ECONOMER
It will not take the researcher too long to discover
that the term economer is not found in any major English dictionary, nor
for that matter in any ‘minor’ dictionary!
The reader can determine which categories the
Etymology
Yes, it would seem to be a ‘Salesian’ word. But before going much further with that, it
is worth just the briefest essay into the linguistic history of the term economy,
assuming that anyone coining the word economer has in mind a connection
with economy. And here the
interesting feature is that the Koiné Greek oikonomia (the ‘oikos’ being
a house) allows for an oikonomos who managed the affairs of a
household. The Greeks applied the term
to that very domestic level and would not have thought in terms of the wider economy
of the State or organization as we do today.
By Middle English times it was employed in English as yconomye. The first recorded sense of the word in our
current usage was found in a monastery’s ‘management of economic affairs’ in
1440. Theologians and biblical scholars
have had little difficulty in applying it to notions of stewardship, to God’s
economy of grace and so forth.
Salesian etymology
To return to the ‘Salesian’ word economer. In contrast to the humble origins of the
Greek oikonomus, the Italian economo was applied by Don Bosco
himself to a role in the larger organization, as early as 1859, in fact, at the
very gathering on 18th December of that year which gave birth to the Salesian Society (although
it has to be said that already in the Regulations for the Festive Oratory, he
had such a role). The founding group was not a large group -around seventeen in
all-, but it included the managing body of what was to become a very large
organization as the Salesian Family. On
that day he appointed, as a member of the very first Superior Chapter, an economo,
the cleric Angelo Savio. The next stage, once the Society began to spread, was
the economo ispettoriale, the provincial economer, in Don Rua’s
time. But at local house level, the role
of prefetto (prefect) included the administration of temporal goods, and
things remained this way until 1965, the time of the 19th General
Chapter.
You can see that the direction is from the larger
organization to the smaller, local level.
The 19th General Chapter retained the role of prefect
or vicario but allowed that the provincial economer might see that some
houses were complicated enough to have someone to assist the prefect, either a
priest or a brother. This person would
be known as the economo.
At some point, a translator wittingly or unwittingly
glossed economo in Italian by economer in English and there we
have it! But when was that point?
The evidence is that it occurred from the first
official translation into English. The
1907 translation of the Constitutions into English glosses economo (both
General and Provincial) as economer.
But the term was not applied at house level (see above).
Individual translators at different times have
obviously been aware of the problem. Italian-English
dictionaries would not have offered economer for the simple fact that it
did not exist. They may have offered bursar,
steward, accountant, financial manager, administrator,
to name just a few options. The
translator in the first instance (the 1907 version) was not working from a
dictionary.
In 1958 the translator for ‘Don Bosco in The World’
consistently employed the Latin economus, in one instance using the English
possessive clitic ‘s to produce economus’s and in another retreating
to the Latin plural to produce economi.
This gave us an Economus General.
By 1969 Fr. Borgatello, editor of the English translation of the ‘Memorie
Biografiche’, had allowed economist in a translation (his own?) of Don
Bosco’s first draft of the Constitutions (Appendix 27 of Vol 5). But meanwhile in 1965 the translator of the ‘Acts
of the 19th General Chapter’ (1965) had employed economer,
almost certainly on the basis of existing official translations of the
Constitutions and Regulations – 1907 as mentioned and the revised version of
the Constitutions after the 1923 revision of the Italian text.
Word formation
There is no difficulty understanding where economer
comes from, in linguistic terms. The
suffix –er is particularly productive in contemporary English. We can have a vacationer, one who goes
on holidays. We could have an economer,
one who looks after the (Society’s) economy.
The point is that no extensive lists of neologisms in the English
language have yet included economer.
At least one other possibility for the term’s genesis
remains – that it was in use in other Religious Congregations, possibly those
founded in Italy, at the time of the first official translation of the Salesian
Constitutions into English. There are
two arguments against this: Don Bosco chose his terms idiosyncractically and
purposefully – he chose society rather than congregation, and
often in speaking and sometimes in writing added pia to società
to avoid misinterpretation at a time when societies were likely to be
political, secret or Masonic! He chose ispettore
over provinciale, direttore over superiore. It is likely that economo was not in
use by religious congregations on that score.
The other argument is that Google today produces no examples of the term
having survived to 2004 in other Religious Congregations.
A case of diglossic effect
It becomes instructive at this point to look at what
actually occurs throughout the Salesian English-speaking world – and by this I
restrict myself to those provinces or vice provinces that produce an annual
directory in English (even if also in another language, e.g. Chinese, French…).
Within the present EAO region we have a directory of
this kind in AUL, ITM, FIN/S, THA, CIN.
In Interamerica, SUO, SUE,
CAN. In
Of those mentioned (if not mentioned it means they
produce their directory only in a language other than English, as do KOR,
GIA…), we can determine which provinces are in a situation of diglossia and
which are not.
The term diglossia was first used in English by
Charles Ferguson in 1959. He has been
considered the classic reference for diglossia ever since. He applied it to
situations where two varieties of the same language were in use. But this has now been widened to situations
where two quite distinct languages (or more than two) are in use in a speech
community. A simple description of
diglossia is where two languages are in use in the wider community but are
distinguished by the contexts in which they are used. The
Having said that,
Now, an investigation of the term used to gloss the
Italian economo in all of the Salesian provinces nominated above offers
interesting data:
AUL, IRL, SUE, SUO, GBR, CAN would not be regarded as
diglossic contexts – bilingual perhaps, but not diglossic in the case of SUO,
SUE, CAN. In simple terms this means
that while people may speak Spanish or French as well as English, they don’t
lapse into these languages mid-sentence, or in casual situations. They choose the context and use one or the
other language accordingly. In these
provinces the term economer is not in use. One could possibly say the same for AFM – it
is, as far as Salesians are concerned, an English speaking situation. While there are 11 official languages and
some Salesians may speak Afrikaans or Ndebele or Zulu, they are not likely to
switch into those in conversation unless it’s a particular situation. Therefore we do not expect to find the word economer
in use. Why? The terms used in these
situations may vary but they will be established terms in the English language:
bursar (AUL, GBR), treasurer (once used in SUO, SUE), financial administrator (SUO
now) community finance (administrator/person) and so on.
What of
In EAO, provinces such as FIN/S (the one directory for
both), THA, ITM, CIN are in a diglossic situation (that is to say, it is the
confreres who are in this situation; conversation at table will reveal
this). We expect, then, to find the term
economer – and we do.
Conclusion
The English language is flexible and experienced
enough, after all these centuries, to work with economer. That is not in doubt. The Salesians are a large enough
organization, even in English-speaking terms, to coin their own words and
remain with the coinage. That too is not
in doubt. But that does not prevent one
from suspecting that the coinage was unwitting and could have been avoided, on
the one hand, and on the other suggesting that while we may for all practical
purposes be stuck with Economer General and Provincial Economer,
neither of which gives any particular offence or problem to anyone but the
purist, we may well still opt for bursar or another synonym at local
level, especially if that person is regularly nominating his role to business
entities around him – they will continue to find economer just a bit
quaint, that’s all.
But the issue is wider than a single word, especially
if the argument based on diglossia is correct.
In these situations we may find the English language being pushed to
limits that it does not so easily absorb.
In my personal opinion Incharge is one such example, but there
will be others too. Incharge (or
its variants) used as a noun, I mean. It
clearly translates either the Italian incaricato or perhaps il
responsabile. The former is the one
to be found more often in a directory (elenco) in Italian. Again, English can work with incharge
– but it is pushing the limits just a bit!
AUL manages with Priest in Charge reserved for situations where
there has not been a canonical Rector appointed. That (or Brother in Charge, where the
situation allows) overcomes the word-class problem.
Julian Fox SDB