trado

Trado, tradere, tradidi, traditum, third conjugation, from trans and do: to give across. The physical sense takes the accusative of the thing and the dative of the person, and covers handing over a city, a prisoner, a letter or a command.

The second sense built the humanities. To hand a story down is tradere, the thing handed down is traditio, and the impersonal tradunt or traditur is the historian's standard "the story goes", worth watching for because it is how a writer quietly declines to vouch for what follows. The uncomfortable third sense is betrayal - handing a person over - and that is why English gets both tradition and, through French trahison, treason from the same verb. Traitor and treachery belong here too.