Business language has its
peculiarities, including expressions that only make sense to those who use it
daily. One interesting example is the
description of that slave-like relation between the controlling company and the
controlled company, .i.e. when one company owns 100% of another company. Curiously, there seems to be slight but
meaningful differences between languages on how to describe this relationship.
English refers to the
company owning the shares as the parent company, reflecting the fact that
non-animate nouns do not have a gender in English. By contrast, since the word for company is
feminine in Hebrew and French, the parental relationship is expressed through
the mother with a small difference, i.e. חברת אם [hevrat em], mother company, in Hebrew and maison mère, mother
house, in French. Spanish assumes the
blood connection and emphasizes the main
point, the power, using empreza
matriz, meaning master or founding company, derived from the word for womb.
Russian, for some unknown reason, opts to express all the options, i.e. компания-учредитель [kompaniya uchhyeditel], компания владеющая [kompaniya vladtyushaya], материнская компания [materinskaya kompaniya], and родительская компания [roditelskakya kompaniya], meaning
founding, leading, mother, and parental company, respectively.
On the other side of the
coin, English refers to the owned company as a subsidiary, from the
Latin subsidiarius meaning help or
support. Spanish follows this
lead, referring to such a company as a subsidiara. Keeping with the
parental connection, Russians and Israeli treat their subsidiaries as daughers,
using the terms дочерная
компания [doshernaya
firma] and חברת בת [hevrat bat], respectively.
The French call it a filiale, which is linked to the Latin word
for son, but generally refers to children in general.
If Turgenev about physical
fathers and sons, who will write a book about mothers and daughters of the legal
body variety?
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