Diet (assembly)


In politics, a diet is a formal deliberative assembly. The term is used historically for deliberative 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 dieta, meaning both "parliamentary assembly" and "daily food allowance", from earlier Latin diaeta transcribing Classical Greek δίαιτα diaita, meaning "way of living", and hence also "diet", "regular work".
In an alternative view, diet means "people". The word is cognate with other Germanic words such as Deutsch, Dutch, and Diets. The Diet is the annual meeting of the people, a Germanic tradition.
Through a false etymology, reflected in the spelling change replacing ae with e, the word "diet" came to be associated with Latin dies, "date". It came to be used in post Roman Empire Europe in the sense of "an assembly" because of its use for the work of an assembly meeting on a daily basis or a given day of the time period, and hence for the assembly itself. The association with dies is reflected in the German language use of Tagung and -tag.

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 Hungarian Diet, 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.

Current use