History of the word Chez

Hi. I am interested to find a little bit about the origins of the word chez. I thought I would try doing it via the internet. Such a neat word in French.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on February 22, 2012 at 2:44am

Well, depending on just how nerdily you want to go into it, at least one person has written an entire book on the subject:

http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/La_pr%C3%A9position_chi%C3%A9...

As I understand, the short version is that it is basically a derivative of the Latin expression "in casa" (which survives into modern Romance languages generally -- cf Spanish "en casa", Portuguese "em casa" -- but not French).

So basically, Latin "in casa" gradually got transformed into something closer to "(en) chiés", and along the way the "in"/"en" was dropped at some stage and "chiés" > "chez" became a preposition in its own right. As I understand, there's some debate as to at exactly what point the "in"/"en" got dropped, and in fact this could have occurred while the language was still ostensibly "Latin" (though of course, there's no actual single point in time at which the language stopped being "Latin" and started being "French" etc -- it was a gradual change, and we draw arbitrary lines in the sand).

Some similar transformations (cf Price, "The French Language: Present and Past", p. 160):

"de intus" > "dans"

"ab ante" > "avant"

"ad pressum" > "après"

In other words, it was a relatively common thing for a preposition+noun/adverb combination in Latin to turn into a preposition in French.