The Latin word plaga means a snare or a hunting net, and is thought to derive from the Proto Indo-European root *plak, meaning “to weave.” From this came the Latin noun plagium, meaning the act of “kidnapping” and “the netting of game.” The perpetrator of the act was called a plagiarius, that is, a kidnapper (a person who steals a human regarded at the time as “belonging” to another, for example a child or somebody else’s slave).
By extension, plagiarius also came to mean a seducer or, after the Roman poet Martial complained of another poet “kidnapping his verses” in the 1st century AD, somebody who commits literary theft by attempting to pass off others’ artistic designs, ideas or writing as their own.
In the 17th and early 18th century the Latin for “kidnapper” and “kidnapping” were adopted into English as “plagiary” and “plagium,” respectively. Martial’s sense of the plagiarius as the committer of literary theft was also adopted into English: over time, the word “plagiary” evolved into “plagiarist,” the modern word for the perpetrator of literary theft, while the modern word for the act changed from “plagium” to “plagiarism.”
Photo: Chen Wen-chan, Taipei Times 照片：自由時報記者陳文嬋
(Paul Cooper, Taipei Times)
拉丁文「plaga」意為陷阱，或捕鳥獸之網，據信由原始印歐語字根「*plak」（意為「編織」）演變而來。由此字根衍生出之拉丁文名詞「plagium」，意為「綁架」的行動，以及「為狩獵結網」。犯下綁架罪的人則稱為「plagiarius」，亦即綁架者（偷取當時被認為是他人「財產」的人，例如兒童或別人的奴隸）。「plagiarius」的衍伸義還有「誘惑者」，以及犯下文學偷竊罪的人，因其試圖將別人的藝術構思、見解或文字假冒為自己的，其典故來自西元一世紀的羅馬詩人馬提亞爾，他抱怨另一位詩人「綁架了他的詩句」。
在十七世紀與十八世紀早期，「綁架者」及「綁架」的拉丁文被英文吸收，分別成為「plagiary」（剽竊）及「plagium」這兩個字。馬提亞爾所說的「plagiarius」——犯下文學偷竊罪的人，也被英文吸收：久而久之，「plagiary」演變為現今「plagiarist」（抄襲者、剽竊者、文抄公）一字，而抄襲的行為則由「plagium」變成現代的拼法「plagiarism」。
（台北時報林俐凱譯）
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