The Latin words jus, law, and jurare, to swear, have a common Sanscrit ancestor in the root ju, to join: the link to ancient India hides, therefore, in words such as justice and jury. This affinity between the words for "law" and "oath" is the clue to a major portion of the history of ancient legal ideas. There are, too, interesting overspills, as the Americans say.
Take the word conjurer, about which a lady in a Greystones, Co Wicklow, shopping mall asked me recently.
Conjure comes from jurare and cum, which means "with", and so means "to swear together". Now, the belief in the ancient world was that if you laid strong spells and swore fierce oaths on the devil, you could call him to help you; indeed, to work wonders for you. The old notion of a conjuror, therefore, was one who conspired with the devil.
John Magowen (or Magowran?) from Monaghan asks why many Irish people stress the second syllable of the word carpenter. He asks if the word is French in origin.
To take the last question first, the word is of Celtic origin: compare the Old Irish carpat and the modern carbad, a chariot. It is thought that when Boadicea first bade the top of the mornin' to the Romans in Britain, the word she would have used for the twowheeled wagon she was carried around in was carpentom.
In Late Latin the contraption was called carpentum, and from that they made carpentarius, a chariot-builder. Finally, the Normans brought the word back to Britain again as carpentier, with the slightly different meaning of any worker in wood. By 1325 it was spelled carpentere.
The Irish stress may represent the survival of the old French stress, although it is possible that like the second syllable stress in Anglo-Irish discipline (architecture, lamentable etc), it is due to the influence of the hedge-schoolmasters of the 18th century: men who never had the opportunity to hear standard English spoken, and so had to invent a pronunciation for many strange words they had come across in their reading.
Hedge-school pronunciations have survived modern schooling of all kinds. The late Alan Bliss of UCD defended them, saying the Irish should use their own form of English, which accurately reflects the social history of the country.