navicularius

Forms

nāviculārius (feminine nāviculāria, neuter nāviculārium); first/second-declension adjective^[1] The spellings nāviclārius and nauclārius also occur.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is from Latin nāvicula (“small ship”) + -ārius.^[2][3] nāvicula is a diminutive of nāvis (“ship”), which goes back to Proto-Indo-European *neh₂-u- (“ship”).^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

De Vaan and the TLL record it first in Varro's Menippean Satires, where a nāviculārius, a shipowner, bursts into the senate house.^[4][3]

Semantic evolution

In Classical Latin it is mostly a noun, the owner of a merchant ship who carried goods for hire, often named beside the merchants: Cicero recalls that the ancestors often went to war when Roman merchants or shipowners had been wronged.^[3][5] The feminine nāviculāria meant the shipping business itself, in Cicero's phrase nāviculāriam facere.^[5][6]

Inscriptions of the imperial period name many such shipowners, and a scholiast on Cicero explains them as those who carried grain.^[3] In the late law codes the adjective means “of shipping” or “of shipowners”, as in the onus nāviculārium, the duty laid on them.^[5][6] Ecclesiastical Latin uses the adjective for “of small boats”.^[7]

Timeline

• 116–27 BC – Varro uses it for a shipowner.^[4][3][8]
• 81–43 BC – Cicero names shipowners beside merchants, and uses nāviculāria for the shipping trade.^[5][8]
• 98–115 AD – Tacitus uses the word.^[5][8]
• 438 AD – The Theodosian Code uses the adjective for the shipowners' burden.^[5][8]

Meanings

Noun

1. A shipowner who carries goods or passengers for hire.^[2][5]
2. (feminine, nāviculāria) The shipping business.^[5][6]

Adjective

1. (Late Latin) Of ships or shipowners.^[5][6]

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
4. ^ a b c 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 e f g h i Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b c d Georges, Karl Ernst (1913–1918), Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 8th ed., ed. Heinrich Georges, Hannover; Leipzig: Hahn
7. ^ Stelten, Leo F. (1995), Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson
8. ^ a b c d Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de