etapă

Forms

etapă f (plural etape)^[1] The first records have a neuter etap, plural etapuri: Beldiman's chronicle of 1821–1826 tells of soldiers quartered in a church who would not leave it: „În biserică etapuri fiind, s-au statornicit” “being quartered in the church, they settled there”.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is borrowed from French étape.^{[3][4][5][6][1]} DELR traces the French word to medieval French estaple, from Middle Dutch stapel (“stack; warehouse; market”), which is related to Old Saxon stapal, Old High German staffal, Old English stapol (“column; pedestal”) and Old Norse stöpull (“thick post”), from Proto-Germanic *stapula-.^[3] The DHLF dates the older form to 1272 and the altered estappe to 1396, and notes that the town name Étaples keeps the old form.^[7] Wiktionary puts Frankish *stapul behind the Dutch word.^[1]

In French the word first meant a warehouse where merchants brought their goods.^[7][3] From the 16th century it meant a store of provisions for an army.^[7] In 1636 it named the rations handed out to troops on the march.^[7][3] Scriban gives the German forms Stapel and Stapelplatz.^[8]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in Alecu Beldiman's verse chronicle of the Greek rising in Moldavia (1821–1826), where etap, plural etapuri, means the quarters of troops on the march.^[3][4][2] The same text uses it for the distance troops cover between two halts.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The word came in as a military term: a place where marching troops are quartered, then the distance a unit covers in a day's march, and any distance between two halts.^[2][4] In older dictionaries the military sense is the only one: Șăineanu glosses it as popas “halt” and conac “night quarters”, and Scriban, who calls popas the pure Romanian word, gives only the soldiers' halt and the day's march.^[9][8]

From the distance between halts came the figurative sense, a stage in the development of a process; the DLR quotes it from Perpessicius and Bogza, and DEX 2009 puts it first.^[2][5] Sport took the word for a section of a long race and a round of a competition held over a season.^[5][10] A derived verb etapiza “to divide into stages” is recorded from 1936.^[3]

Timeline

• 1821–1826 – etap, plural etapuri, “quarters of marching troops” in Beldiman's chronicle.^[3][2]
• 1830 – etapuri in a decision on supplies for the army in Wallachia, quoted from a newspaper.^[2]
• 1831 – the feminine etapă in Tiktin's first record.^[6]
• 1936 – the derived verb etapiza.^[3]

Meanings

Noun

1. A stage or phase in the development of a process, usually marked by important events.^[5][3]
2. (military) The distance a unit covers on the march in a given time; a halt or the place where troops on the march are quartered.^[5][4]
3. (sport) A leg of a long-distance race, to be covered without stopping: a câștigat etapa a treia a turului “he won the third stage of the tour”.^[5][3]
4. (sport) Each of the successive rounds of a competition held over a long period, such as a football championship; also a period in the annual training cycle.^[5][4]

Word family

• etapiza

Related words

• popas
• French étape

Usage notes

MDA2 records the adverbial phrase în etape “in stages, at intervals”.^[4]

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. etapă
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k 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. etapă
4. ^ a b c d e f Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 838
5. ^ a b c d e f g DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 362
6. ^ a b Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. etapă
7. ^ a b c d Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
8. ^ a b Scriban, August (1939), Dicționaru limbii românești (etimologii, înțelesuri, exemple, citațiuni, arhaizme, neologizme, provincializme), Iași: Presa Bună, p. 476
9. ^ Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 234
10. ^ Macrea, Dimitrie; Petrovici, Emil (coord.) (1955–1957), Dicționarul limbii romîne literare contemporane, 4 vols., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 2, 223