TEMA
Latin Lemma
thema < Gk θέμα
Latin POS
N
Latin Meaning
"subject, topic, theme; disposition of heavenly bodies at a person's birth: a horoscope" L&S
Spanish
Portuguese
French
French Lemma
thème
French Variants
thèmes, theme, tesme, teme, theume, thieume, thieusme, tume
French POS
French Morphologically related words
thématique
Ranking/frequency in French
French First attestation
Por plus enforcier l'anatesme, / Quant il aura finé son tesme, / Li met où poing ung ardant cierge / Qui ne fu pas de cire vierge. (TLF: Jean de Meun, Roman de la Rose, ll.20189-92, 1269-78)
French Historical frequency (per million words)
13C: 0 | 14C: 0 | 15C: 0 | 16C: 3 | 17C: 0 | 18C: 0 | 19C: 8 | 20C: 25 | 21C: 17 | FRANTEXT |
French Semantic history
» "subject, proposition, especially that of a sermon or the text on which a sermon is based" from 13C
Et pour venirà sa matiere, prant pour theme: Subtrahate vos abomni fratre ambulante inordinate, IJe ad Thessalonic.ultimo. (FRANTEXT: Nicolas de Baye, Journal, 1, 1400)
Many later technical meanings:
» "principal melody, melody on which variations are composed (music)"
» "central proposition, topic (logic)"
» "topic, what is being talked about (linguistics)"
» "morphological stem to which inflections are added (linguistics)"
» "situation of the stars and planets at a particular moment (astrology)"
Italian
English
Cultural transmission
Thema seems to have been familiar in Medieval Latin, where it developed its meanings of "subject or text of a sermon" and "logical proposition", the initial meanings of the borrowing in the vernaculars, suggesting common adaptation. Later technical meanings also suggest a common usage within western European cultural communities. The collocations noted in modern English are sometimes calqued into other languages, with, for example, Sp. parque temático overtaking parque de atracciones in frequency from 2000 onwards (Google ngram viewer). It is not clear that the secondary Lat. meaning of "disposition of heavenly bodies at a person's birth: a horoscope" was intially paralleled; this may have been a later restitution. All other meanings of tema and its congeners are transparently related. though sometimes languages show idiosyncratic individual developments: this is the case of Sp. "obstinacy" and Fr. "reason, cause", which appear not to be paralleled elsewhere, and have become obsolete. French and Italian use the word in the sense of "essay", and in French this has developed the even more specific meaning of "translation from one's native language into a foreign language". Treated most commonly as masculine in Romance, though there are some examples of feminine.