Terminological Divergence

Abstract

The same English word does different work in different legal systems, and different systems carve up the same problem with structurally different vocabulary. This entry classifies the ways the correspondence fails, because the failures, unlike the vocabularies, are few and recur: the missing equivalent, where a system never formed the concept as a single term; the directional pair, where one system's neutral noun answers to another's separate words for increase and decrease -- or to no noun at all, the rule being carried by a verb; the same word landing on a different referent; institution names that do not survive translation; and calendar eras. The evidence is the terminology checked against primary statute texts for this issue, with the exceptions marked in the notes. Outside the Commonwealth and the United States, only Japan and Korea have a single statutory term for "the scheme": Germany splits it between modern usage and doctrine and keys its disregard to the expropriation's own advance effect; France, Spain, Brazil, and Türkiye each name the undertaking differently; Russian statutes name it as the object and carry the disregard in a verb; Arabic-drafted statutes divide between the Egyptian-Gulf noun and the Maghreb's French-model forms, with narrow disregard rules that have no received collective name. East Asia divides three ways: Japan and Korea hold genuine statutory terms of art, Taiwan a statutory head noun with a one-way date ratchet in place of a disregard, and the PRC no term of art as a valuation reference and no scheme-disregard rule at all in the instruments checked. "Value effect" was identified nowhere as a statutory noun in the materials surveyed. Unverified forms are printed but flagged; languages still under verification are marked as gaps, not filled. The entry's discipline is alignment rather than translation: establish what work a term does at home, find what does that work in the other system, and state each system in its own words, side by side, with the comparison left to the reader. The entry never asserts that two systems agree.