Accounting and the words to tell it: an historical perspective

Pierre Labardin and Marc Nikitin ()

Accounting, Business and Financial History, 2009, vol. 19, issue 2, pages 149-166

Abstract: In the French language, the word comptabilite (accounting) first appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was used in the Royal finances and its first meaning was that of accountability. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, or thereabouts, the uses of the word evolved gradually but in a somewhat confused manner. Once its meaning had become stabilised, the growing use of the word by an increasing population and the development of accounting activities created a need for adjectives to be added. Commercial, industrial and agricultural accounting, general and auxiliary accounting appeared, as well as the use of comptabilite to designate the accounting department. In this paper, we examine the evolution of words in the context of the development of accounting, seeking some help from amongst linguists.

Keywords: words; accounting; nineteenth century; France; French language (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article& ... 40C6AD35DC6213A474B5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:acbsfi:v:19:y:2009:i:2:p:149-166

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/subscription.html

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Business and Financial History is edited by J R Edwards and Trevor Boyns

More articles in Accounting, Business and Financial History from Taylor and Francis Journals
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().