From a review of the Dictionary of Untranslatables:
This cartography can be rich and complex, even with a familiar concept like “liberty” — specifically, the ancient Greek word eleutheria, variously translated as liberté, Freiheit, and “liberty” or “freedom” in English. The Dictionary discusses the mistaken traditional Greek etymology — which, in a tradition that antedates Aristotle, associated eleutheria with freedom of movement (via the phrase elthein hopou erai, or “going where one likes”). In fact, the Dictionary tells us, the concept emerged from the Indo-European radical *leudh — meaning “to grow or develop,” which serves also as the basis for the German word for “people,” Leute. At its root, “liberty” wasn’t about revolutionary emancipation from constraint but about rootedness in nature, an empowering sense of belonging, and “the idea of growth that leads to a complete form, which ends in its full flourishing.” This origin doesn’t give the lie to later terms in other languages — the Latin libertas, with its long history evoking “the idea of pure spontaneity” and “the notion of a will that is not in any way determined to choose one or another of two contraries,” which finds its way into French and English through ideas of self-determination. These, too, are part of the “philosophically weighty” history of eleutheria, which the Dictionary encourages us to understand in all its variety, without “homogeniz[ing] the diverse meanings and flatten[ing] the richness of Greek.” “Liberty,” it turns out, is much more than a mere calque from the Latin. More.