The origin of the words transmit and transmission and their derivatives can be traced to the Latin transmittere, in turn formed by prefixing the preposition trans (“across or beyond”) to the verb mittere (“to let go or to send”). The >400 cases we have documented in Latin literature through the 4th century c.e. attest to its use throughout Roman history. The earliest records date back to Archaic Latin (3rd to 2nd centuries b.c.e.) and more specifically to Plautus’s comedies, a fragment by tragic poet Pacuvius, and some of Lucilius’s satires. In light of such frequent use of the verb, the sparing instances found of the respective nouns, transmissio and transmissus, is intriguing. The former was found in barely a couple of cases in Cicero’s prose, while the latter was used only once each by Pacuvius, Caesar, and Aulus Gellius.
Transmittere, moreover, has not only existed since the dawn of Latin literature, but has also been “transmitted” to the Romance languagesa and from there to English. It remains in common usage today, both in everyday language and especially in scientific and technological jargon.
The uncertain etymology of mittere has induced scholars to propose a number of hypotheses around the true Indo-European origin of the verb, two of which are set out below.
Some linguists contend that its Indo-European root is *smeit- or *smit, meaning “to throw,” which would have lost the initial s as it evolved into Latin. Further to that proposal, the same root would be found in some Germanic verbs with a similar meaning: the Dutch smitjen or German schmeissen. Identical origin would be attributed to the English verb to smite, whose specific meaning (“to strike”) would be the immediate outcome of throwing something at someone.b
Be that as it may, the conversion from the original sense of *smeit- into “to let go” or “to release” would appear to be reasonable. That meaning is also found in the Avestan āmiϑnāiti and in some compound forms of mittere, such as manumittere and manumissio (English, to manumit, manumission), whose definition, “to free a slave,” derives from the literal “to let go of someone’s hand.”
For others, in contrast, mittere would stem from another Indo-European root, *mit(h)-, “to leave,” found in German verbs such as meiden (“to leave aside,” “to avoid”) or vermissen (“to miss”). That original meaning could feasibly have evolved into “to lose” (see amittere or omittere below) and from there into “to let go” and ultimately into “to send,” which is the first dictionary definition of mittere and the one that has persisted in modern languages.
That meaning lasted in the form of any number of terms deriving from the past participle missus, which were taken up into English directly or through French: words such as mission, missionary, or missile (which in Latin referred to any hurled weapon and today is applied to self-propelled projectiles) or missive, from the expression littera missiva (“letters sent”), eventually converted into a noun, as in the French (lettre) missive or the Spanish (carta) misiva. The notion of “sending” is also present in the English message, a derivative of the Medieval Latin missaticum, introduced through French in the 14th century. This “French connection” was common to other words such as voyage (French voyage, Latin viaticum) or savage (French sauvage, Latin silvaticum). Lastly, mass (French messe, Spanish misa) stems from the noun taken from the feminine participle missa, pronounced at the end of the Eucharist: Ite, missa est. Whilst its origin is certain, the interpretation of the phrase is less so, for it may mean either “Go, (the prayer) has been sent” or “Go, it is the dismissal.”c Either way, the term was first used to mean “Eucharistic celebration” in the 4th century c.e. by St. Ambrose in his letters. Christmas, in turn, a derivative of mass, means “celebration of the birth of Christ.”
The Middle Ages witnessed a significant variation: the original meaning of mittere, “to send,” was attributed to other verbs such as inviare (literally, “to set on its way”) or mandare, in which the meaning “to command” was clearly replaced by the notion “to send.” Both verbs were successfully introduced into most Latin languages: Spanish enviar, mandar; French envoyer, mander; and Italian inviare, mandare.
Even so, mittere did not disappear altogether, although its use changed to mean “to send something to the table,” “to set on the table,” or simply “to put.” This latter meaning has survived in the French mettre, “to put,” and derivatives such as mettable (“wearable”), metteur (“director”), or mise en scène (“put on stage”). The Spanish verb meter (“to put into”), in turn, gives rise to remeter (“to tuck in”), arremeter (“to attack”), or the expressive adjective meterete (“busybodying”).
The meaning “to set on the table” was present in early Latin in missorium (“dish”) and missus (“course”). It is the root of the French mets (“dish”), introduced into English as mess, which changed from the original sense of “army officers’ dining hall” to a “chaotic mix of things.” Mets also gave rise to entremets, courses served between the main dish and dessert. That in Spanish became entremés, which is applied both in the culinary context and to a type of skit very popular in 16th- and 17th-century Spain, performed between acts in a longer play (interlude in English).
The root proposed by linguists, *ter- (“to go through, to cross”), and its variation *tra-, would give rise to the Latin intrare (“to enter”). Further to that theory, intrare would derive from trare, whose present participle trans would ultimately become a preposition.d Its significance in any event is clear: “through,” “across,” “beyond.” Hence the Latin traducere (“to lead or convey across”) and other more abstract conceits denoting progression, such as transformare (“to change in shape”), or duration, transcurrere (“to elapse”).
The root *ter- is present in other Indo-European languages in prepositions equivalent to trans, such as the German durch or the English through. It also appears in avatar (Sanskrit avatarah, “descent,” from avá, “off, down” + tarah, “crossover”), a term applied to the terrestrial incarnation of deities. Hence the modern meaning of transformation into another being. In its transferal into the Romance languages, trans gave rise to the French très (the origin of whose meaning, “very,” lies in “from one place to another,” which in turn yields the more abstract conceit “throughout, completely,” and hence “more intense”) and the Spanish tras (from the notion “beyond”).
In English, the presence of trans is not confined to the words introduced in the past from Latin or French; it is also found in words formed directly in English, such as transatlantic, transnational, transpersonal, or transship. And it is still being used today in electronics (transducer, transponder, transceiver) and science. In chemistry, for instance, trans- is the opposite of cis- (“on this side”), describing the arrangement of atoms in a molecular structure, as in cis-trans isomerism. It is widespread in medicine and biology: transaminase, transcranial, transcriptase, transcriptome, transcytosis, transdermal, transection, transfection, transferase, transferrin, transfusion, transgenesis, transgenic, translocation, transmembrane, transpiration, transplantation, transposition, transposon, and so on. And in recent years it has found its way into the terminology denoting sexual identity with terms such as transgender, transsexual, transvestism, transman, transwoman, and transphobia.
Languages draw from a number of morphological mechanisms to create new from existing words with which they are etymologically and semantically related. That resource contributes decisively to the enhancement of language, for the creation of vocabulary entails the inclusion of nuances in word meanings and therefore greater precision in the verbal depiction of reality.
In traditional grammar, the three morphological processes for creating new words were composition, derivation, and parasynthesis, to which a fourth, acronymy,e might be added. Structural semantics (4), in turn, also defines three processes, modification, development, and composition.f Our interest here focuses on the first of the three. More specifically, it hinges on the modification of verbs, the process of creating new verbs by adding prefixes or suffixes that alter the meaning of the base word, as in transmittere from mittere. In Latin, the mechanism normally involved in verbal modification consisted in adding a preverb to a verb. In English, the mechanism often involves the generation of phrasal verbs, i.e., associating an existing verb with another word or phrase. The two procedures are analogous, as the following examples show:
Before addressing the modifications of mittere, we should say that preverbs and prepositions have a single underlying meaning from which more or less interrelated notions derive. According to linguists such as Pottier, prepositions can express space, time, or notion (5). Hence, in connection with the Latin ante and its equivalent before:
Mittere stands as indisputable proof of how productive verbal modification was in Latin. In this study, we documented 23 preverbal modifications that add some nuance to the meaning of mittere, most of which have been carried over into modern languages. In English, all these derivatives were introduced as learned words directly from Latin or via other languages, French in particular. Some of the most prominent are listed below.
Admittere. The original meaning of the modifier ad- (“toward”) would yield the notion “to allow entry” (as in English admittance). A derivative of that initial idea would be “to accept,” present in most modern languages, English among them (as in admit, admission, admissible, and inadmissible).
Committere. Attached to this preverb (“with”), mittere became “to join, to put together” (found in the English noun commissure). This notion would ield “to engage” (observed in Latin in committere proelium, “to engage in battle”), which ultimately became associated with “to begin, to carry out” (Spanish acometer, “to undertake”). More specifically, it became associated with something reprehensible: to commit a crime, suicide, or in Spanish decomiso, “confiscation,” drawn from the Latin phrase de commisso crimine, “to confiscate goods related to the commission of a crime.” A third meaning, “to trust, entrust,” is present in commitment, which evolved from the delivery of something to the state for custody to today’s more figurative notion, “engagement.” The words committee and commission (“group of people in charge of something”) also convey that idea, as do commissary (once “officer in charge of food supply,” now “officers’ dining hall”), commis (“junior chef”), and committal (both “imprisonment” and “burial”). In Spanish, the conceit is inherent in the words comisario (“police superintendent”), cometido (“task”), and fideicomiso (“trusteeship”).
Demittere. The preverb de- (“downwards”) vests the word with the meaning “to send down, to drop.” It has persisted, but only barely. In Spanish, demisión (“despondency”) refers to a person’s mood; in English, to demit and demission, to relinquishment of a position or job.
Dimittere. With the modifier dis- (“in different directions”), the verb means “to send apart.” English took dismiss from the French demettre, giving it essentially two meanings: “to withdraw” and “to remove.” Oddly, the latter is the opposite of the Spanish dimitir, meaning “to resign,” which is not at all the same as being fired. The literal sense of the Latin verb persists in English in the adjective dismissive as well as in demise, a euphemism for death borrowed from French and originally meaning the conveyance of goods, which normally occurs after the death of their owner.
Emittere. With the addition of the prefix ex- (“out of,” “from within”), the meaning is clearly “to send out, to let go” (Latin emissarium, hence emissary). The same idea is conveyed by emit and emission, used in English in the context of global warming (“emit GHGs,” “emissions trading”) and in other modern languages in telecommunications (Spanish emisora, for “broadcasting station”).
Immittere. In- (“into,” “in”) affords the verb an obvious meaning: “to send into a place, to introduce.” In English, while to immit and immission are now archaic, immitance is used in electronics as a synonym of impedance. In Spanish, inmisión refers to the pollution concentrated in a given time and place.
Intermittere. When the verb is prefixed by inter- (“among,” “between”), its meaning is “to suspend temporarily, to pause for a moment,” which persists in the English intermit and intermission. The words intermittence and intermittent are also associated with discontinuity, such as in rain or, in medicine, the temporary easing of symptoms. Inter- also conveys the idea of “being in the midst,” “mediating in something.” Hence intermise in English; entremise in French, for “intercession”; and in Spanish, to refer to someone who interferes in others’ affairs, entremetimiento (“meddlesomeness”), entremeter (“to meddle”), and entremetido (“meddler”).
Intromittere. The meaning here is similar to immittere. In English, intromit and intromission are applied in medicine to mean the penetration of one body part by another (such as the vagina by the penis). The usage differs widely in colloquial Spanish, where intromisión is “interference” and entrometido a synonym of entremetido (derived from intermittere).
Omittere. With the preverb ob- (“toward, over, against, in the way of”), the meaning is clearly “to lay aside” and thus “to refrain from doing something, willingly or otherwise,” “to neglect,” “to disregard.” The word is widely used in the Romance languages (Spanish omitir, French omettre), from where it was introduced into English in the 14th century (to omit, omission). Shakespeare coined the term omittance, authoring the proverb “Omittance is no quittance.”
Permittere. The preverb per- (“through”) modifies mittere to mean “to let pass or go through,” and hence “to allow, to give consent.” The words to permit, permission, permissible, and permissive were introduced into English from French in the 15th century. The verb is extensively used in Latin languages (French permettre, Italian permettere, Spanish permitir).
Praemittere. The definition of prae- (“before”) explains the meaning of praemittere, “to send forward or before.” It persists in premise (French premisse, Spanish premisa), a term used in logic to signify the two propositions of a syllogism from which a conclusion is drawn. In archaic legal language, premises meant the property conveyed by bequest or deed, from which present usage, introduced in the 18th century (“land, appurtenances, and structures”), stems.
Praetermittere. Praeter-, “beyond,” is a modifier meaning “to let pass.” In English, to pretermit and pretermission convey the idea “to disregard intentionally,” which in certain contexts may be synonymous with to omit. In rhetoric, pretermission is another word for preterition or paraleipsis, the intention to omit something.
Promittere. With pro- (“forward, forth, before”) as a prefix, the verb assumes the meaning “to let go forward, to say beforehand,” “to foretell,” which even in Latin conveyed the idea of “promise” as “guaranteeing in advance that something would/would not occur.” This is the notion that prevails in modern languages: Spanish prometer and French promettre, lent to English as promise, from the past participle promesse (Latin promissum). It is found in phrases such as promised land, alluding to God’s announcement of Canaan to the people of Israel, and promissory note (“IOU”), common in business language.
Promittere, in turn, yields compromittere (literally “mutual consent to arbitration”), applied to the intention of litigants to honor a judge’s decision. In English, compromise (“to adjust or settle by partial mutual relinquishment of principles, position, or claims”) comes from the French compromis, in turn a derivative of the Latin participle compromissum. In Spanish, for instance, that initial legal sense has since acquired today’s moral connotations: compromiso (“commitment”) and comprometido (“committed”). To compromise also means “to put at risk”; hence in medicine the participle compromising is used to refer to any harmful element that may affect another body part.
Remittere. With the addition of re- (“back to the original place, again”), the original meaning is “to let go/to send back,” i.e., to reposition something in its original place (French remise, “garage”) or “to release from burden or guilt” and therefore “to forgive” in legal or religious domains (English remissible). “To weaken” or “to lose energy” is a related meaning, which when applied to adverse developments is equivalent in a way to returning something to its natural state. Hence to remit, said of a storm that abates or a disease whose intensity declines (as in remittent), but also remiss, “negligent in the performance of one’s work,” and unremitting, “relentless.” The notion “to send” conveyed by mittere also persists in the context of money or goods (to remit, remittance, Spanish remesa), correspondence (Spanish remitente, “sender”; remite, “return address”), and the referral to authority for consideration (to remit).
Submittere. This verb, like its equivalent in English, to submit, bears two main meanings, deriving from the two senses of the preverb sub- (“under” and “forth, up”). The first would be “to place under the control of another” and therefore “to yield, lower, let down” (as in submission, submittee, submittal, submittance, and submissive). The second is “to send forth from below, to produce,” meaning “to send or commit for consideration, study, or decision,” found as well in resubmit and submissible.
And that brings us to transmittere. The many meanings listed in dictionaries can be grouped under two main headings.
In the transition from Latin to modern languages, only the first meaning of the verb persisted. The second was replaced in English by to cross, in French by traverser, and in Spanish by atravesar. In English, the use of to transmit has been verified from the 15th century, whereas transmission appeared later. The verb bears two connotations, one spatial, meaning to send something tangible to another place (to transmit a letter, a message), and the other notional, the transfer of ideas or feelings. It also persisted as the transmission of a legacy, and by extension genetic legacy. Today its use is associated primarily with disciplines such as physics, telecommunications, mechanical engineering, and medicine.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (1), the first documented use of the verb to transmit in English dates from 1400 to 1450. In The Wars of Alexander, written in Middle English, it means “to cause (a thing) to pass,” a conceit unrelated to this discussion. Its next documented usage, in 1565, conveys the same meaning, although in the context of transmitting impurities or sins. The second definition given in the OED, documented since 1629, refers to inheritance law, which as discussed below is related to the subsequent use of the verb in the context of disease. The meaning acquired by the word in physics or mechanics (third definition in the OED, documented since at least 1664) to describe the transfer of sound, light, or heat is closer to medical usage, for it was later applied in physiology and then in pathology. Both the legal and mechanical meanings are found in classical Latin, as noted, and were introduced into modern languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian) via learned channels through Renaissance Latin.
According to the OED, the first documented appearance of the noun transmission dates to 1611. Used to mean the “action of transmitting,” “passage through a medium,” it was later applied more specifically to mechanics (first documented in 1704). Oddly, the OED makes no mention of the use of these words in biology or pathology, despite the firmly established usage in those contexts in English. The disease-related examples for the entries transmissible and transmissibility in this very dictionary and for the verb to transmit in Webster’s Third International Dictionary of the English Language (6) stand as proof of such usage. The omission may be partly explained by the fact that these entries are still to be revised further to a note in the OED. Interestingly, the subsequent use of the terms associated with the transfer of a disease has a precedent in classical Latin, in which the verb was also used to mean “conveying something in silence,”g as is generally the case of diseases passing from an ill to a healthy person.
To explain the progressive and specialized use of the verb to transmit and the noun transmission in medical contexts, we reviewed the appearance of both in medical treatises from the 15th to the 19th centuries in Latin, English, Spanish, French, and Italianh to acquire a historical overview of the matter. Bearing in mind that until the 18th century Latin was the language used in scientific literature intended for an international readership, the specialized terms used by a scientist in one language tended to appear in parallel form in another, usually within a narrow time frame.
In classic, late, and Medieval Latin, neither the verb transmittere nor the noun transmissio appeared with specialized meanings associated with medicine. No precedents of the modern use of these terms in connection with disease were found until the 16th century.
In the Renaissance, Girolamo Fracastoro introduced the word syphilis in medicine in 1530 with his most famous work, the poem Syphilis sive morbus Gallicus (Syphilis or the French disease). He also authored a book in 1546 on contagion entitled De contagione et contagiosis morbis (On Contagion and Contagious Diseases) (8), in which he distinguished between fevers caused from within and those prompted by external agents such as the air, germs, or vapors, noting that the latter could be “transmitted” from one person to another (febris in nobis primo pestilens sit et ab uno in alium transmittitur). In another context, he described the passage of fever from one area of the body to another, affecting different body parts. This notion of the conveyance of disease or its symptoms from one place to another connects with the aforementioned use of the term in mechanics and physics. Fracastoro in fact wrote about transmissio caloris (“heat transmission”). This mechanics-related meaning of the Latin verb applied to physiology can also be found in a treatise published in 1628 by William Harvey that revolutionized the understanding of the circulatory system. The English translation of his De motu cordis et sanguinis (On the Motion of the Heart and Blood) reads:
although some state that the lungs, arteries, and heart have the same function, they also say that the heart is the factory of spirits and that the arteries contain and transmit them…
To desire that waste vapors from the heart and air to the heart be transmitted by this same conduit is opposed to Nature which nowhere has made but a single vessel or way for such contrary movements and purposes. (9)
Fracastoro was apparently ahead of his times in the pathological use of the Latin verb transmittere and noun transmissio, which did not become widespread until the 18th century. French physician Nicolas Chesnau (10), in a treatise written in Latin, used the phrase qualitatis malignae transmissionem (“transmission of malignancy”) to refer to epilepsy and the mechanics of its flow to the brain.
Another significant text found in a 1725 treatise by a doctor to the Spanish court, Martín Martínez, attempted to explain fever in terms of its transmission from a number of sites within the body (11). An Italian medical text dated in 1746 on the transmission of fever also used the verb transmettere (12). Although we searched in English, we were unable to find a single clear example of such usage, a failing we would attribute to documentary shortcomings.
In 1774, we found the following sentence in a book on popular medicine: “What a dreadful inheritance is the gout, the scurvy, or kings-evil, to transmit to our offspring” (13).
The second edition of a treatise by an Irish physician published in 1777 used the word transmission to refer to interpersonal conveyance of what causes disease: “These morbific matters which are found capable of producing, occasionally, particular species of diseases, are of two sorts, native and adventitious; the first appear to be formed within the body, the second are communicated from without; either by the transmission of a subtile matter, or by actual contact with a diseased subject” (14).
By the late 18th century the verb and noun began to be used in their modern medical meaning, i.e., under the entry transmit in Webster’s (6), “to give or convey (a disease or infection) to another person or organism.”
From then on the use of these terms in pathology became increasingly popular and more abundant. In 1796, a medical journal contended: “the [venereal] disease or its consequences are frequently transmitted to the offspring, and often when the parents have no symptoms indicating its presence.”
These examples show that the two senses of the Latin verb converge in the pathological use of these terms. The meanings in both inheritance law, “to convey property or rights,” and in physics and mechanics (likewise documented in medicine in texts on physiology such as Harvey’s) are now applied to the mechanisms whereby disease is conveyed from the ill to the healthy.
Before transmission and to transmit in the sense studied here came into general use, the Latin word applied since ancient times to refer to the conveyance of disease from one person to another was contagio. Etymologically speaking, the term implies physical contact, for it is a nominal derivative of contingere (comprising tangere, “to touch,” and, to reinforce the notion of contact, the preverb cum, “with”). Hence, “to touch,” “to be in contact with.” From Medieval Latin it made its way into modern languages: contagion is documented in French since 1375 (15), contagio in Spanish since 1490 (16, 17), contagion in English since 1522 (1), and so on. We believe that transmission was introduced with its new pathological meaning as a generic term that embraced the conveyance of disease through both inheritance and contagion. Transmission and to transmit were also useful when it was unclear whether propagation entailed the direct contact between the ill and the healthy intrinsic to the word contagion. Both terms, transmission and contagion, were found in the following text written in 1821: “The plague is by most writers considered as the consequence of pestilential contagion, which is propagated from one person to another by association, or by coming near infected materials … but the laws of its transmission are not more accurately known than the specific nature of the contagion” (18).
In short, we believe that the introduction of the pathological use of transmission and to transmit was a response to the gradual deepening of the understanding of disease propagation. That led to a need for generic terms applicable to the conveyance of disease, whether through inheritance or through proximity (with or without physical contact) between the healthy and the ill.
Accustomed today to conceits such as airborne transmission, blood-borne transmission, fecal-oral transmission, and vertical transmission, many biomedical professionals tend to restrict the term transmission to mean microbial transmission. Like them, many a layperson appears to find it difficult to distinguish between transmissible (or in English, also communicable), contagious, and infectious, which are frequently used interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. Actually, however, the three are not strictly equivalent and their subtle differences should be borne in mind when precision of language is a concern. The adjective infectious refers to a disease caused by pathogenic microorganisms, be they bacteria, viruses, fungi, or protozoa. Such microorganisms are transmitted from one individual to another via immediate (direct contact) or mediate contagion. In the latter case, the mechanism may consist of hydric contagion, fomites, droplets, used/shared syringes, blood transfusion, organ transplant, or other channels of indirect contagion. All infectious diseases are, then, by definition, contagious and transmissible, but the contrary is not true. Inherent in the adjective contagious is the notion of disease transmission via direct or indirect contact between two people, although not necessarily involving the intervention of a pathogenic microorganism. Contagious diseases have been known in medicine, in fact, since the age of Hippocrates, whereas infectious disease as a conceit first appeared in the 19th century. The difference can be seen more clearly when we consider that both laughter and hysterics are contagious, but certainly not infectious. Lastly, the adjective transmissible is applicable to any disease that can be conveyed from one individual to another, via contagion (infectious or otherwise) or genetics. Huntington’s chorea, for instance, is a genetically transmissible disease, but it is neither contagious nor infectious.
Hereditary transmission, linked to nucleic acids, is crucial today in fields such as clinical genetics, molecular biology, and biotechnology. But it dates back 150 years, when Augustin monk Gregor Mendel published his “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden” (19) (Experiments on plant hybrids) in the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn. Over 8 years of experimentation, Mendel examined upward of 20,000 green and yellow peas and took detailed notes of their Charaktere, or phenotypical characteristics. The mathematical analysis of his results enabled him to deduce the laws whereby certain Elemente (today we call them genes or alleles) determine how characteristics are inherited or transmitted from parents to offspring. Initially his paper went unnoticed, for contemporary scientists were unable to perceive the significance of experiments with hybrid plants and Mendel died before his talents as a naturalist could be acknowledged. It was not until 1900 when three botanists and pioneering geneticists, Hugo de Vries (20, 21) in The Netherlands, Carl Correns (22) in Germany, and Erich von Tschermak (23) in Austria, independently rediscovered Mendel’s works and paved the way for the spectacular development of genetics, today the foremost discipline in biological science and the driver of modern biotechnology.
The transmission of pathogenic microorganisms and of genetic material are two fundamentals of biomedical science and can be found in such widely used expressions as sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in connection with the former and the transmission of plasmid-mediated resistance with the latter. The use of the term transmission in science and technology does not by any means end there, however. The prevalence of the usage of transmission in modern science is readily visible in countless specialized terms in all realms of biology and other technical and scientific disciplines: in mechanics and engineering it is applied to energy, electricity, mechanical force, and electromagnetic waves; in botany, to pollen from a flower’s stamen to its stigma; and in physiology, to nerve pulses across neuron synapses and of electrical stimuli from auricles to ventricles through the conductive tissue in the heart. In a similar vein, transmission electron microscopy is a type of microscopy in which a beam of electrons is transmitted through an ultrathin specimen. And we call acetylcholine, adrenaline, dopamine, γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glycine, histamine, and serotonin neurotransmitters because they are the chemical substances involved in neurotransmission, i.e., specific chemical agents that cross a synapse to inhibit or stimulate the postsynaptic nerve cell. Even the notion of cell signaling, a complex system of communication that governs basic cellular activities and coordinates cell actions, can essentially be interpreted as intracellular signal transmission.
From the times of Ancient Rome in the 3rd century b.c.e., the Latin word transmissio has been “transmitted” (through Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese) to all the major languages of culture, English among them. And through English, the international language of biomedical science in the 21st century, the term transmission is increasingly present today in some of the most dynamic disciplines of modern natural science, including genomics, molecular microbiology, hospital epidemiology, molecular genetics, biotechnology, evolutionary biology, and systems biology. In conjunction with the meanings of transmission ushered in by new concepts, the progressive development of every scientific discipline entails a growing degree complexity in the understanding of all the senses of the word. One immediate example can be found in this work, in which the kaleidoscopic reality of transmission processes in the specific realm of microbial biology is addressed from a host of perspectives.
Villalba J, Navarro FA, Cortés F. 2017. Origin, history, and meanings of the word transmission. Microbiol Spectrum 5(6):MTBP-0004-2016.
1Department of Sciences of Antiquity, University of Extremadura, Spain.
2Cosnautas, Cabrerizos (Salamanca), Spain.
3Department of Classical Philology and Indoeuropean Studies, University of Salamanca, Spain.
a Spanish transmitir, French transmettre, Portuguese transmitir, Italian trasmettere, Romanian transmite, Catalonian transmetre, Corsican trasmèttala.
b Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online (1), under “smite”: “The development of the various senses is not quite clear, but that of throwing is perh. the original one.”
c The latter would allude to the Catechumenal farewell (missa cathecumenorum), initially pronounced after the sermon, although the meaning was ultimately extended to the celebration of the entire mass, as noted by Ernout-Meillet and Blaise in the entries in their respective dictionaries (2, 3).
d This is not uncommon. Other instances of participles converted into prepositions include English during (Spanish durante) and Latin versus. Other authors, including Ernout-Meillet (2), reject this theory, contending that intrare derives from intra.
e Composition consists in forming a word by joining two or more, such as in heartache. In derivation words are formed by adding prefixes or suffixes to existing words, as in unmyelinated. Parasynthesis would be the simultaneous deployment of composition and derivation, as in nearsightedness. Acronomy is the creation of words from the initial letter or letters of each of the parts or major parts of a compound term, as in dopa (di-OH-phenylalanine).
f In modification the derived and original words are the same part of speech (e.g., the creation of to react from to act). Development entails a change in part of speech (e.g., the adjective microbial from the noun microbe). Lastly, composition is the joining of two lexemes, as in earwax.
g The eighth sense in the Oxford Latin Dictionary (7).
h From GoogleBooks and medical publications listed in archive.org.
1. Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online. 2016. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/. Accessed 28 November 2017.
2. Ernout A, Meillet A. 1967. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine: histoire des mots, 4th ed. Klincksieck, Paris, France.
3. Blaise A. 1954. Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs chrétiens. Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium.
4. Coseriu E. 1991. Principios de semántica estructural. Gredos, Madrid, Spain.
5. Pottier B. 1962. Systématique des éléments de relation. Étude de morphosyntaxe structurale romane. Klincksieck, Paris, France.
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