culca

Forms

culca (present culc, third person culcă, past participle culcat), first conjugation.^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin collocō (“to place, set in place”).^[2][3][4][1] The Latin verb is formed from con- and locō (“to put in a place”), from locus (“place”).^[2] In Late Latin it had also come to mean “to lay down horizontally”, and phrases meaning “to lay on a bed” led the Romance languages to make it the verb for going to bed.^[2][5][6] Following Lausberg, Ciorănescu also allows a start from cōlocō, an attested form whose /o/ became /u/ after the syncope.^[3]

The verb survives in all four branches: Aromanian culcu, Megleno-Romanian culc and Istro-Romanian cucå.^[2][3][7][8] Its Romance cognates include Italian coricare and the older colcare, Occitan colgar, Catalan colgar, Spanish colgar (“to hang”) and French coucher.^[3][6] Its doublet is the learned coloca.^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first records are in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki of about 1500.^[2] In the Psaltirea Scheiană the young lions „în straturele sale culcă-se” “lay down in their dens” when the sun rose (Psalm 103:22), the sense “to lie down to rest”.^[5][9]

Semantic evolution

The core sense is to lie down, or lay someone down, to sleep or rest; from it came “to put up for the night” and the reflexive “to go to bed”.^[10][3] The sense “to sleep with someone”, which Ciorănescu notes is common to all the Romance languages, appears in the 17th century in Stoica Ludescu's chronicle.^[3]

Transitive uses include to lay an object down, to knock someone to the ground or kill them (a culca la pământ), and of plants, to bend to the ground.^[10][3] Idioms include a se culca pe o ureche “not to worry, to wait in vain”, a se culca cu găinile “to go to bed very early” and a se culca pe lauri “to rest on one's laurels”.^[10][4]

Timeline

• c. 1500 – first records in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki.^[2]
• c. 1573–1578 – culcă-se “they lay down” in the Psaltirea Scheiană.^[4][5]
• 1660 – culca glossing Slavonic “to lie down” in a Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[11]
• 17th century – the sense “to sleep with someone” in Stoica Ludescu.^[3]
• 1673 – the noun culcat “lying down” in Dosoftei's psalter.^[2]
• 1679 – culcuș “place to sleep, den” in Dosoftei.^[2]
• 1857 – culcușă “maize porridge eaten before bed” in Polizu.^[2]
• 1906 – culcată, a measure the width of a hand laid flat.^[2]

Meanings

Verb

1. (reflexive and transitive) To lie down, or lay someone down, in a horizontal position in order to sleep or rest;^[10][1] a se culca “to go to bed”.^[10][1]
2. (reflexive, colloquial) To have sex with someone, to sleep with.^[10][1]
3. (transitive) To give someone a bed for the night, to lodge; also to order someone to lie face down, as in military drill.^[10]
4. (transitive) To lay an object or a part of the body on something.^[10]
5. a culca la pământ: to knock down; to kill.^[10]
6. (reflexive, of plants) To bend down to the ground.^[10]

Word family

• culcat
• culcuș
• culcușă
• culcuța

Related words

• coloca
• Aromanian culcu

Usage notes

A se culca pe o ureche (literally “to lie on one ear”) means not to worry, or to wait in vain for a promise;^[10][9] culcă-te pe o ureche tells someone to give up hope.^[10][9]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2011–), Dicționarul etimologic al limbii române (DELR), vol. I: A–B (2011), vol. II: C (2015–2018), București: Editura Academiei Române; continued online at delr.lingv.ro, p. s.v. culca
3. ^ a b c d e f g h Ciorănescu, Alexandru (1958–1966), Diccionario etimológico rumano, La Laguna: Universidad de La Laguna (Romanian ed.: Dicționarul etimologic al limbii române, București: Saeculum, 2001), p. s.v. culca
4. ^ a b c Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 567
5. ^ a b c d Academia Română (1913–1949), Dicționarul limbii române (DA), ed. Sextil Pușcariu, tom I (A–B, C, D–De) and tom II (F–I, J–Lojniță), București: Socec / Universul / Monitorul Oficial și Imprimeriile Statului; page scans at cflr-scans.solirom.ro, p. s.v. culca
6. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 2052
7. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 323
8. ^ Capidan, Theodor (1935), Meglenoromânii III: Dicționar meglenoromân, București: Academia Română, p. 84
9. ^ a b c Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. culca
10. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 257
11. ^ Ungureanu, Mădălina; Gînsac, Ana-Maria; Moruz, Alexandru (eds.), eRomLex: The First Romanian Bilingual Dictionaries (17th century), Iași: Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, https://scriptadacoromanica.ro, p. s.v. culca