If the English word "obliterate" really comes from Latin "oblitteratus" (erased, forgotten), why is there no double t in the English word? [closed]

Question

The English word "obliterate" allegedly comes from Latin "oblitteratus" (erased, forgotten), itself from "ob-" (against) and "littera" (letter of the alphabet). Here is its page on etymonline. But, if that's true, why doesn't the English word "obliterate" contain a double t, to be *oblitterate, like Latin "oblitteratus"? Was it borrowed through French, which lost geminate consonants rather early (so to be for the same reason as there is no double-m in "flame", even if it comes from Latin "flamma"), or?

Answer 1

In general, any word derived from the root of the Latin word littera is spelled with liter- in English: examples are literature, literate, literary, literal. (Letter itself is an exception, since it is a less learned formation.) I don't know exactly why this spelling became established. Although the double -tt- spelling littera is supposed to have been usual in Classical Latin, variant spellings with single -t- seem to have existed from fairly early on. (The ultimate origin of Latin littera is debated: many scholars think the double /tt/ form developed out of an earlier form with single /t/, but others disagree with that explanation.)

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It looks like the earliest attestations in English of the word literature, from the 15th century, show both -t- and -tt- spellings, so I think these words in general previously showed variation in spelling between -t- and -tt- in English.

I don't think the modern English habit of using -t- spellings to the exclusion of -tt- spellings in this family of words goes back to French: Modern French uses spellings with double -tt- in related words like littéraire and littérature. However, it seems Middle French may have showed variation, as in Middle English, between -t- and -tt- spellings (which would have been pronounced identically). The OED entry for literal mentions "Middle French literal, litteral", for literary mentions "Middle French literaire, litteraire". The TLFi etymology sections for littéraire and littéral cite historical examples of single-t spellings, "1527 œuvre literaire" and "Début xiv^es. science literale « les belles-lettres, les lettres » (Aimé de Mont-Cassin, Histoire des Normands, éd. N. de Bartholomaeis, p. 217)"

As for the situation in Late Latin, Buzássyová 2016 gives the following summary:

The word lit(t)era was originally written with a long vowel or the diphthong ei and one t, which then (around 200 B.C.) turned into a sequence of a short vowel and double t (the so-called rule littera or Iuppi­ter). Thanks to the etymologies of Roman grammarians deriving the meaning of the word lit(t)era from litura or legitera, the original way of spelling with one t came into use again. The chapters in Artes gram­maticae may therefore, according to the preferences of the author, have the headings De litera or De littera, and De literis or De litteris.

(Ľudmila Buzássyová, "The ‘Phonetic Complex’ in Renaissance Latin Grammar: Petrus Ramus’s Dichotomies and Their Reflections in Two Vernacular Grammatical Texts", Graeco-Latina Brunensia (Bratislava) 21, no. 2, page 82. As you see, Buzássyová subscribes to the hypothesis that a single-t form of lit(t)era was original, but says that the use of single-t spellings in later Latin texts was due to etymological theories of the writers.)

To sum up, then, it seems like t and tt spellings in littera and its derivatives coexisted to some extent as early as Latin (although tt was clearly the dominant spelling in Classical Latin). In Middle French, spellings with t and tt seem to have coexisted (I'm not sure what their relative frequencies were), and Middle English showed similar variation between t and tt. For reasons unclear to me, t rather than tt became the established spelling when modern English spelling conventions became fixed.

Those authors who played a role in standardizing the single t spelling in English presumably also used single t in the corresponding Latin words. Thus, Samuel Johnson's dictionary of 1755 has entries like

• ILLI'TERATE. adj. [illiteratus, Latin.]

• Li'terature. n.s. [literatura, Latin.]

• To OBLI'TERATE. v.a. [oblitero, ob and litera, Latin.]

None of this poses a problem to deriving obliterate from Latin oblitteratus, obliteratus: it simply comes from the second of these two alternative spellings of the same word.

Here are some Google Books results showing that spellings with "oblitt-" existed in English in the 17th century:

• 1638 oblitterated

• 1628 oblitterated

• 1666 oblitterate

• 1643 oblitterate