Setting up a company and working for yourself

The last verb on this list is constituir uma sociedade, and English does not use its own cognate for the same act. Both languages inherited the Latin constituere, built on statuere, to make a thing stand: to set something up and leave it standing. Portuguese made that the legal verb of formation — constituir uma sociedade is what the founders do, a constituição da sociedade is the event, and a sociedade constituída is the finished thing. English sent the same word elsewhere. « To constitute » now says what a thing is made of, three members constitute a quorum, and « a constitution » belongs to a state or to somebody’s health, so « to constitute a company » reads as translation rather than as law. For the act itself English reached instead for corpus, the body: a company is « incorporated », what comes into being is « a body corporate », and every « corporate » in the business pages comes from that noun. The pictures differ. One language stands the company up; the other hands it a body — and Portuguese, which had the body available, calls the result a pessoa coletiva, a person instead.