words, one whose history testifies to the essentially borderless nature of human contact.
English “tariff,” French tarif, Spanish tarifa, Italian tarrifa, Turkish tarife, Arabic ta’arifeh, Persian tarafeh, Hindi and Malay tarif: this is not a word, like “radio,” “television,” or “Internet,” that has been diffused around the globe by the technological innovations of the 20th century. Its dissemination goes back hundreds of years and was caused not by technology but by trade, the white slave trade included. (Does anyone still learn in grade-school history classes about the Barbary Coast wars, or that, in the same centuries in which millions of black Africans were being shipped as slaves to America, over a million white Europeans were enslaved in Muslim North Africa?) Moreover, the language instrumental in spreading the word, far from being a world-dominant one like English, or even a language at all in the ordinary sense, was a pidgin, known as Lingua Franca, that was spoken by merchants, sailors, pirates, and pirates’ victims from the Christian and Muslim countries of the Mediterranean basin. From it, our generic term “lingua franca” derives.
One of the earliest descriptions of Lingua Franca that we have comes from the 16th-century Spanish Benedictine abbé Diego de Haedo. In his account of three years of captivity in Algiers after pirates from the Barbary Coast (a region named for its Berber inhabitants) imprisoned the passengers of the ship he was sailing on and sold them into servitude, he wrote:
Lingua Franca is called that by Muslims not only because in speaking it they think they are talking in the language of a Christian nation but because by means of this mixture of words from various languages, mostly Spanish and Italian with a smattering of Portuguese, they communicate with Christians. . . . Because of its confused jumble of words and their faulty pronunciation by the Muslims who do not know how to conjugate the persons and tenses of their verbs as do their native Christian speakers, Lingua Franca is a jargon, or better, a patois, . . . that is generally employed for all affairs and relations with the Turks.
Italian, which is estimated to have contributed 65–70 percent of the vocabulary of Lingua Franca, was the language of Venice and its allies, whose galleons vied with the Ottoman fleet for control of the Mediterranean in the 16th and 17th centuries. Algiers was then ruled by the Ottoman empire, and Frenk, the “Franca” of Lingua Franca, was the Turkish word for any European, and especially any West European, Christian. (The term went back to the period of the Crusaders, a high percentage of whom were French.) Through the city’s large slave market passed many of the victims of North African piracy between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Haedo’s observation that Lingua Franca did not conjugate verbs was correct. Like most pidgins, which by definition exhibit extreme grammatical simplification, Lingua Franca dropped all conjugations, declensions, and plural endings. Take, for example, a typical Lingua Franca utterance recorded in a 19th-century Dictionnaire de la langue franque published in Marseilles, the sentence Mi andar in casa del signor, “I am going to the gentleman’s house.” In it, the Italian/Spanish verb andare/andar, “to go,” remains unconjugated in its infinitive form while the nominative pronoun “I,” Italian io and Spanish yo, is replaced by its objective form of mi, so that mi andar (“me go”) serves for Italian io vado or Spanish yo voy.
Another sentence in the same lexicon, Se querir paché, l’yoldash fazir gribouila, “If he sues for peace, the Turks will make a stir,” shows the diversity of Lingua Franca’s sources. The unconjugated querir is Spanish/Portuguese for “to want”; paché, “peace,” is Italian pace; yoldash is Turkish yoldaş, “comrade,” kept in the singular rather than given its plural of yoldaşlar; fazir is the infinitive of Portuguese “to make”; and gribouila, “stir,” comes from French gribouille, a rash person, or gribouillage, a scribble or something hastily or carelessly done.
Getting back to “tariff,” it derives, via Turkish tarife, from Arabic ta’arifeh, a noun formed from the verb arafa, “to know.” A ta’arifeh was a list of things that one should or needs to know, specifically, a price list—and what was more useful for a merchant or sailor in one of the ports of the Levant than a price list of what he wished to buy or sell? Although ta’arifeh or tarife doesn’t appear in the Dictionnaire de la langue franque, there can be no doubt that it was part of Lingua Franca’s vocabulary.
Such price lists would also have included taxes imposed by local or regional governments on goods leaving or entering ports of trade. Imposts of this sort existed in Europe from at least the early centuries of the Common Era, when the Roman empire, while not taxing Mediterranean trade, taxed all goods arriving through non-Mediterranean ports—that is, from without the Empire’s frontiers—at a standard rate of 25 or 12.5 percent of their estimated value. Once the empire dissolved, similar taxes were imposed in Mediterranean ports by their rulers and collected by the harbormaster or reys de marina (from the Arabic ra’is, “head” or “chief”), as he was known in Lingua Franca. Since these varied from port to port and in accordance with the taxed merchandise, tarifes of them were a necessity.
Disseminated by Lingua Franca, tarife thus came to have two different if closely related meanings, one bearing on prices or rates in general and one on import taxes. In some European languages, the first meaning alone prevailed. In French, for example, a tarif is any price list, so that one speaks of les tarifs des taxis, “taxi fares,” or le tarif d’electricité, “electricity rates,” whereas a tariff in the sense of an import duty is a droit de douane.
In English, the opposite happened. Although “tariff” was at one time used in the French sense, too, by the 19th century it had come to designate an import duty alone. A watershed in this respect was the U.S. Tariff Act of 1789, the first major piece of legislation passed by Congress after the ratification of the Constitution. Included in it was a price list, viz.: “On all distilled spirits of Jamaica proof, imported from any kingdom or country whatsoever, per gallon, ten cents. . . . On all cider, beer, ale, or porter in bottles, per dozen, twenty cents. . . . On brown sugars, per pound, one cent. . . . On coffee, per pound, two-and-a-half cents. . . . On all shoes, slippers, or galoshes made of leather, per pair, seven cents. . . . On coal, per bushel, two cents. . . . On pickled fish, per barrel, seventy-five cents,” etc. Henceforward, “tariff” in American English rarely meant anything other than what it means today.
Given the purchasing power of a penny in those days, these rates were pretty stiff. One doubts whether an American not engaged in the domestic production of spirits, sugar, coffee, shoes, slippers, galoshes, coal, pickled fish, or other items on the list would have found the word “tariff” very beautiful. To tell the truth, applied to a sentence like “On all Chinese motorcars, per vehicle, 20,000 dollars,” it doesn’t sound a whole lot better today.