video

Video (rendered vĭdĕo, "WID-eh-oh," "I see") is one of the most-lived-in words in the Latin corpus: 21,607 occurrences across 354 works. It belongs everywhere, but the record shows where it gathers thickest — Livy's Ab urbe condita ("From the Founding of the City," 1,335), then Cicero's correspondence, the Letters to Atticus (1,053) and Epistulae ad Familiares ("Letters to Friends," 719), then Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria ("The Training of the Orator," 710), Pliny's Naturalis Historia ("Natural History," 596), and Cicero's In C. Verrem ("Against Verres," 559). History, private letters, rhetoric, natural science, courtroom — seeing is the common verb of a mind at work in all of them.

The lexica agree flatly on the sense. De Vaan (Etymological Dictionary of Latin, Brill 2008) glosses it "to see," listing the principal parts (perfect vīdī, participle vīsum, "seen") and noting its attestation from Livius Andronicus onward. Lewis & Short (A Latin Dictionary, 1879) gives the same headword vĭdĕo, vīdi, vīsum, and preserves the clipped colloquial form viden' — that is, videsne, "do you see?" — from Plautus, Terence, Catullus, and Virgil. The word wears its everyday speech openly.

De Vaan's entry also records the derivatives the verb threw off: vidēlicet, "evidently, of course," and prūdēns, "well aware, clever," beside imprūdēns, "ignorant, unaware," and imprūdentia, "ignorance." Knowing, in Latin, keeps company with seeing — the family of sight standing next to the vocabulary of wit. The record's one matched etymology pointer is exactly this: de Vaan treats the word at entry #1978 (scan p. 690), and it is to that treatment, not to any deeper reconstructed root, that the derivatives are attributed here.

The cited surfaces are all Livy, book 1 — videam ("that I may see"), vidit ("he saw"), vidissent ("they had seen"), vīsum ("seen") — the tenses of a historian watching his city come to be.

When a word carries both seeing and, in its derivatives, a settled kind of knowing, which sense do we owe the other?