The colonial past

The first entry is le protectorat, and the ending it carries is one of the most productive pieces of French, better learnt as a rule than as a word. -At is fixed to the name of an officer or an office and yields the name of the institution itself — the body, the building, the territory, sometimes the span of years. Le consulat is the consul’s office and its building; le rectorat is the education authority of a region; le commissariat is the police station; le patronat is the whole body of employers taken together, and never one employer. English has the same ending in « consulate » and « protectorate » and stopped there, because it is no longer productive, so each of the others has to be rendered with a different word — an authority, a station, a body, the employers. Two habits follow. When a noun in -at turns up, ask which institution it names instead of reaching for a person. And never read le protectorat as the protector: the word names the arrangement and the land it covered, which is why le traité de protectorat, further down this list, is able to create one.