Business and finance

The fifteenth entry is os juros, and the two languages arrived at this money from opposite ideas. Portuguese took the Latin ablative iure, by right, from ius, iuris, right or law: what a lender receives is what is owed to him by right, and nothing in the noun says anything about time or about arithmetic. The same root sits all over English with no money in it at all — « just » and « justice », « jury », « judge » from ius dicere, to speak the law, and « injury », iniuria, a thing done against right. « Interest » began somewhere else entirely. It was not a noun in Latin but a verb form, interest, it makes a difference, it matters, and the lawyers’ phrase id quod interest named the gap between where a creditor stood and where he would have stood. The money took its name from that gap. One small consequence for reading: the rate is spoken of in the singular, a taxa de juro, while the sum that turns up on a statement is always the plural, as in Os juros do empréstimo subiram outra vez.