margine

Forms

margine f (plural margini)^[1] An older form margene occurs in texts quoted by the DLR: „Am mers vro două ceasuri pînă la margenea Moscovei” “we travelled about two hours to the edge of Moscow” (Chiriac).^[2][3] MDA2 also records the variant margină, which Scriban gives as the Moldavian form, and the regional marne, plural mărni.^[4][5]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin margō (“edge, border”), continued from the accusative marginem.^[6][4][1][7] The word survives south of the Danube: Aromanian mardzine and Megleno-Romanian mardzini.^[6][8] Its Romance cognates include Dalmatian mrgan, Italian margine, Sardinian margine, French marge, Occitan marge, Catalan marge, Spanish margen and Portuguese margem.^[7][6]

Wiktionary traces the Latin noun to Proto-Indo-European *mórǵs (“boundary, border”).^[1] De Vaan derives it instead from an n-stem, *mrǵ-n- (“border”).^[9] Serbo-Croatian borrowed the Romanian word as mrginj.^[6][10]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is a place name in a Transylvanian document of 1365, and a place called Margenea is named in a Wallachian charter of 1511.^[3] In Romanian texts the word first appears in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki (early 16th century), where the plural marginile occurs in Psalm 60:2.^[11][4] The early sense is the outer end of a piece of land or of the earth: MDA2 labels the phrase marginile pământului “the ends of the earth” old and popular.^[4]

Semantic evolution

From the outer end of a piece of land the word came to mean the frontier of a country: a text of 1784 tells how Alexander came to „margine țărilor”, “the edge of the lands”, beyond which there were no settled people.^[2] It also names the shore of the sea or a river bank, the rim of a well or a pit, and the brim of a hat.^[3][12] Eminescu wrote of the margins of exercise books, and fără margini became the usual phrase for “boundless”: an ambition „n-are margini”, “knows no bounds”.^[3]

Old and regional phrases include de la margini până la margini “from one end to the other” and the regional a umbla huci-marginea “to run off in fear”.^[4] Scriban glosses the Moldavian a umbla huci-margina instead as “to wander about idly”.^[5] The adjective marginal is a later loan from French, not a Romanian derivative.^[6]

Timeline

• 1365 – a place name in a Transylvanian document, the first record.^[3]
• c. 1500-1520 – the plural marginile in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki.^[11][4]
• 1511 – the place name Margenea in a Wallachian charter.^[3]
• 1649 – Mardarie's Slavonic–Romanian lexicon glosses Slavonic крайнее “outermost” with margine.^[13]
• 1688 – 36 occurrences in the Bucharest Bible.^[14]
• 1699 – „în marginea horii” “at the edge of the round dance”.^[2]
• 1784 – the sense “frontier”, in „la margine țărilor”.^[2]
• 1825 – the Lexicon of Buda gives the edge of water, of a book and of a garment, and a boundary.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. edge: the place where a surface ends; the end or outer part of a surface; the blank margin of a page.^[16][12] Fără (de) margini: endless, boundless.^[16][4][12]
2. A border or frontier; the outskirts of a place (de margine “peripheral”); the shore of the sea, the bank of a river.^[16]
3. The rim of a pit or a container: the place where it ends at the top.^[16]
4. (figurative) A limit up to which something can be accepted or imagined.^[16]

Word family

• mărginaș
• mărginean
• mărgini
• nemărginire
• nemărginit

Related words

• marginal
• Aromanian mardzine
• Latin margō

Usage notes

The plural is margini;^[4][3] MDA2 records a popular plural mărgini, and Tiktin notes it as colloquial.^[4][3] Common phrases are a ține marginea “to keep to the edge (of a road)” and de la marginea lumii “from very far away”.^[17][18]

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. margine
3. ^ 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. margine
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 1434
5. ^ a b Scriban, August (1939), Dicționaru limbii românești (etimologii, înțelesuri, exemple, citațiuni, arhaizme, neologizme, provincializme), Iași: Presa Bună, p. 776
6. ^ a b c d e 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. margine
7. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 5355
8. ^ Cunia, Tiberius (2008), Dictsiunar a limbãljei armãneascã, Editsii Timpurarã (after T. Papahagi, Ș. Mihăileanu and I. Dalametra; online at dixionline.net), p. 612
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. ^ Cihac, A. de (1870), Dictionnaire d'étymologie daco-romane I: Éléments latins comparés avec les autres langues romanes, Frankfurt am Main, p. 158
11. ^ 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 60:2
12. ^ a b c Candrea, I.-A.; Adamescu, Gh. (1926–1931), Dicționarul enciclopedic ilustrat „Cartea Românească”, București: Cartea Românească, p. s.v. margine
13. ^ 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. margine
14. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Facerea 47:21
15. ^ 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. 377
16. ^ a b c d e DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 620
17. ^ Macrea, Dimitrie; Petrovici, Emil (coord.) (1955–1957), Dicționarul limbii romîne literare contemporane, 4 vols., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 3, 39
18. ^ Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2002), Noul dicționar explicativ al limbii române, București: Litera Internațional, p. s.v. margine