Re: Entrepreneurs, Bush and the French

The answer to this question may be more complicated, because in French,
"entrepreneur" is productively derived from "entreprendre", along with
"entreprise", etc. The specialized sense of "entrepreneur" that Bush
was citing seems to fall well within the common meanings of
entreprendre/entreprise/entrepreneur. So the complication is that a
French form with a productive derivation and a fairly wide range of
meaning was borrowed into English and assigned a specific meaning and
cut away from its derivational roots: there is no English verb "to
enterprend" that I'm aware of, and the connection between
"entrepreneur" and "[business] enterprise" is probably something that
some English speakers are aware of to a certain extent, but certainly
not as ordinary, productive derivational morphology. BTW, note the
similarity in meaning between "entrepreneur" and "enterprising" as in
"an enterprising young man".

But I'm no expert in French or bushiness.

Greg Shenaut

.

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