găti

Forms

găti (third-person singular present gătește, past participle gătit, third-person subjunctive gătească) 4th conjugation^[1] A regional variant găta (present gat) and an old present gătez also occur.^[2][3] Neculce writes „văzând că craiul leșesc gătează oaste” “seeing that the Polish king was making ready an army”.^[4]

Etymology

It is formed from Romanian gata + -i, from the adverb gata (“ready”).^[3][2][5][6] DEX, MDA2 and Wiktionary compare Albanian gatis.^[3][2][1] Ciorănescu thinks the variant găta may have been influenced by Old Church Slavonic гатати (gatati, “to accumulate”).^[6]

The origin of the adverb is debated.^[6] Ciorănescu derives it from Serbo-Croatian gotov (“ready”), read as an inflected form of a supposed ⟨*gotŭ⟩, and notes the parallel Albanian gat.^[6] Philippide, Petrovici and Rosetti took the Romanian word from Albanian, and Miklosich thought it native.^[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

The verb is already in the oldest psalter, the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki of the early 16th century, with the sense “to make ready, prepare”: gătiră “they made ready” in Psalm 10:2.^[7] Tiktin dates it to the 16th century from the Psaltirea Scheiană, and MDA2's first record is Varlaam's Cazania of 1643.^[4][2]

Semantic evolution

A găti meant “to make ready”: troops for war, gifts, a road, oneself for a journey.^[5][4] In this sense it is now often replaced by pregăti, which Ciorănescu calls a modern formation on the model of Latin praeparō or Russian приготовить (prigotovitʹ).^[5][6] Applied to food, it came to mean “to cook”, the main sense today; applied to people and things, “to dress up, adorn”.^[5][3] From “to finish”, still regional, came “to finish someone off, to kill”, and figurative uses such as a se găti de drum “to be close to death”.^[4][2][5]

Timeline

• c. 1500–1520 – gătiră and găti in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki.^[7]
• 16th century – in the Psaltirea Scheiană (Psalm 77:20).^[4]
• 1643 – in Varlaam's Cazania.^[2]
• 1649 – gătesc glosses Slavonic verbs of preparing in Mardarie's lexicon.^[8]
• 1827 – the derivative gătitură “cooked dish”.^[9]

Meanings

Verb

1. (reflexive and transitive) To dress up, to adorn oneself or someone: S-a gătit de nuntă.^[3][1]
2. (reflexive and transitive) To get ready, to prepare for an action.^[3][1]
3. (transitive) To cook, to prepare food by boiling, frying and the like.^[3][1]
4. (regional) To finish, to complete.^[3][2]
5. (regional) To kill, to destroy.^[3]

Word family

• gătare
• găteală
• gătenie
• gătire
• gătit

Related words

• pregăti

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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, 972
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 429
4. ^ a b c d e Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. găti
5. ^ a b c d e 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. găti
6. ^ a b c d e f 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. gata
7. ^ a b Gînsac, Ana-Maria; Ungureanu, Mădălina; Moruz, Alexandru et al., roPsalt: Re-evaluating the Sixteenth Century Romanian Psalters (aligned corpus), Iași: Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, https://scriptadacoromanica.ro, p. Ps 10:2
8. ^ 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. gătesc
9. ^ Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 973