Re: OT: Worcestershire sauce

On Tue, Oct 07, 2003 at 11:24:44PM -0500, Nik Taylor wrote:
> "Mark J. Reed" wrote:
> > But the different pronunciations of ranks aren't as annoying as
> > having the same rank name associated with different grades.
> > I understand the historical reasons why a navy captain is
> > three grades higher than an army captain
>
> What *are* the historical reasons?
How did I know someone was going to ask that question? :)

Let's start with the linguistics.  "Captain" comes via Middle
French from the Latin "capitaneus", an adjective meaning "chief"
or "principal", derived from "caput"="head".  "Chieftain" is a
variant of the same word which has retained a meaning closer to
the original sense.

Anyway, captains were officers in command of some number of soldiers,
which over the centuries and the various armies standardized on
something called in English a "company", containing about 100-200 men.

The original seafaring captains, in the eleventh century English
navy, were just army captains in transit.  One ship generally held
one company, and the captain of that company travelled with them.
He was responsible for combat decisions, but had no actual authority
over operating the ship; that fell to the Masters, who were warrant
officers.  However, as more combat took place on the water itself
instead of just wherever the ships landed, the combat captains
and their lieutenants took over the executive functions of the
ship.  By the mid-18th century these officers had full command of
the ships, so the British made Captain an official naval title
in 1747.  As these navy captains now held sway over more than
just a company of men - the entire ship was under their command -
they officially outranked army captains by a single grade.

However, the sizes of warships varied, as did their crew complement.
So just one year after establishing the rank of Captain, the British
Navy split it up into three grades according to the size of the
ship commanded.  The smallest ship still had a crew larger than a
company, so the lowest naval captain still outranked an army
captain.  Over time, those three grades got individual rank names:
the highest kept the name Captain, the middle became a Commander,
and the lowest a Lieutenant Commander.

And that's the situation today.  The Navy rank of Captain is
one grade above a Commander, which is one grade above  Lieutenant
Commander, which is one grade above Lieutenant - which is equivalent
to a Captain in the Marines, Army, and Air Force.  Going back up in the
landlubber ranks, a naval Lieutenant Commander is equivalent to a
Major, a Commander to a Lieutenant Colonel, and a naval Captain to
a Colonel (which somehow had its spelling borrowed from the French
but its pronunciation borrowed from the Spanish [and then mangled],
thus the mismatch between <Colonel> and /'kr\=nl=/).

As for lieutenants: "lieu-tenant" is French for "place-holder".
Various officers had lieutenants who were responsible for shadowing
them and being ready to take over if the officer were incapacitated
or killed.  These lieutenants eventually got ranks named according
to the rank of the officer they were shadowing: Lieutenant General,
Lieutenant Colonel, Lieutenant Commander, etc.  The bare "Lieutenant"
was originally a Lieutenant Captain, and in the Marines, Army, and
Air Force does indeed rank one grade below a Captain.  But because
of those extra ranks inserted between Lieutenant and Captain in
the Navy, the historical relationship behind the rank name
no longer holds there.

-Mark