curto

Forms

curtō (present infinitive curtāre, perfect active curtāvī, supine curtātum); first conjugation^[1]

Etymology

It is formed from Latin curtus (“short, cut off”) + -ō.^[2][3] De Vaan traces curtus through Proto-Italic *korto- to Proto-Indo-European *kr-to- (“cut off”).^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Its first use is in Horace's Satires (65–8 BC),^[2][5] in the figurative sense to diminish: how little each day takes off the sum.^[2]

Semantic evolution

Persius uses it of reducing an estate,^[2][6] while the literal sense, to cut short, appears in Celsus and in Palladius, of trimmed roots.^[7][6] Boethius has it of losing a foot,^[6] and Paul's excerpt of Festus uses it of cropped ears.^[3] It is rare in Classical Latin.^[7]

It lives on in Ibero-Romance as Portuguese and Galician cortar and Asturian curtar, and in regional Italian.^[1]

Timeline

• 65–8 BC – Horace uses it figuratively, of a sum diminished.^[2][5]
• 34–62 AD – Persius uses it of reducing an estate.^[2][5]
• end of 4th / beginning of 5th century AD – Palladius uses it of trimming roots.^[6][5]

Meanings

Verb

1. To cut short, shorten; to mutilate.^[7][6]
2. (figurative) To diminish, reduce.^[2][7]

Word family

• decurto

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
4. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
5. ^ a b c d Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
6. ^ a b c d e Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918), Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 8th ed., ed. Heinrich Georges, Hannover; Leipzig: Hahn
7. ^ a b c d Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press