The law of the sea

The twentieth entry is o privilégio creditório marítimo, and the English name for it is a French word that French itself never uses in this room. English calls the right « a maritime lien ». The noun came in from French, where « lien » means a tie, a bond, a link, and it goes back to Latin ligamen, from ligare, to bind — the root that also gives « ligature » and « oblige ». That picture is the doctrine itself, and it explains the sentence on this page. The claim is not fastened to the owner, who may sell the ship and walk away from it; it is fastened to the hull, so it travels with the vessel into the hands of whoever buys her, and the action is brought against the ship rather than against a person. French, meanwhile, calls the same right « le privilège maritime », word for word what the Portuguese entry says. The borrowing went one way only, and English stopped hearing the French inside the word a very long time ago.