Photography and composition

Il treppiede is the tripod, and the two names are one thought assembled twice in two different workshops. Latin had tripes, accusative tripedem, three-footed, out of tres and pes; Italian inherited it and wore it down to treppiede, where a speaker still hears tre and piede sitting next to each other. « Tripod » says exactly the same thing in Greek: treis and pous, stem pod-, which reached English through Latin as a bookish import and never joined the working stock of the language — nobody builds a fresh English compound on pod- the way Italian builds on piede. The Greek original was not a camera support at all but a three-legged stand: the seat of the priestess at Delphi, and the cauldron handed out as a prize at games. There is a second name for the object, and there the two languages are just as close and just as unaware of it. Italian also says il cavalletto, a little horse, for this stand and for a painter’s easel, while « easel » is the Dutch ezel, a donkey. Two languages, two beasts of burden, one set of legs.