materie

Forms

materie f (plural materii)^[1]

Etymology

It is a learned borrowing, borrowed from Latin māteria (“timber; stuff, matter”).^[2][3][1] The dictionaries name several sources at once: MDA2, DLR and DEX add Italian materia, Russian материя (materija) and German Materie, and MDA2 French matière as well.^[4][5][6] Gabinschi calls it a European word of Latin origin taken through Italian and Russian.^[7] Ciorănescu dates the Latin borrowing to the 18th century and traces two senses to other languages: “fabric” renders German Stoff, which means both “matter” and “cloth”, as the Russian word does, and “pus” follows the German use of the Latin word, compare Spanish materia.^[2]

The Latin noun is formed on māter (“mother”) with the suffix -ia.^[8][1] It first meant timber for building, and Cicero used it to render Ancient Greek ὕλη (húlē, “wood, matter”).^[8][1] Pascu records Aromanian materie “object, purpose”, and Ciorănescu takes it from Italian.^[9][2]

Earliest recorded meaning

One of the 17th-century Slavonic–Romanian lexicons (Lex.St., about 1660–1670) gives materie for Old Church Slavonic вещество (veštĭstvo) “substance”.^[10] The first dated text is the Cheia înțelesului of 1678: „Cruce făcută den materie, adecă care iaste făcută de aur” “a cross made of matter, that is, made of gold”.^[3][5]

Semantic evolution

In the old texts the word means the stuff a thing is made of: Dosoftei's lives of the saints (1682–1686), the Bucharest Bible of 1688 and Cantemir's Istoria ieroglifică (1705) use it so.^[4][11][5] Klein's dictionary of about 1801 adds the medical sense “pus”, and the Lexicon de la Buda of 1825 gives three senses: matter, a fine fabric and pus.^[12][13] The fabric sense lived on in popular and regional speech, where materie is cloth bought by the metre.^[6][14]

From the 19th century the word took the abstract senses of the European languages: matter opposed to spirit, the subject of a speech or book (a intra în materie “to come to the point”), and the content of a school subject.^[15][16][6] Philosophy gave it the sense of objective reality independent of consciousness, the first sense of the post-war dictionaries.^[17][6]

Timeline

• c. 1660–1670 – materie for Slavonic “substance” in a Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[10]
• 1678 – first dated text, the Cheia înțelesului.^[3][5]
• 1682–1686 – in Dosoftei's lives of the saints.^[4]
• 1688 – in the Bucharest Bible (James 3:5).^[18]
• 1705 – in Cantemir's Istoria ieroglifică.^[5]
• c. 1801 – the sense “pus” in Klein's dictionary.^[12]
• 1825 – “matter”, “fine fabric” and “pus” in the Lexicon de la Buda.^[13]

Meanings

Noun

1. (philosophy) matter: the objective reality that exists outside and independently of consciousness and is reflected by it.^[6][1]
2. The substance of which things are made, or a body seen from the point of view of its composition: materie primă “raw material”, materie cenușie “grey matter”, (by extension) brain, intelligence.^[6][4]
3. (popular) fabric, cloth.^[6][4]
4. (popular) pus.^[4]
5. A field of knowledge or research, a question: în materie de “as regards”, a intra în materie “to come to the point”, tablă de materii “table of contents”.^[6]
6. The whole of what is taught in a school subject: Am recapitulat toată materia pentru examen.^[6][1]

Word family

• material
• materialism

Related words

• Latin māteria

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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. materie
3. ^ 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. materie
4. ^ a b c d e f Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 1, 1442
5. ^ a b c d e Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. materie
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 624
7. ^ Gabinschi, Marcu (2001), Dicționar de dublete etimologice ale limbii române, 2nd ed., Chișinău: Litera
8. ^ a b Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ Pascu, Giorge (1925), Dictionnaire étymologique macédoroumain, 2 vols. (I: Les éléments latins et romans; II: Les éléments grecs, turcs, slaves, albanais, germaniques, magyars, néologismes, créations immédiates, obscurs), Iași: Cultura Națională, p. 1, 213
10. ^ a b Ungureanu, Mădălina; Gînsac, Ana-Maria; Moruz, Alexandru (eds.), eRomLex: The First Romanian Bilingual Dictionaries (17th century), Iași: Universitatea „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, https://scriptadacoromanica.ro
11. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition)
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. 397
13. ^ a b 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. 381
14. ^ Stati, Vasile (2003), Dicționar moldovenesc-românesc, Chișinău, p. s.v. materie
15. ^ Scriban, August (1939), Dicționaru limbii românești (etimologii, înțelesuri, exemple, citațiuni, arhaizme, neologizme, provincializme), Iași: Presa Bună, p. 781
16. ^ Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 389
17. ^ Macrea, Dimitrie; Petrovici, Emil (coord.) (1955–1957), Dicționarul limbii romîne literare contemporane, 4 vols., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 3, 28
18. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Iacov 3:5