Provision and Prevision
Tricksy Twins
‘Provision’ differs from ‘prevision’ by a single letter, not a proper letter, mind you, but a wee little vowel that, when voicing either word, many speakers of English pronounce in much the same way . Nonetheless, every time I make a foray into the elephantine corpus of English-language works preserved by the good people of the Hathi Trust, the former proves far more popular than the latter.
To provide a single example, the Plenteous Pachyderm of Ann Arbor recently revealed that, in books and magazines published in America, Australia, Britain, and Canada in the Year of Grace 1936, appearances of ‘provision’ outnumbered apparitions of its homophone by a factor of forty.
(I almost wrote plesiohomophone*, thereby stressing the similarity in the pronunciations of the two words, rather than the absolute interchangeability of the sounds in question. Doing so, however, would have broken the iron-clad rule that forbids the combination, in a single sentence, of a freshly minted word and the public practice of arithmetic.)
We got ‘prevision’ and ‘provision’ from the French, who continue to check the prévisions météorologiques before going to the grocery store to faire les provisions. French, in turn, got both words from the Romans, who coined them by combining pro (‘towards’) and pre (‘before’) with visionem (‘sight’).
Given this history, we should not be surprised to find the kissing cousins of ‘prevision’ and ‘provision’ in the other living languages of the Romance persuasion. Thus, for example, Catalan makes use of previsió i provisió and Portuguese employs previsão e provisão.
With this in mind, I find myself wondering why ‘prevision’ found so little honest labor to perform in the vineyards of the Bard of Avon. Strange to say, the answer to this conundrum may lie in a peculiar feature of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. That is, while provided with a handy counterpart to the Latin prefix pre (the fragment ‘fore’, which gave ‘foresight’, ‘foretell’, and ‘forethought’ their future-facing orientation) the Old English idiom possessed no equivalent of pro.
Thus, soon after ‘provision’ appeared in the ears of the Anglophones, the good people of that Green and Pleasant Land, whether jurists, divines, or grocers, put it to work. ‘Prevision’, alas, languished in the lexical equivalent of the adjunct faculty, hired by professors for occasional odd jobs, but never finding regular employment.
Note
My explanation of the differing fates of ‘provision’ and ‘prevision’ owes much to the concept of ‘blocking’. Also known as ‘lexical blocking’, that theory holds that the reception of a new word depends heavily upon the availability of pre-existing competitors. For a (surprisingly readable) account of the origins of this notion, see Mark Aronoff ‘Morphology and Words: A Memoir’, an article that I found, with the help of ChatGPT, in Olivier Bonami et alia (editors) The Lexeme in Descriptive and Theoretical Morphology (Berlin: Language Science Press, 2018). (You can download the entire book, for free, on the website of OAPEN.)
For Further Reading
