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
Italian
English
English Lemma
theme
English Variants
theam, teme
English POS
English Morphologically related words
thematic, thematically, theme (verb, now mostly in past participle/adjective themed), themeless
English First attestation
Crist..toke þe same word for his teme þat Baptist toke whanne he prechide. (OED: Eng. Wycliffite Serm. in Sel. Wks. I. 306, c.1380)
English Semantic history
» "subject, proposition, especially that of a sermon or the text on which a sermon is based" from 14C
My theme [teeme, teme, teem, tyme] is alwey oon and euere was Radix malorum est Cupiditas. (OED: G. Chaucer, Pardoner's Prol. 5, c1386)
» "reason, cause" 16C-19C
Ham. Why, I will fight with him vpon this theame... Quee. O my sonne, what theame? Ham. I loued Ophelia... (OED: W. Shakespeare, Hamlet v. i. 263, 1604)
Many later technical meanings:
» "principal melody, melody on which variations are composed (music)" from 16C
» "central proposition, topic (logic)"
» "topic, what is being talked about (linguistics)"
» "morphological stem to which inflections are added (linguistics)" from 16C
» "situation of the stars and planets at a particular moment (astrology)" from 17C
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.