popina

Forms

popīna f (genitive popīnae); first declension^[1]

Etymology

It is a Sabellic word: de Vaan explains it as the Sabellic outcome of Proto-Italic *kʷokʷīnā, the form that gave native Latin coquīna (“kitchen, cookery”), from the root of coquō (“to cook”), Proto-Indo-European *pekʷ- (“to cook”).^[2][1] The OLD calls it an Italic doublet of coquīna.^[3] The TLL leaves open whether it was borrowed from Oscan or Umbrian or formed in Latin from their word popa.^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

Plautus has it first, in the Poenulus: “there is drinking and eating as in a cookshop”.^[5][2][6]

Semantic evolution

It is a cheap eating house or cookshop selling cooked food and drink.^[3][5] Cicero uses it in his attacks on Antony, and transfers it to the food itself: a banquet better called a cookshop meal, and the stench of the cookshop breathed out by Piso.^[5] Suetonius and the satirists Horace, Martial and Juvenal mention it often.^[5] Gaius Gracchus says in a speech that there was no cookshop at his house.^[3] Church Latin glosses it food or fare.^[7]

Timeline

• c. 250–184 BC – Plautus of a cookshop.^[5][6]
• 81–43 BC – Cicero of the cookshop and its food.^[5][6]
• c. 75–c. 150 AD – Suetonius of the cookshops of Rome.^[5][6]

Meanings

Noun

1. A cookshop, cheap eating house, tavern.^[3][5][1]
2. Contemptuously, a lavish private meal; the food of a cookshop.^[3][5][7]

Word family

• popīnālis
• popīnāria
• popinarius
• popīnō
• popinor

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
3. ^ a b c d e Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
4. ^ Thesaurus linguae Latinae (1900–), Leipzig: Teubner; Berlin: De Gruyter; open-access ed., Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften
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 Köbler, Gerhard (2010), Lateinisches Abkunfts- und Wirkungswörterbuch für Altertum und Mittelalter, online ed., koeblergerhard.de
7. ^ a b Stelten, Leo F. (1995), Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson