nautea

Forms

nautea f (genitive nauteae); first declension^[1] The TLL also records the spellings nōtia and nodia, mostly in glossaries.^[2]

Etymology

The origin is disputed.^[3][2] The OLD and Saalfeld take it as borrowed from Ancient Greek ναυτία (nautía, “seasickness, nausea”),^[3][4] which Lewis and Short and Georges explain as a form of ναυσία (nausía).^[5][6] The TLL calls the origin uncertain; since tanners used it, it tentatively proposes the root Proto-Indo-European *kneh₂- (“to scrape”) (compare Ancient Greek κνῶ (knô, “I scrape”)), with a noun meaning “scrapings” as the original form behind the spelling nōtia, and the spelling with ⟨naut-⟩ as secondary.^[2][1]

Ancient writers explained it in several ways.^[5][2] Festus reports Opilius Aurelius as saying it was a plant with black seeds used by tanners, named after the ship because it causes nausea;^[5][2] Nonius explains it as water from hides or, more likely in his view, bilge water, named after sailors.^[5][2]

Earliest recorded meaning

It is first found in Plautus,^[2][5] where it is a byword for a foul smell: asked whether his wife's breath stinks, a character answers that he would sooner drink nautea than kiss her.^[2][7]

Semantic evolution

In Plautus it is a stinking liquid: the epilogue of the Casina threatens anyone who does not applaud with a he-goat smeared with it, and in the Curculio an old woman tells a wine jar that every perfume is nautea beside its smell.^[2][5] A fragment of Plautus quoted by Festus has nauteam facere, “to cause nausea”.^[5][6]

The TLL takes it as the name of the plant bryony, whose foul-smelling fruit or juice tanners used to take the hair off hides, and doubts the old explanation as bilge water.^[2] The glossaries gloss it as the smell of hides and the stinking water in which hides are soaked,^[2][8] and under the form nōtia as bryony and the wild gourd.^[2]

Timeline

• c. 250–184 BC – Plautus uses it of a foul-smelling liquid.^[2][9]
• end of the 4th or beginning of the 5th century AD – Nonius explains it as water from hides or bilge water.^[5][9]

Meanings

Noun

1. A foul-smelling liquid, perhaps bilge water, or the tanners' ooze.^[3][5][2]
2. The plant bryony, used in tanning.^[2][1]
3. Nausea, a qualm.^[5][6]

Related words

• nausea

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
3. ^ a b c Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. ^ Saalfeld, Günther Alexander (1874), Index Graecorum vocabulorum in linguam latinam translatorum, Berlin: Weidmann
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b c Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918), Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 8th ed., ed. Heinrich Georges, Hannover; Leipzig: Hahn
7. ^ Conte, Gian Biagio; Pianezzola, Emilio; Ranucci, Giuliano (2010), il Latino: Vocabolario della lingua latina, 3rd ed., Florence: Le Monnier
8. ^ Goetz, Georg (1888–1923), Corpus glossariorum Latinorum, Leipzig: Teubner; vols. VI–VII Thesaurus glossarum emendatarum, digital ed. CGLO, Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
9. ^ a b Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de