locație

Forms

locație f (plural locații)^[1] In law the variant locațiune is usual: „Locațiunea lucrurilor este un contract” “the lease of things is a contract”.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is borrowed from French location (“renting, hire”), with Latin locātiō (“a placing; a letting”) as a second model, a learned loan of the 19th century.^{[4][5][2][6][1]} The French word is a 13th-century borrowing of the Latin one, made as the noun of louer (“to hire”).^[7] The Latin word is formed from locō (“to place; to hire out”) with -tiō, and the verb from locus (“place”), whose further origin de Vaan leaves open.^[8][9]

The newer sense “place, site” comes from English location, a sense the DLR and DEX add to the older word.^[2][5][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

MDA2's first record is Costinescu's Romanian–French vocabulary of 1870, where the word means the hiring of a seat or a box in a theatre.^[4][2] The legal sense, the letting of property for rent, is quoted from I. Ionescu and Hamangiu's civil code.^[2]

Semantic evolution

Through the 19th and 20th centuries the word belonged to law and administration: the letting or hiring of goods, the rent paid, the lease contract (contract de locațiune), and the taxă de locație charged when a railway wagon is loaded or unloaded too slowly.^[2][5][4] Dictionaries also record the fixing of a ship's position at sea, and, in older dictionaries, an arrangement of things in order.^[4][2]

More recently the word took on the sense of English location, “a place, a site”.^[2][5] Dimitrescu records it in the press from the 1980s on, together with a newspaper complaint of 2003 that journalists were using an unsuitable translation of the English word instead of “position” or “site”.^[10] DEX 1998 does not have this sense and DEX 2009 adds it; the DLR places it in a section of its own and adds the meaning “premises of a company or an institution”.^[11][5][2]

Timeline

• 1870 – first record, in Costinescu's Romanian–French vocabulary.^[4]
• 1982 – locația biletelor in a sports paper, the first of Dimitrescu's press quotations.^[10]
• 2003 – a newspaper criticises the use of the word for “place, site”.^[10]
• 2009 – the sense “a precisely determined place” enters DEX.^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. renting, hiring; also the rent paid for something used for a time.^[5] Taxă de locație is the fee charged when a wagon or lorry is loaded or unloaded late.^[5][4][1]
2. (law) In contract de locațiune: a lease, a contract by which one party lets the other use a thing for a set time in return for money.^[5][4]
3. (nautical) The fixing of a ship's position at sea.^[4][6]
4. A particular, precisely determined place; a location, a venue: Am găsit o locație pentru nuntă.^[5][2][1]

Related words

• loc
• locatar
• locator

Usage notes

The sense “place” comes from English and has been criticised in the press as a misuse of the older legal word.^[10] DEX 2009 lists it as a third sense of the same word.^[5]

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 (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. locație
3. ^ Macrea, Dimitrie; Petrovici, Emil (coord.) (1955–1957), Dicționarul limbii romîne literare contemporane, 4 vols., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 2, 776
4. ^ 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, 1385
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 598
6. ^ a b Marcu, Florin; Maneca, Constant (1986), Dicționar de neologisme, 3rd ed., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, p. s.v. locație
7. ^ Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
8. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
10. ^ a b c d Dimitrescu, Florica (1997), Dicționar de cuvinte recente, 2nd ed., București: Logos (with the 3rd ed., 2013, in CLRE), p. s.v. locație
11. ^ Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan” (1998), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române, 2nd ed., București: Univers Enciclopedic, p. 579