expert

Forms

expert m (plural experți, feminine equivalent expertă)^[1] The first record has the form ispert: „Fiind ispert... întru oștire” “being experienced in warfare”.^[2][3] Ion Heliade Rădulescu wrote espert: „S-apropie fantasma de Oradin espertul, săgetător celebru” “the ghost of Oradin the skilled one, a famous archer, draws near”.^[2]

Etymology

It is borrowed from French expert, with Latin expertus (“tried, experienced”) as a second model: DEX, MDA2 and the neologism dictionaries give both sources.^[4][3][5][6] The DLR and Wiktionary put the French word first, and Scriban takes the word straight from Latin.^[2][1][7]

The Latin adjective is the participle of experior (“to test, try”), with a passive meaning, “well proved, tested”.^[8][9][1] The French word is the learned remaking, in the early 14th century, of Old French espert (1252–1262), which came from the same Latin participle.^[10] In French the noun appeared in 1580, with Montaigne, and took on its legal sense in the early 18th century.^[10]

Earliest recorded meaning

MDA2 dates the first record to 1818, in Petru Maior's Romanian version of Fénelon's Telemachus, where ispert means “experienced, skilled” in war.^[3][2] The DLR's quotations also begin with a legal code, in which something is to be valued by „oameni experți” “expert people”.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The adjective “experienced, skilled” came first, and the 19th-century texts still spell it espert.^[2] Costinescu's dictionary of 1870 gives both the adjective “very versed in an art learnt by experience” and the noun “a person chosen to examine and value things and report on them”.^[11] The legal sense, a person appointed by a court or by the parties to examine or value something, is the main noun sense in Șăineanu, Scriban and the CADE.^[12][7][13]

Today the noun means a specialist of high standing in general, with the court or state appointee as a special case.^[4] Computing added sistem expert “expert system”, and Wiktionary records the noun for a program that guides a user through a task.^[4][3][1]

Timeline

• 1818 – ispert “experienced” in Petru Maior's translation of Fénelon.^[3][2]
• 1858 – expertul și curagiosul ostaș “the skilled and brave soldier” in a calendar.^[2]
• 1870 – the adjective and the noun “appraiser, expert” in Costinescu's dictionary.^[11]
• 1931 – the court-appointed expert in the CADE.^[13]

Meanings

Noun

1. An expert: a person with thorough knowledge and experience in a field; a specialist of high standing.^[4][1]
2. Specifically, a competent person appointed by a state body or by the parties concerned to carry out an expertiză.^[4][3]
3. (computing) A wizard: a program that simplifies a complex operation.^[1]

Adjective

1. experienced, skilled, competent in a field: un mecanic expert în motoare.^[3][2]
2. (computing) In sistem expert: an expert system, a program that draws on a database of one field.^[4][5]

Related words

• expertiză
• experiență
• experiment
• Latin experior

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. expert
3. ^ a b c d e f g Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 861
4. ^ a b c d e f DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 371
5. ^ a b Marcu, Florin (2000), Marele dicționar de neologisme, București: Saeculum Vizual, p. s.v. expert
6. ^ Marcu, Florin; Maneca, Constant (1986), Dicționar de neologisme, 3rd ed., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, p. s.v. expert
7. ^ a b Scriban, August (1939), Dicționaru limbii românești (etimologii, înțelesuri, exemple, citațiuni, arhaizme, neologizme, provincializme), Iași: Presa Bună, p. 484
8. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ a b Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
11. ^ a b Costinescu, Ion (1870), Vocabularu romano-francesu, 2 vols., Bucuresci, p. 1, 409
12. ^ Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 1, 238
13. ^ a b Candrea, I.-A.; Adamescu, Gh. (1926–1931), Dicționarul enciclopedic ilustrat „Cartea Românească”, București: Cartea Românească, p. s.v. expert