12/11/2023 0 Comments Transmit meaning![]() Influenza virus could become transmissible in mammals Today, transmissible is nearly always used in the context of contagious diseases: Transmissible is an interesting case: it’s the only one of these words that has survived in form but has changed in meaning (or at least context) along the way. Rare.” There is some 16th- and 17th-century use, interchangeable with permissible, but recent evidence shows the development of a narrow sense, meaning “satisfying the requirements for a permit,” such as “permittable architectural plans.” 'Transmissible' in Legal and Medical Usage ![]() Though it did have a definition in our 1934 Unabridged edition, it was given simply as “Permissible. The history of permittable shows a similar path of decline. There is some recent evidence of admittable referring to students seeking admission to a college and patients considered ill enough to be admitted to a hospital-showing that Johnson’s distinction is still a valid one-but, for the most part, admittable has been eclipsed by its cousin admissible in contemporary English. John Gauden, The tears, sighs, complaints, and prayers of the Church of England, 1659 Ver since there was such a great Councel in the nation, and long before there was any house of commons: neither presbyterian nor independent ministers are admittable Its definition, “that may be admitted,” is pretty formulaic, but Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary makes an interesting distinction, making it clear that it only applies to the sense of admit meaning “to allow entry.” Here’s a 17th-century example of the kind of use he was referring to: 'Admittable' vs 'Admissible'įor instance, we have admittable, a perfectly predictable and good word that happens to have fallen from common use (and from the pages of our dictionaries since 1961). The result is an interesting Darwinian test case for the survival of words in a language. These adjectives entered the language in the 16th and 17th century, and knowledge of Latin was sufficiently widespread among the scholars and writers of the time to give a clear advantage to the more Latinlike ( -ss-) forms from the start, but the parallel use of the ( -tt-) forms meant that a natural competition for usage was underway. ![]() But a funny thing happened on the way to forming adjectives from these verbs: rather than forming only from the past participles-as this process worked in Latin-English speakers stuck the -able/-ible ending on both the infinitive ( -tt-) and the past participle ( -ss-) stems. ![]() These gave us the verbs admit, permit, and transmit. Let’s take a look at a few of these pairs of infinitives and past participles: One group of words formed with this suffix had another spelling pattern in common: they were all Latin verbs that changed -tt in the infinitive form to -ss- in the participial form. In Latin, the -bilis suffix indicated “capable (of acting) or worthy of (being acted upon).” Our adjective able as a free-standing word derives from a Latin word that had this form, habilis (also the root of prohibit). As with -ative, these endings derive from Latin but are applied to verb stems that come from both Latin words and words of Germanic origin from Old English (like talk and play). Adding '-able' to WordsĪnother very common verb-to-adjective alteration is the addition of -able or -ible to a verb: playable, paintable, walkable, deductible, exhaustible, etc. Some verbs become adjectives in more or less fixed ways with other suffixes such as -en ( broke, broken) or -ful ( play, playful) or -ative ( talk, talkative). So routine, in fact, that some standard verb tenses can do double duty as adjectives without even a change in spelling-only the word’s function in a sentence changes: Turning a verb into an adjective is a routine thing in English.
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