mămăligă

Forms

mămăligă f (plural mămăligi)^[1] A regional form măligă, shortened by haplology, is found in Jipescu: „Numai măligă, măligă d-atâția ani!” “nothing but mămăligă, mămăligă for so many years!”^[2][3]

Etymology

Its origin is unknown.^[3][2][4] Ciorănescu sees an expressive word built on the syllables ⟨mama⟩ “food”, as P. Papahagi, Capidan and Graur did, comparing mamă and Aromanian mamă (“children's pap”); he thinks it more likely, however, that it comes from Latin mamilla (“breast, teat”) with a diminutive suffix -ică or ⟨-igă⟩.^[5][6] Scriban also took it as imitative, from the repeated syllable ⟨ma⟩ and the suffix of săpăligă, and Șăineanu as a nursery word, first meaning the pap of infants.^[7][8]

Cihac traced it to Venetian melega (“millet, maize”), reduplicated, since the Venetians had spread maize growing in the east, and Tiktin to Italian meliga (“sorghum”), itself obscure, comparing a Bulgarian word for maize.^[9][10] Ciorănescu finds this derivation improbable, and Scriban rejected it.^[5][7] Hasdeu had taken it as a native word of the pre-Roman population.^[11]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin's first record is the place name Mamaliga in a Wallachian document of 1520.^[10] MDA2 dates it in Romanian texts from 1793, in a manuscript translation of an arithmetic manual; a document of the same year lists among the food of the fasting days „mămăligă uscată” “dry mămăligă”.^[4][2]

Semantic evolution

The dish was once made of millet, buckwheat or barley meal, and is now made mostly of maize;^[4][2][10] Tiktin calls it the staple food of the Romanian peasant.^[4][2][10] Klein's dictionary of 1801 already defines it as a dish of maize flour.^[12] The soft dish gave the figurative sense of a spineless person, and the derivative mămăligar became a contemptuous name for the peasants of Wallachia and Moldavia.^[3][10][2] The phrase a o pune de mămăligă “to put the mămăligă on” came to mean “to get into a fix”.^[3][10]

The word spread from Romanian to its neighbours: Hungarian mamaliga, recorded from 1781, Turkish mamaliga, Bulgarian мамалига (mamaliga), Ukrainian мамалиґа (mamalyga), Russian мамалыга (mamalyga) and, through Ukrainian, Polish mamałyga.^{[13][14][15][5][1]} The English word mamaliga is from it as well.^[1]

Timeline

• 1520 – the place name Mamaliga in a Wallachian document.^[10]
• 1781 – Hungarian mamaliga, taken from Romanian.^[13]
• 1793 – the first records in Romanian texts.^[4][2]
• 1801 – mămăligă “dish of maize flour” in Klein's dictionary.^[12]
• 1825 – mămăligă “maize porridge” in the Lexicon de la Buda.^[16]

Meanings

Noun

1. mamaliga, a stiff porridge of maize flour (more rarely of millet or buckwheat) boiled in water, like polenta.^[3][4][1]
2. (familiar, derogatory) a spineless person, without energy or initiative.^[3][2][1]
3. (in the compound mămăliga-bradului) an orange-yellow slime mould that grows on rotting fir trees (Trichia favoginea).^[4][2]
4. (slang) the beginner's sign on a car windscreen.^[17]

Word family

• mămăligar
• mămăligos

Related words

• mălai

Usage notes

A o pune de mămăligă means “to get into trouble, to fail”.^[3] The proverb unde nu-i bărbat în casă, nici mămăligă pe masă “where there is no man in the house there is no mămăligă on the table” says that the man keeps the household.^[10][18]

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 Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. mămăligă
3. ^ 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. 627
4. ^ 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, 1452
5. ^ a b c 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. mămăligă
6. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 653
7. ^ a b Scriban, August (1939), Dicționaru limbii românești (etimologii, înțelesuri, exemple, citațiuni, arhaizme, neologizme, provincializme), Iași: Presa Bună, p. 786
8. ^ Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 378
9. ^ Cihac, A. de (1879), Dictionnaire d'étymologie daco-romane II: Éléments slaves, magyars, turcs, grecs-moderne et albanais, Frankfurt am Main, p. 185
10. ^ a b c d e f g h Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. mămăligă
11. ^ Ștef, Dorin (2011), Dicționar de regionalisme și arhaisme din Maramureș, Baia Mare: Ethnologica, p. s.v. mămăligă
12. ^ a b Gáldi, László (ed.) (1944), Samuel Klein: Dictionarium valachico-latinum. Primul dicționar al limbii române, Budapest: Királyi Magyar Pázmány Péter Tudományegyetemi Román Intézet (Klein's dictionary of 1801, with Gáldi's etymological study), p. 394
13. ^ a b Benkő, Loránd (ed.) (1967–1976), A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára, 3 vols., Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, p. 2, 832
14. ^ Eren, Hasan (1999), Türk Dilinin Etimolojik Sözlüğü, Ankara: Bizim Büro, p. 285
15. ^ Tietze, Andreas (2002–2018), Tarihi ve Etimolojik Türkiye Türkçesi Lugatı, Istanbul: Simurg; Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, p. 130
16. ^ Lesicon românescu-latinescu-ungurescu-nemțescu quare de mai mulți autori, în cursul a trideci și mai multor ani s-au lucrat (1825), Buda: Typographia Universității (the Lexicon of Buda, ed. Petru Maior et al.), p. 371
17. ^ Volceanov, George (2007), Dicționar de argou al limbii române, București: Niculescu, p. s.v. mămăligă
18. ^ Candrea, I.-A.; Adamescu, Gh. (1926–1931), Dicționarul enciclopedic ilustrat „Cartea Românească”, București: Cartea Românească, p. s.v. mămăligă