generație

Forms

generație f (plural generații)^[1] The longer variant generațiune occurs in older texts: „Proximitatea rudeniei se stabilește prin numărul generațiunilor” “the closeness of kinship is set by the number of generations”.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is borrowed from French génération and Latin generātiō, the two sources that DEX, MDA2, DILF and NODEX name.^[4][3][5][6] Tiktin names only the Latin word, as a learned loan, and the DA and Wiktionary only French.^[7][2][1] The Latin noun is formed from generō (“to beget”) with -tiō and meant “begetting”, and in late Latin also “a generation of men”.^[8][9] Wiktionary notes that within Romanian the word can also be read as genera with the suffix -ție.^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin dates the word to 1818, and notes an old spelling with ⟨ghen-⟩.^[7] Negulici's dictionary of neologisms of 1848 gives it the senses “begetting”, “posterity, descendants”, “a people” and “the people born within fifty years”.^[10]

Semantic evolution

The first senses were those of the Latin word: the birth of a being from another, then posterity and, by extension, a relative, all three now marked as dated in MDA2.^[3][2] By analogy the word came to mean all the people living at one time, measured by the length of a human life, which led to the modern sense of all the people of about the same age.^[2][4] Grigore Alexandrescu used it figuratively of “generations” of foaming waves, the first record in MDA2.^[3][2]

Biology gave the phrase teoria generației spontanee “the theory of spontaneous generation” and the sense of the animals of one breed born in the same year.^[4][3] MDN adds the technical sense of a group of technologies of the same period.^[11]

Timeline

• 1818 – the first record.^[7]
• 1848 – in Negulici's dictionary of neologisms, “begetting, posterity, a people”.^[10]
• 1863 – figurative generații of waves in Grigore Alexandrescu's poems, MDA2's first record.^[3]

Meanings

Noun

1. All the people of a community who are of about the same age: din generație în generație “from father to son, from one age to the next”.^[4][3]
2. The span of time between the age of a father and that of his son.^[4]
3. All the domestic animals of one species or breed born in the same year.^[4]
4. teoria generației spontanee: the old theory of spontaneous generation, by which living beings arise by themselves from lifeless matter.^[4]
5. A group of contemporary technologies of the same period.^[11]
6. (dated) The begetting of one being by another; posterity, descendants; a relative.^[3]

Related words

• genera

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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. generație
3. ^ a b c d e f g h Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 982
4. ^ 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. 433
5. ^ Costăchescu, Adriana; Dincă, Daniela; Dragoste, Ramona; Popescu, Mihaela; Scurtu, Gabriela (2009–2010), Dicționar de împrumuturi lexicale din limba franceză (DILF), 2 vols., Craiova: Universitaria
6. ^ Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2002), Noul dicționar explicativ al limbii române, București: Litera Internațional, p. s.v. generație
7. ^ 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. generație
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 Negulici, I. D. (1848), Vocabular romînesc de toate vorbele streine întroduse pînă acum în limba romînească și de toate cuvintele ce s-ar mai putea introduce încă, București, p. s.v. generație
11. ^ a b Marcu, Florin (2000), Marele dicționar de neologisme, București: Saeculum Vizual, p. s.v. generație