Introduction
The English word tuberculosis and its Spanish cognate
tuberculosis refer to an infectious disease typically caused by the
bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB), though there are four other mycobacteria
that can cause, M. bovis, M. africanum, M. canetti, and M. microti. Tuberculosis,
often abbreviated to TB in English, primarily affects the lungs, but it may affect
other parts of the body as well. The cause of this disease was found by German
physician and microbiologist Robert Koch in 1882, when he discovered the
tuberculosis bacillus, for which he received the Nobel Prize in physiology and
medicine in 1905. The pulmonary form of the disease had already been described
in 1689 by English physician Richard Morton. who described the tubercles or nodular
lesions in the lungs of affected patients. It was not until the 1820’s, however,
that tuberculosis was found to be a single disease and it received its current name
in 1839 (see below).
About 90% of all tuberculosis infections result in no
symptoms and thus the bacteria is said to be latent (and non-contagious). In
the remaining 10%, the disease becomes active and about half of those patients
will die if not treated. Currently, about a quarter of the world population has
the latent form of the disease. Active TB can be diagnosed by means of X-Rays
and cultures of bodily fluids and latent TB (LTBI), by means of the tuberculin
skin test (TST) or blood tests. There is a preventive vaccine for TB and the
disease can now be treated by means of multiple antibiotics administered during
a long period of time, though antibiotic resistance is an increasing problem.
The word tuberculosis
The name tuberculosis is a New Latin noun created in the 1839 by German professor of medicine Johann Lukas Schönlein. Interestingly, Dr. Schönlein was also one of the first German medical professors to lecture in German rather than in Latin. From German, the name tuberculosis spread to other European languages, including English tuberculosis [tə.ˌbɜɹ.kjə.ˈloʊ̯s.əs], French tuberculose [ty.bɛr.ky.ˈloz], and Spanish tuberculosis [tu.βeɾ.ku.ˈlo.sis].
This New Latin word was formed from the stem tūbercŭl‑ of the classical Latin noun tūbĕrcŭlum ‘a small swelling, bump, or protuberance; a boil, pimple, tubercle’ (L&S), a diminutive of the third declension noun tūber (gen. tūbĕr‑is) that meant primarily ‘a hump, bump, swelling, tumor, protuberance on animal bodies, whether natural or caused by disease’ (L&S) (cf. tūbĕr‑cŭl‑um, with the diminutive suffix ‑cŭl‑). To this stem, the scientific New Latin suffix ‑osis was added, which adds the meaning ‘diseased or abnormal condition’ (AHD). The source of this suffix is the Greek ending -ωσις (-ōsis) ‘state, abnormal condition, or action’, from ‑όω (-óō) stem of causative verbs, and the noun-forming ending ‑σις (-sis). The reason for the name is the tubercules (lumps) in the lungs that result from the disease.
English and Spanish have also borrowed the Latin source
words from which the word tuberculosis is derived, directly from written
Latin. Spanish has the word tubérculo, from Lat. tūbercŭlum, and English has both
tuber, from Lat. tūber,
and tubercle, from Lat. tūbercŭlum. Eng. tuber (first attested in the
mid-15th century) means ‘a round swollen part on the stem of some plants, such
as the potato, that grows below the ground and from which new plants grow’
(LDCE). The English word tubercle (first attested in the mid-16th
century) is mostly a technical one used in anatomy, zoology, botany, and
medicine (pathology). In the latter of these fields, it has the meaning ‘a
small nodular lesion in the lungs or other tissues, characteristic of
tuberculosis’ (COED) and in the former ones, ‘a small rounded projection or
protuberance, especially on a bone or on the surface of an animal or plant’
(COED). The word tuber can also be used with the last of these meanings
of the word tubercle, namely for ‘a rounded swelling or protuberance; a
tuberosity; a tubercle’ (RHWU). The Spanish equivalent of both of these English
words is tubérculo, since Spanish never borrowed the Latin word tuber.
From the noun tuber, Latin derived an adjective and
from it, another noun, both of which have made it into English and Spanish. The
adjective was tūbĕrōsus/a, formed with the first/second
adjective-forming suffix ‑ōs‑,
which meant ‘full of humps, lumps, or protuberances’ (L&S). From this, we
get the synonymous English adjectives tuberous and tuberose that
mean ‘producing or bearing tubers’ or ‘being or resembling a tuber’ (AHD).
Spanish has also borrowed this noun as tuberoso/a. From this adjective
and the abstract-noun-forming suffix ‑ĭ‑tāt‑,
Latin could form the noun tūbĕrōsĭtāt‑,
which English has borrowed as tuberosity, which refers to ‘the quality
or condition of being tuberous’ but can also mean ‘a projection or
protuberance, especially one at the end of a bone for the attachment of a
muscle or tendon’ (AHD). The Spanish cognate of this word is tuberosidad.
There may be another pair words in English and Spanish that are
derived ultimately from Lat. tūber,
namely the cognate words (paronyms, not full cognates) Eng. truffle and
Sp. trufa. These words are good friends semantically and they have two
rather different meanings in each of these modern languages, namely (1) ‘a
strong-smelling underground fungus that resembles a rough-skinned potato,
considered a culinary delicacy. [Family Tuberaceae.]’; and (2) ‘a soft
sweet made of a chocolate mixture’ (COED). The second sense of these words is
derived from the first one, in the 20th century and it is based on the visual
similarity between the fungus and the chocolate confection. Both of these words
have been hypothesized to come from Old Provençal trufa, a descendant of
a vulgar Latin tufera, with metathesis of the r, a descendant of the
neuter plural wordform tūbĕra
of the noun tūber
‘edible root’. French would have borrowed the term from Occitan at the end of
the 14th century, cf. Mod. Fr. truffe [ˈtʀyf]. Spanish and French both borrowed the word from Occitan
and English borrowed it from French to which it later added the suffix ‑le (OED).
(The English word without the suffix did exist in English as truff, but
it is now obsolete, OED.) The Spanish word trufa has another
sense in colloquial dialectal Spanish, namely ‘lie, hoax, jest’, a meaning that
is quite old and exists also in the French word (Sp. ‘mentira, patraña, embuste,
engaño’; cf. Cat. trufa ‘joke, kidding’). Actually, the ‘trick, jest’
meaning of this French word precedes the ‘edible fungus’ one. The former is
found already in the 13th century, whereas the latter is not found until the
15th century.
Earlier names in English
The traditional name for the tuberculosis disease in English
before its modern name was borrowed from German was consumption [kənˈsʌmpʃən].
English borrowed this word in the 14th century from Old French consumpcion
or consumption (Modern French consomption [kɔ̃sɔ̃psjɔ̃]), where
it meant ‘wasting of the body’, ‘destruction’ and, eventually, ‘wasting
disease, especially pulmonary tuberculosis’ (OED). The word consumption to
refer to tuberculosis is now ‘dated’ (COED), ‘old-fashioned’ (MWALD), and ‘no longer
in scientific use’ (AHD).
The original source of this word was classical Latin cōnsūmptiōn-, a noun meaning ‘the
process of consuming or wearing away’ in classical Latin, and in post-classical
Latin also ‘destruction’, ‘death’, and ‘a disease in which the body wastes away’
(for the most part, what we now know as tuberculosis). This noun was derived
from the participial stem cōnsūmpt‑
of the passive participle cōnsūmptus of the verb cōnsūmĕre (principal parts: consūmo,
consūmĕre, consumpsi, consumptus).
The original meaning of this Latin verb was ‘to take wholly or completely’
(L&S), from which other meanings derived over time such as ‘to consume,
devour’, ‘to waste, squander, annihilate’, ‘to kill, destroy’ and ‘to eat’. This
Latin verb is, of course, the source of the cognates Eng. consume ~ Sp. consumir,
which are close friends semantically in the modern languages.
The 3rd conjugation Latin verb cōnsūmĕre was derived from the
verb sūmĕre ‘to take, take up,
take in hand, etc.’ by means of the prefix con‑ ‘with, together;
completely’ (con+sūmĕre; principal parts: sūmo,
sūmĕre, sumpsi, sumptus).
This verb was passed on to Spanish as sumir, a fancy word today that
means primarily ‘to sink, plunge, submerge’, used mostly in a figurative sense,
e.g. Al caer al río el anillo, se sumió con rapidez ‘As the ring fell
into the river, it quickly sank’, La guerra sumió a muchas personas en el
hambre ‘The war plunged many people into hunger’ (both examples from Larousse).
Other verbs derived from this Latin verb by prefixation were: (1) assūmĕre ‘to take up, receive,
adopt or accept’, source of (partial friends) Eng. assume and Sp. asumir,
from ad ‘to’ + sūmĕre); (2) praessūmĕre ‘to take first; to
take for granted, etc.’, source of (partial friends) Eng. presume ~ Sp. presumir,
from prae‑ ‘before’ + sūmĕre;
and (3) īnsūmere ‘to take for any thing; hence to apply to, expend upon’
(L&S), source of the rare cognate verbs Eng. insume ~ Sp. insumir
both meaning ‘to take in, absorb’ (from in‑ ‘in’+sūmĕre). Interestingly,
Spanish has adopted a noun derived from the rare verb insumir, namely insumo,
as the most common way to translate the very common English word input. Medieval
Latin has also created a verb subsūmĕre
‘to take under’ from which comes Eng. subsume, a verb not borrowed by
Spanish (the Spanish translations of Eng. subsume are englobar and
incluir).
In the early 16th century, English borrowed another name for
this disease that had been used in Late Latin, namely phthisis. Although
rare, this word is still used in English for ‘pulmonary tuberculosis or a
similar progressive wasting disease’ (COED). The Late Latin word phthisis
was a loanword from Greek φθῐ́σῐς (phthísis), the name for tuberculosis
and tuberculosis-like wasting diseases in this language, though this noun had a
more basic original meaning, namely ‘decline, decay, wasting away’, since it was
derived from the verb φαίνειν (phaínein) ‘to decay, waste away’ by means of the noun-forming
suffix ‑σις (‑sis). The English word
phthisis, typically pronounced [ˈθaɪ̯sɪs] or [ˈtʰaɪ̯sɪs], among other possible spelling pronunciations, was
never a common one in English, but rather a medical one and most dictionaries
classify it as archaic or rare today, though not obsolete. As we will
see below, its Spanish cognate was quite a bit more common.
Two adjectives were derived from the noun phthisis in
English, namely phthisic and phthisical. The former is a loanword
through Old French tisike or phtisique ‘consumptive’ (11th century),
which comes from the Latin adjective phthĭsĭcus/a ‘consumptive, related
to consumption’, a loanword from Gk. φθισικός
(phthisikós) ‘consumptive,
phthisical’, both containing cognate adjective-forming suffixes, namely Grk ‑ικ‑ and Lat. ‑ĭc‑ (phthĭs‑is + ‑ĭc‑ = phthĭsĭcus).
The adjective phthisical was created in English from the earlier phthisic
by the addition of the Latinate adjectival suffix ‑al, a common addition
to Latinate adjectives ending in ‑ic in this language (cf. Eng. physical
vs. Sp. físico/a, Eng. logical vs. Sp. lógico/a). Interestingly,
English borrowed the adjective phthisic even earlier than the noun phthisis,
in the late 14th century. (As we will see, Spanish did too.)
Not only that but the adjective phthisic was also used
as a noun to refer the disease, as a variant of the noun phthisis (AHD).
Actually, it wasn’t just tuberculosis that the name phthisic and/or phthsis referred
too, for at the time these diseases were not properly understood. The dictionary
tells us that the noun phthisic was used in English not just for tuberculosis
but also for ‘any illness of the lungs or throat, such as asthma or a cough’
(AHD). The same thing is true of the name consumption, which could refer to any
wasting disease, of which tuberculosis was the most common. It is thus not surprising
that the newly-coined word tuberculosis was so readily adopted once the
cause of the disease was discovered in the 19th century.
Earlier names in Spanish
The two English words for this disease that we just
discussed have cognates in Spanish, which were also used to refer to the disease
in this language. The earliest name for the disease in Spanish was consunción,
a semi-learned word that comes from the same Latin source as Eng. consumption,
with simplification of the Latin consonant cluster (cf. Part I, Chapter 10).
This word is rare in Modern Spanish and dictionaries do not give it as another
name for tuberculosis but rather define it more vaguely as, first, ‘deterioration
and extinction of something, generally by combustion, evaporation or wear’ and,
secondly, in medicine, as the ‘progressive physical deterioration of a person
or animal, accompanied by a visible loss of weight and energy’ (Vox).[1]
The connection of this noun to the modern Spanish verb consumir
is obvious but the semantic connection is only partial. The verb consumir
is polysemous since it has between 5 and 7 senses, depending on the dictionary.
According to the DLE, which gives 7 senses for consumir, some quite
rare, the two main ones are ‘to destroy, extinguish’ and ‘using groceries or
other goods to satisfy needs or wants’.[2]
María Moliner’s dictionary, which only gives 5 senses for this verb, does give
one that the DLE does not, perhaps because it is archaic, namely ‘to make
someone skinny or weak’, which is relevant to us since this is the sense that
relates to the Spanish noun consunción.[3]
Note that Spanish has created other nouns from the verb consumir
that relate to the main senses of the verb consumir, namely consumo
and consumición, both meaning ‘consumption, the act of consuming’. The
noun consumición can also be used in some dialects, such as in Spain, to
refer to what one consumes at establishments such as bars, coffeeshops, or discotheques,
the word being very common in that context, e.g. Cuesta mil pesetas la
entrada con consumición ‘The cost of entrance and a drink (etc.) is one
thousand pesetas’ (María Moliner).
Before tuberculosis became the normal name for this
disease in Spanish in the 19th century, the more common name was no longer consunción
but rather tisis, which is an adaptation of Lat. phthisis (see
above). This word is somewhat archaic now in Spanish, but it is still found in
dictionaries, which tell us that the word is still used in medicine as a
synonym of tuberculosis, but also to refer to any ‘disease in which there is
gradual and slow consumption, hectic fever and ulceration in some organ’ (DLE).
In other words, tisis was the word that was used for tuberculosis and
similar diseases that resulted in patients wasting away before the causes of
these diseases was known and the diseases were given unambiguous names.
An even earlier word for the tuberculosis disease in Spanish,
now obsolete, is tísica, a noun derived from the adjective tísico/a
used to refer to people with the disease, much like the noun física ‘physics’,
the name of the branch of science, is derived from the feminine form of the adjective
físico/a ‘physical’. As we saw, English also used a cognate of this word,
namely phthisic, to refer to the disease in the 14th century, even
before it borrowed the noun phthisis. Nebrija’s 1495 dictionary gives tísica
as the name for the disease, but not tisis, which was obviously not in use
at the time. Nebrija also mentions the noun tísico/a as the name for
someone who suffers from the disease (DCEH), much like Sp. físico/a ‘physicist’
is used to refer to someone who practices physics.
It seems that Old French did use early on the word tesie
or tisie derived from the Latin name phthisis, which in the
mid-16th century came to be spelled phtisie, its current form. It is very
likely that Sp. tisis and Eng. phthisis were adopted under the
joint influence of the cognate Latin and French words after the words Sp. tísica
~ Eng. phthisic were already in use as names for the disease.
Names for tuberculosis sufferers
Since we just mentioned that tísico/a was used to refer
to a sufferer of this disease, we should ask if there are any other names for such
sufferers. In English, there is no single word for them today and thus the only
options are tuberculosis sufferer or tuberculosis patient.
Spanish, on the other hand, uses the noun tuberculoso/a for such a
meaning. This noun is derived by conversion from the identical adjective formed
with the adjective-forming suffix ‑oso/a. The Spanish adjective tuberculoso/a
translates into English as tuberous in Botany and as tubercular
or tuberculous in Medicine. But the English cognate of the adjective tuberculoso/a,
namely tuberculous, cannot be used as a noun in English. Actually, this is
not surprising since this is something applicable to all adjectives containing the
cognate suffix that descends from Lat. ‑ōs‑. In Spanish, adjectives formed with the ending ‑oso/a
that describe people are often used as nouns too, as in this case, but not so their
English cognates, e.g. Sp. avaricioso/a ‘avaricious; avaricious person’ ~
Eng. avaricious, Sp. goloso/a ‘sweet-toothed (person)’, Sp. cauteloso/a
‘cautious (person)’.
As we saw above, in Spanish, the adjective tísico/a
could also be used as a noun in earlier times to refer to a person affected by
tuberculosis, a ‘sufferer of phthisis’. In English, the word consumptive
was used to refer to someone suffering from consumption. Eng. consumptive
was primarily an adjective meaning ‘of, relating to, or afflicted with
consumption’, but in earlier times, since around the middle of the 17th
century, it was also used as a noun for ‘a person afflicted with consumption’
(AHD). Some dictionaries warn us that the noun consumptive is today ‘old-fashioned’
to refer to a person afflicted with consumption, but other dictionaries do not give
any such usage warnings.[4]
[1] In Spanish:
‘Deterioro y extinción de algo, generalmente por combustión, evaporación o
desgaste’ and ‘Deterioro físico progresivo de una persona o animal, acompañado
de una pérdida visible de peso y energía’.
[2] In
Spanish: ‘tr. Destruir, extinguir. U. t. c. prnl’ and ‘Utilizar
comestibles u otros bienes para satisfacer necesidades o deseos’.
[3] In
Spanish: ‘tr. Poner *flaco o *débil a ↘alguien.’
[4] It is The
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English that tells us that this use is ‘old-fashioned’
today.
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