Friendship and relationships

The seventeenth entry is tradire, to betray, and it is worth following backwards, because it explains a pair of English words that look like strangers. The Latin verb underneath is tradere, built from trans and dare: to hand over, to pass a thing along to somebody else. Handing it to the next generation produced the noun traditio, and from traditio English has « tradition ». Handing a man to his enemies gave that same traditio a second career, and by way of Old French it arrived as « treason », with traditor following as « traitor ». One noun, three English words, and nothing on the surface to tie them together. Italian keeps the join where anyone can see it: tradire and la tradizione sit in the same column of the dictionary, on the same stem, so a learner who has met one already owns half of the other. The older sense survives untouched in ordinary speech as well — il suo accento lo tradisce means his accent gives him away, and there the verb is doing nothing worse than passing something on.