In Praise of my Favorite Latin Verb – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
I first started studying Latin when I was fourteen, a high school freshman at St. James Academy. Over the next four years I studied Latin with Bob Weinstein, then the St. James Latin teacher, and even took a year of Ancient Greek with him as well. In those years I got a good foundation in Latin, though I’ll admit I didn’t learn as much as I wanted, in part thanks to my own immaturity at the time. In the years since I’ve been able to connect more of these concepts in my thinking about the language, now on my third round of studying it. I often like to say that there are certain languages which I feel I can inhabit, that are so familiar and comfortable to me that I feel empowered to read, speak, write, and even think in them on a regular basis. These four are English, my native language, Irish my ancestral language, French, the language I fell in love with in college, and Latin, my original language of study in school.
Honestly, it took me until my third round studying Latin to really get the hang of today’s verb of note: mittō. Its full dictionary entry, laying out its principal parts are mittō, mittere, mīsī, missum. Looking at these four we can see the utility of this verb, which in its most basic meaning I’d translate mittō as “I send.” It means to send, but it also includes other types of sending like dispatching, releasing, or extending a hand, yielding, bringing out, attending, and dedicating a book, among many others. To say that one verb has so many meanings, so many actions it represents seems a bit of a stretch to me, but if you only think of a language by taking its parts out of place and analyzing them individually of the rest of the language, you’ll find you’re getting a different picture than you would if you considered the whole thing in one go.
Mittō has a great many descendants in English. Just looking at that 1st person present active form (mittō) we can see emit, intermittent, omit, permit, remit, submit, transmit, and everyone’s favorite cat name mittens. Frommīsī and missum we get all of the mission words, words like intermission, missile, omission, permission, promise, remission, and transmission.
Even the word Mass as in the Catholic liturgy comes from mittō. It originated in the phrase Īte, missa est, which I’ve always heard as “Go, the assembly is dismissed” though I think of it more in line with the phrase “the Mass has ended” that you hear at the end of every liturgy. Missa in that phrase comes from missiō, a 3rd declension Latin noun meaning sending or dismissal, which itself has roots in our old friend mittō. One thing of interest regarding the name of the Mass is that the Latin word Missa is the origin of a great many names for the liturgy in the Romance and Germanic languages as well as the Polish msza. Yet in Irish the Mass is called Aifreann, which comes instead from the Latin verb participle offerendus, essentially translating as offering. The same Latin word is the origin of the name for the Mass in all of the other Celtic languages, though Welsh and Breton today call it an offeren and an oferenn respectively.
I decided to write about mittō this week because it keeps coming up in stuff as I find myself going about my work. I like versatility, the idea that we can look to something as particular as a verb like mittō to find the source for so many concepts and ideas. Language is the way we understand the world around us. It’s one of the first things in most creation myths that the humans do, they look about and start naming things. Those names transmit information about the object to people whether in earshot or in other worlds through writing. In our own day we are pushing the limits of mittō and its descendants by sending data back and forth to our furthest out exploratory spacecraft, from the Voyagers on the edge of the Solar System to the Perseverance Rover on Mars to the International Space Station in orbit. All of that data gets submitted back to each craft’s mission control here on Earth for further analysis.So, here’s to mittō, one of my favorite Latin verbs.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 