Heraldry

The twentieth entry is l’araldo, and it is the odd one out in a list otherwise inherited from Rome. Almost everything around it — lo scudo, l’arma, la figura — is Latin stock. L’araldo is not. It reached Italian through Old French heraut, and that word rests on a Frankish compound of two Germanic elements: harja, an army, and wald, rule or power. The man in it is the one who has charge of the host. English took the very same Old French word and made « herald » of it, so the two are cousins by the shortest route there is. The second copy is the better story. Old English held the same compound in its own stock, Hereweald, and there it survived not as an office but as a name: « Harold ». An English reader therefore owns both halves of this entry already. It is worth noticing which way the vocabulary grew, too: l’araldica and araldico are built on the man, not on the shield. The herald announced and recorded; the rules came after him.