mânea

Forms

mânea (third-person singular present mâne, past participle mas, third-person subjunctive mâie or mâne) 2nd conjugation^[1] The present is mân or mâi, the old perfect măsei, the participle mas and the gerund mâind.^[2][3] Variants are the rare mâne and a regional first-conjugation mâna.^[2][4]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin maneō (“to remain, stay”).^{[5][6][2][1][3]} The Latin verb comes from Proto-Indo-European *men- (“to stay, stand still”).^[1][7] It survives south of the Danube as Aromanian amîn.^[5] The Romance cognates are Italian manere, Occitan maner, Old French manoir, Spanish manir and Portuguese maer; compare rămâne.^[5][8] Ciorănescu thinks Albanian mënoń comes from Romanian.^[5]

Eric Hamp proposed a double source, the Latin verb and mane (“morning”), since one stays the night until morning.^[9] Graur rejected it: the archaic perfect ⟨măsei⟩ and participle ⟨mas⟩ set the verb apart from the adverb, and a verb formed on it would belong to the first or fourth conjugation, not the unproductive second.^[9]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in the Palia de la Orăștie (1581–1582), with „Turnați-vă la casa slugiei voastre și măneți acolea” “turn aside to your servant's house and spend the night there”.^[4][2][3]

Semantic evolution

The core sense has always been “to spend the night somewhere”, often with de noapte or peste noapte.^[4][2] The sense “to remain in a certain state” is archaic, and regional speech has “to stop, rest for a while”.^[2][6] Ciorănescu names the derivative noun mas “a night's stay; a place to spend the night”;^[5] Pușcariu and Candrea–Densusianu take it straight from mānsum.^[5] A folk saying about a man who is always hungry is that mice have spent the night in his belly.^[6][3]

Timeline

• 1581–1582 – in the Palia de la Orăștie, the first record.^[2][3]
• c. 1660–1670 – mas in a Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[10]
• 1688 – many forms in the Bucharest Bible.^[11]

Meanings

Verb

1. (popular) To spend the night somewhere, to put up for the night, to sleep somewhere: Am mas la un han pe drum.^[6][1]
2. (regional) To stop and stay somewhere for a while.^[6][2]
3. (archaic) To remain in a certain state.^[2]

Word family

• mas

Related words

• rămâne
• Latin maneo

Usage notes

The saying (parcă) i-au mas șoarecii în pântece is said of someone who is always hungry.^[6] The curse mâie unde a înserat means “may he never come back”.^[2]

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 1469
3. ^ 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. mânea
4. ^ a b c Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. mînea
5. ^ 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. mînea
6. ^ a b c d e f DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 633
7. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
8. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 5296
9. ^ a b Graur, Alexandru (1975), Alte etimologii românești, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, p. s.v. mînea
10. ^ 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. mas
11. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Judges 19:6