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I have noticed that when the suffix -ible is added to "admit", it becomes "admissible" rather than "admittible".

There are few other examples:

  • "omit" = "omissible" not "omittible".
  • "permit" = "permissible"
  • "transmit" = "transmissible"

These are words that end with it and have ssi in the suffixed forms. I didn't find other words that show the same pattern. Most it words don't have ssi forms in suffixed words.

Also:

  • commit = commission
  • emit = emission
  • admit = admission

I know that S and T are both alveolar sounds (produced at alveolar ridge) but this relationship seems to be confusing. I googled a lot but didn't find anything helpful. I asked some people and they told me "because Latin did it", but no one seemed to know the reason.

Does anyone know why the t changes to ss in these words?

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    etymonline: admit - late 14c., "let in," from Latin admittere* "admit, give entrance, allow to enter; grant an audience.* admission - early 15c., "acceptance, reception, approval," from Latin admissionem* (nominative admissio) "a letting in," noun of action from past-participle stem of admittere "admit, give entrance; grant an audience,"* So effectively you're asking why that "s / t" distinction occurred in *Latin*, which I would say is Off Topic. – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '21 at 13:22
  • Note that the rules of English allow us to derive, for example, *omittance* as an alternative noun form of *omit. It might not be as common as omission*, but it's in the full (subscription-only) Oxford English Dictionary. – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '21 at 13:28
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    But I see that 3-4 centuries ago, *admittance and admission were about equally popular.* So the fact that we've so decisively swung behind *admission* today must be telling us something about the linguistic preferences of Anglophones. – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '21 at 13:33
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    This happened way back in the B.C, when Latin was forming. One of the ways to form one of the past tenses in PIE (the "sigmatic aorist", if you want a term to freeze a discussion) was to add -s to the root. When this root happened to end with a t, the /ts/ cluster was reduced to just /s/ (though it was often double /s:/). This happened to a lot of verbs, including mittō, mittere, mīsī, missus (respectively, the first person singular present tense form 'I send', the infinitive 'to send', the 1sg Perfect 'I sent', and the past participle 'sent'). The last two forms show the change. – John Lawler Jan 28 '21 at 14:39
  • Why do you keep asking us about Latin? :) – tchrist Jan 30 '21 at 02:56

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The etymological reason is because in Latin, words like omissible, permissible, transmissible were built on perfect passive participle stems, which were marked with a -t- suffix. Because of a sound change between Proto-Indo-European and Latin, the -t- suffix is not directly visible, but instead results in -ss- in the adjectives you mention, which are all derivatives of one Latin verb, mittō. There are other adjectives ending in -ible that instead show addition of unchanged -t-, as in perceptible, or a change to single -s-, as in divisible; whether the perfect passive participle stem of a verb has -t-, -ss- or -s- is usually regularly based on the phonetic context in Latin, although there are some irregularly formed perfect passive participles.

The relevant sound change is that when a stem ending in a dental obstruent in Proto-Indo-European (*t, *d, or *dʰ) is combined with a suffix starting with the dental *t, the two dental consonants are replaced in Latin with -ss-, which was further simplified to single -s- everywhere except for after a short vowel.

Sound changes are frequently not simple to explain. As you said, t and s are both produced with similar parts of the tongue.

The "sigmatic aorist" is a construction with a distinct origin that corresponded to a distinct Latin stem (the verbal perfect stem) that appeared in finite past tense forms of verbs. Its relevance to your question is indirect. Stems ending in a dental obstruent in Proto-Indo-European also developed forms with -ss- or -s- in Latin when combined with the *s suffix of the sigmatic aorist. Perhaps in part because of this, in Latin, as in English, there was sometimes analogical influence between the perfect stem used in finite verb forms and the non-finite perfect passive participle stem. However, in the case of mittō, the stems are in fact different (perfect mīsī vs. participle missus), and you can see that that the words you mention are formed on the participle stem, not on the aorist stem.

The Latin suffix -ibilis did not only appear after passive participle stems; it could also be added to other word forms. According to "The morphome vs similarity-based syncretism: Latin t-stem derivatives" by Donca Steriade,

adjectives like duct-i-bilis and duct-ilis ‘which can be led’ are based on a t-stem (cf. duct-us ‘led’) and denote only passive ability; only root-based duc-ibilis can mean ‘who can lead’.

(page 117)

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