Developmental psychology in French

The fifth entry is la théorie de l’esprit, and the two languages arrive at it from opposite ends of their vocabulary. L’esprit descends from Latin spiritus, which named breathing first of all: spirare was to breathe, and the same verb stands behind « respiration », « inspiration », « to expire ». French kept that breath and let it rise into thought, so the noun that now heads a laboratory task once meant no more than air going in and out. English owns spiritus too, as « spirit », and could have used it here, yet nobody writes « theory of spirit ». The word English reaches for is « mind », and that one is home-grown: Old English gemynd belongs to the ancient root of thinking that also produced « to remind » and « to mention ». Latin built mens on that very root, and English has it — but only as the adjective « mental », never as a noun. So the reader who meets l’esprit here should hear nothing lofty or ghostly in it: the word is doing the plain work « mind » does, and the two languages simply picked different ancestors for it.