664: transmit and commit Oct, 2, 2016

Root words are sometimes easy to pick out, but other times may be the source of confusion. Many words, such as 'transmit' and 'commit' are fairly simple words which both come from 'mittere' which is Latin for 'to send'. It may seem odd then that  'transmission' and 'commission' are the nounal forms. This isn't due to irregularities at all, in fact, it is just an extension of the original Latin base. 'Mittere' may be the form of the infinitive verb, but 'missus' is its participial form. It would have been the case that English writers would replace the '-ssion' with a '-tion' to make the spelling more logical by retaining the T's, but Latin was seen at the pinnacle of all languages, and scholars tended to gravitate towards it, generally.