Good question...."Assumption" comes from French. The French word is "Assomption" and as you know French words etymologies are based on greek and Latin sources.I found a page that was translatable from French to English. Click here.
As a shortcut the "p" comes from either "to support" or suppose
This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mozart,
Posts: 6472 | Location: u.s.a, south Florida | Registered: 06-03-02
Easier than that. The Latin verb as learned by students goes assumo, assumere, assumpsi,[I]assumptum[/I] that is 'I take up/upon myself', 'to take up' 'I took up' ( assumptum is effectively meaningless and really only exists as the form to give us the root for other formations). So we can see that 'assumptus/ta/tum' would be the adjective for something [masculine/feminine/neuter] taken up and if we were inventing a noun for the act of taking up we'd create 'assumptio' (I expect the Romans already had but I've no Latin dictionary here). So whether we have 'assume' or 'assumpt' and whether we have 'assumption' depends on which form of the Latin our ancestors were taking as the root. As 'assumption' must be the noun form it would be natural to keep the'P' in our word just as it is in Latin.'Assumpt' was closer to Latin being the perfect(past) tense but at some point we dropped the P perhaps because 'assumed' sounded better or because we assumed it should come as a formation from assumere: we took the assume bit and added the anglicising -ed to remake the past tense/ past participle.
