Recreation in the Renaissance

130 Appendix: the European Vocabulary of Recreation
It would have been crossed with similar words like the Akkadian hiaqu (to mix
wine) and the Hebrew hagag, hoggi (to keep a festival, to dance), and hag (feast),
with parallels such as the Lithuanian jukas (pleasantness) and juktis (to laugh). 12
Early modern French displays frequent reference to ‘jeux et divertissements’.
If this usage finds some explanation in a general fashion for reinforcing repetition
and hendiadys (with parallels like ‘le bal et la danse’, though the latter had
a close Latin equivalent in ‘choreae et saltationes’), some more specific, semantic
reasons for the double naming could be easily found. Jeu had replaced to a
significant extent the comprehensiveness of ludus. However, as ludus needed to
be twinned with iocus in order to include the field of playing with words, jeu had
the tendency to be associated with a substantial but limited range of games; divertissement
(see below) could widen its dominion by considering less structured
play, and the amusement which can derive from the arts and a variety of other
leisure activities.
The relationship between the two key English terms has been described as
follows: game 13 ‘identifies the concept, its development as schema and system,
place, and set of rules’; play 14 ‘distinguishes action, time, the moment of
participation, the identity of the player in the ludic performance’. 15 The most
striking difference between English and Romance languages is the lack of a
comprehensive English parallel of either ludus or jeu/gioco/juego (‘joke’ being no
match for their range of meanings). It is well known how this poses serious problems
in translation from one linguistic dominion to the other, with the hendiadys
‘play and games’ usually required in order to give a rough equivalent. The
difficulty includes the lack of a parallel English adjective, ‘ludic’ being a poor relative
to which non-English speakers resort in desperation. Apart from this major
discrepancy, the English language follows most of the Romance vocabulary, thus
showing that it developed its terminology of recreation in close relation with
French and Italian trends.
The opposite is true with German, whose vocabulary, although it shows
parallel constructions, is based on an almost entirely different set of roots. The
etymology of the key term here, Spiel, 16 is unclear, but the earlier usage of both
the noun and the corresponding verb is significantly presumed to have applied
them to ‘dance, lively movement’, and subsequently have expanded to ‘amusement,
pastime’.
The literal meaning of recreation, 17 ‘to create again’, has obvious parallels (see,
for instance, re-formatio). It denotes recovering normal operating conditions after
tiredness or disease (the latter being the case in one of the direct meanings of
the German parallel Erholung). In that sense, its value is close to that of a wider
family of terms referring to refreshment, including the specific type that derives
from drinking (cf. German Erquickung, Labung).
Divertissement/divertimento 18 is mainly a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
development, by which a variety of pastimes (including society entertainments
and children’s games) are referred to with respect to their role as distractions
from everyday cares and occupations. The distinctively negative connotations
of the ‘diversion’ in question, which is best known from its role in Pascal’s
Pensées, can be found in a wider circle of contemporary rigorous moralists, but
it should not be taken as a mainstream use of the word. 19 The specifically musical
sense of a light and easy instrumental piece also appeared towards the end of
our period.