Law Belongs to Those Who Can Speak
It began with a connection I had never made: the English words “infantry” and “infant” share an origin.
This is no vague resemblance. Both trace back to Latin infans, combining the negative prefix in- with fari: to speak, say or utter. Infans therefore literally means someone who does not speak—or, more precisely, cannot yet utter a fully recognisable word.
It is significant that Romans defined children not by smallness, fragility or dependence on adults, but by what they could not yet do: speak.
Romans did, after all, have a certain tendency to turn facts of life into pragmatic legal categories.
In Roman law, infans was not merely a word for a child. It was a legal classification. Infantia traditionally extended to seven years of age, and an infant was considered incapable of independently performing legal acts.
Not because six-year-olds were physically mute, but because their speech was not yet recognised as expressing a legally informed will.
The issue was not producing sounds. It was uttering words to which the legal system could attach consequences. Words with consequences.
This is where etymology becomes law.
In law, speaking does not merely describe the world. It changes it. Say “I accept” and a contract may arise. Say “I waive” and a right may be lost. Say “I promise” and an obligation may arise. Say “I acknowledge” and a legal position may change radically.
In Roman law, words’ force was almost tangible. Stipulatio, a fundamental form of obligation, arose through a matching question and answer: “Do you promise?” “I promise.”
Words did not merely accompany the bond. They were where the bond came into being.
Even today, law is a vast machine attaching effects to words, often taking them far more seriously than their speakers do. Much of a lawyer’s work is determining whether someone truly intended what they said, said what they intended, or simply signed where somebody pointed.
The root of fari has left deep traces in Italian and related languages. Fate is what has been pronounced and, because spoken, becomes destiny. A fable is what is told. Fame is what people say and circulate about someone, sometimes with a rather elastic relationship to reality.
For the Romans, words were therefore more than communication. They could tell, consecrate, bind, condemn and even make the future inevitable.
The infans is someone who does not yet fully participate in that power.
But the word’s history does not end in childhood.
As Latin developed into the Romance languages, infante also came to mean a youth, boy, apprentice or servant. Losing its initial syllable, infante then became fante.
The fante was the subordinate youth or servant accompanying a mounted knight. Since a horse signified wealth, prestige and power as well as transport, those without one travelled and fought on foot.
Even in the Middle Ages, evidently, a company vehicle improved one’s CV.
The servant’s name thus came to designate the foot soldier. Fante produced Italian fanteria and, through the Romance languages, English infantry.
The path is extraordinary: infans is someone who does not speak; infante becomes the young servant; fante is the subordinate who fights on foot; infantry is the body of soldiers physically sent onto the ground.
An entire social structure remains fossilised in this linguistic evolution.
On one side, the horse-owning, armed knight with the power to command. On the other, the foot soldier who walks, carries the burden and is often sent ahead.
First the child, whose will others must express. Then the servant, acting for others. Finally the foot soldier, fighting on others’ orders.
The word born to describe someone without a voice thus comes to designate someone in a subordinate position.
The same fante also gives rise to a much less glorious Italian word: lestofante, a rogue or swindler.
Originally, the lestofante was the fante lesto: the alert, shrewd servant, quick of hand and tongue. Over time, cunning overtook speed, and the term came to mean someone using their skill not to resist power but to exploit others.
The circle then closes almost perfectly.
The infans does not yet possess speech. The fante can speak but remains subordinate. The lestofante has learned to use speech rather too well, especially to confuse other people’s.
It is not difficult to read a small history of law and power in this transformation.
Those whose speech is recognised can declare, undertake obligations, testify, dispose of property and command. Those without such a voice, or denied recognition of it, are represented, protected, administered and sometimes simply ordered about.
Here etymology ceases to be a game. Words change function without entirely losing their history. Meaning shifts, but does not completely erase what preceded it. It incorporates it.
Law proceeds similarly. Categories change name, shape and function but often retain much older structures. Capacity, intention, declaration, representation: they seem thoroughly contemporary concepts, yet come from far away.
Words are alive, and law continually tries to keep up.
To understand where they have arrived, however, we must know where they began. What a word once was often continues silently to explain what it has become—and perhaps what it may yet become.
Paolo Fortina · Originally published on LinkedIn on 15 July 2026. Read the original
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