Semantics / Cristina Gatti

A Reliable Promise

Edited by Maurizio Crippa

That skeptical old fox Umberto Eco loves to say that words are signs because they can lie. Thank Heaven, he is mistaken; there are words that not only tell the truth, but also have “encoded in their DNA,” if we can put it this way, instructions for using them correctly, i.e., according to truth. “Hope” is one of these words.

Simplifying–but we hope not too much–the following is the essence of a conversation we had with Cristina Gatti, a researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the Università Cattolica in Milan, who has been doing fascinating work on words for years. To use the right term, her field is semantic analysis (“doing semantic analysis is simply bringing out the constitutive connections hidden in the depths of a word”), attempting to rediscover the full and true meaning of words.

Hope: a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen, confident that it will bring something good; expectation of a positive event; trust in a good that has to happen; believing in the positive achievement of something that could even be difficult to obtain. “I consulted various dictionaries, and all of them agree in giving these definitions of ‘hope.’ It is the expectation of something good. The word has, without doubt, positive connotations. And this is the case in all the European languages.” In effect, Cristina Gatti explains, one cannot say, “I am hoping for a disaster.” There is, as it were, a “code” of meaning that prevents the word being used in a negative sense.

But it is Cristina’s job to go more deeply into things, to “trace a semantic map,” as they say. What do we discover, reading this map? “That ‘hope’ implies the expectation of a future event that has to be good. Otherwise, one does not hope, but fears. We discover that the expectation is always tied to the certainty that the expected good will come about, that this certainty is founded on a promise that someone has made (‘I hope he comes, he promised me he would’) or a clue (‘I hope he comes soon, I hear the sound of his steps in the garden’).”

But perhaps the most important thing is the history of this word we like so much. Words have a development in history that shapes them. “Hope,” as we use it, is the result of something that happened in history, whereas for the Greeks and Romans this was not the case. First of all, our guide explains to us, we must note that the root of the Greek word is shared with the word “want.” To hope and to want, to desire, have, in short, the same foundation in thought. “But for the Greeks, elpis, or for the Romans, spes, was ambivalent; it could allude to a positive or a negative event. The Greek or Latin speaker had in any case to specify if it was an expectatio boni, the expectation of a good, or an expectatio mali, the expectation of something bad. In short, it was a word that attested to man’s desire and expectation, but this could be destined to remain unfulfilled and be given up. As we said: ambiguous.”

And then what happened? “The change came about with the use of the Greek word in the Old Testament. Here the Greek elpis is no longer an ambivalent word; it expresses exclusively the expectation of a good. We have a mutation on the level of grammar as well, in that the tendency prevails to make the foundation of hope explicit by using a grammatical construction that is very rare in classical Greek. And we can say that this occurs starting with the certainty of the Hebrew people about the Covenant.” Borrowing it from the Old Testament, the New Testament and the early Christians also used the word in a positive sense, always specifying the source of hope, that here becomes the redemptive working of Christ. Ever since then, this way of understanding hope is part of our daily speech, of our horizon.

What about today? It often seems that a depleted use is made of this great word. We say, “I hope to get it,” when we have played the numbers in the Lottery. “Sometimes, ‘Let’s hope’ is said with a wry tone of doubt. But upon reflection, we see that these are improper usages, because the spectrum of the word’s true meaning is much broader,” Cristina explains. For Dante, hope is “a wait, confident of future glory” (Paradiso XXV, 67-68). Here we have clarified for us the meaning of the most beautiful Christian word: hope is already and not yet.