Diet (assembly)


In politics, a diet is a formal deliberative assembly or legislature. The term is used for some assemblies such as the German Imperial Diet, as well as a designation for modern-day legislative bodies of certain countries and states such as the National Diet of Japan, or the German Bundestag, the Federal Diet.

Etymology

The term might be derived from Medieval Latin , meaning both "parliamentary assembly" and "daily food allowance", from earlier Latin diaeta, possibly from the Greek, or Classical Greek, meaning "way of living", and hence also "diet", "regular work".
Through a false etymology, reflected in Latin spelling change in medieval Europe that replaced the ae with e, the word diaeta came to be associated with another Latin word dies, which means "day". Day thus came to be used in postclassical Europe in the sense of "an assembly" and retroactively explained that the day referred to the day of the assembly meeting.
The association with dies is reflected in the German language's use of Tagung and also -tag, meaning not only "day", as in Montag but also "parliament", "council", or other legislative chamber, as in Bundestag or Reichstag for national parliaments, and Landtag for regional assemblies.

Historic uses

In this sense, it commonly refers to the Imperial Diet assemblies of the Holy Roman Empire:
After the Second Peace of Thorn of 1466, a German-language Prussian diet Landtag was held in the lands of Royal Prussia, a province of Poland in personal union with the king of Poland.
The Croatian word for a legislative assembly is sabor ; in historic contexts it is often translated with "diet" in English, as in "the Diet of Dalmatia", "the Croatian Diet", "the Hungarian-Croatian Diet", or Diet of Bosnia.
The Diet of Hungary, customarily called together every three years in Székesfehérvár, Buda or Pressburg, was also called "Diéta" in the Habsburg Empire before the 1848 revolution.
The Riksdag of the Estates was the diet of the four estates of Sweden, from the 15th century until 1866. The Diet of Finland was the successor to the Riksdag of the Estates in the Grand Duchy of Finland, from 1809 to 1906.
The Swiss legislature was the Tagsatzung before the Federal Assembly replaced it in the mid-19th century.
The Polish–Lithuanian Sejm was sometimes called a diet.

Current use