Latin · Roman moral vocabulary; Christian and scholastic theology
conscientia
Heard as kon-skee-EN-tee-ah
- Period
- Roman to medieval
- Semantic range
- Shared knowledge, conscience, inner witness, sometimes awareness of one's own acts.
- What it can mean
- Moral conscience and, in some uses, a more psychological being-aware.
- What it should not be equated with
- Not yet split into two English words. Not every occurrence is modern consciousness.
- Primary or early source
- Cicero; Roman legal and moral prose; Christian Latin.
- Scholarly source
- Thiel; SEP medieval conscience.
- Relation to other terms
- The Latin bridge. French conscience later kept both jobs in one word.