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In the British army, a subaltern is an officer below the rank of captain — in practice a second lieutenant or a lieutenant. It is the lowest officer level: young, newly commissioned, in charge of a platoon of about thirty soldiers, and very much learning the job under older officers and experienced sergeants. The word can also work as an adjective meaning of that junior rank. It is an old, formal word and it belongs to a particular world. You meet it in military history, in regimental records, and above all in novels and memoirs of the British Empire — Kipling's young subalterns in India, the subalterns of the First World War. Serving British soldiers today still use it, but a general reader will meet it mostly on the page. There is a second life to this word that a student may run into at university, and it is worth because the two meanings feel unrelated. In academic writing about colonialism and power — postcolonial studies, subaltern studies — the subaltern means people held at the bottom of a social order, whose voices are not recorded by those in power. That use comes through the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci and is now the more commonly encountered sense in the humanities. Same word, ordinary root meaning "lower in rank", two very different rooms.
（英國陸軍）尉級軍官、下級軍官（上尉以下）；學術上另指「被壓在底層、發不出聲音的群體」（後殖民研究的「底層／庶民」）
組成From Latin sub- ("under") + alternus ("one after the other, alternate"), from alter, "the other of two". It reached English through Middle French subalterne and Late Latin subalternus. The idea in the parts is of ranking below in an ordered series — one placed under the next in line.
同家族的字
- alternatesame Latin alternus — one after the other
- alterLatin alter, "other" — to alter is to make other
- alternativealso from alter — the other choice
- submarinesame sub-, "under"
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
subalternadj/ˈsʌb.əltən/
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Of a lower rank or position; inferior or secondary; especially (military) ranking as a junior officer, below the rank of captain.
- a subaltern officer
- Two weeks after giving birth[…] she [Rachida Dati] was removed and offered no consolation prize other than the subaltern position of No 2 on the UMP's list for the next European elections.
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human-scienceslogicmathematicsAsserting only a part of what is asserted in a related proposition.
subalternnoun/ˈsʌb.əltən/
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A subordinate.
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governmentmilitarypoliticsA commissioned officer having a rank below that of captain; a lieutenant or second lieutenant.
- She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, Margaret Devereux ; and made all the men frantic by running away with a penniless young fellow ; a mere nobody sir a subaltern in a foot regiment, or something of that kind.
- As a subaltern of 24, Neave was captured in the defence of Calais in May 1940.
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human-scienceslogicmathematicsA subaltern proposition; a proposition implied by a universal proposition.
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human-sciencessciencessocial-scienceA member of a group that is socially, politically and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of the colonial homeland.
- Young refers sardonically to the existence of reams of postcolonial "theory", and promises to give us "postcolonialism from below, which is what and where it should rightly be, given that it elaborates a politics of ‘the subaltern’, that is, subordinated classes and peoples".
- In Ghosh's novel, a canonical western scientist is pitted against a counterscientific group of native folk-medicine practitioners led by Mangala, a subaltern in every conceivable meaning of the term.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。