minte

Forms

minte f (plural minți)^[1] Old texts also have mente: the Psaltirea Scheiană renders Psalm 31:9 as „Nu fireți ca calul și mujdeiul cei ce n-au mente” “be not like the horse and the mule, which have no understanding”.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin mentem (“mind”), the accusative of the Latin noun.^[4][3][5][1] The Latin word goes back to Proto-Indo-European *méntis (“thought”).^[1][6]

The word survives south of the Danube: Aromanian minte and Megleno-Romanian minti.^[4][7][5] Its Romance cognates include Italian mente, Spanish miente, Portuguese mente and Catalan ment.^[4][8] Ciorănescu, after Philippide, compares Albanian mënt.^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki of the early 16th century.^[3][9] The later psalters of the 16th century have the word in the same sense, “reason, understanding”.^[10][2]

Semantic evolution

From “mind, reason” the word developed the senses “sound judgement, good sense”, “intelligence” and “imagination”.^[11] As in several Romance dialects, it also names the seat of memory: a ține minte “to remember” and a-i veni în minte “to occur to someone”.^[8][11] The phrase a aduce aminte “to remind, to recall” belongs here too, and has parallels in Friulian and Neapolitan.^[8]

Romanian minte can also mean “brain”, and the Aromanian plural mintsă means “temples”.^[8][5] While most Romance languages use the Latin word to form adverbs, Romanian knows this use only in altmintre “otherwise”.^[8]

Romanian formed derivatives on the word: the adverb aminte “in mind”, the verb aminti “to remember, to mention”, and the adjective cuminte “wise, well-behaved”, made with the preposition cu.^[4] Old texts also name the wisdom tooth măseaua de minte or măseaua minții.^[10]

Timeline

• early 16th century – minte in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki, the first record.^[3][9]
• c. 1573–1578 – mente and minte in the Psaltirea Scheiană.^[10][2]
• 1649 – the form minte glosses several Slavonic words in Mardarie's lexicon.^[12]
• 1688 – over 200 occurrences of minte in the Bucharest Bible.^[13]
• 1801 – Minte, glossed Latin mens, in Klein's dictionary.^[14]

Meanings

Noun

1. The mind: the faculty of thinking, judging and understanding; reason, intellect.^[11][3][1]
2. Thought; imagination; memory: Îmi vine în minte o melodie veche.^[11]
3. Sound judgement, good sense, wisdom: un om cu minte “a sensible person”.^[11][1]
4. Intelligence, cleverness.^[11]
5. (obsolete) Learning, knowledge.^[1]

Word family

• mintos
• aminte
• amintire
• cuminte
• cumințenie
• aminti

Related words

• dement
• mintal
• mental
• mențiune
• minți
• minciună
• Aromanian minte
• Latin mēns

Usage notes

The plural minți is used in many phrases with the value of a singular: a-și ieși din minți “to go mad, to lose one's temper”, a fi în toate mințile “to be in one's right mind”.^[11][15] A învăța pe cineva minte means “to teach someone a lesson”, and la mintea cocoșului “obvious, plain to anyone”.^[11]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. minte
3. ^ a b c d e Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 18
4. ^ 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. minte
5. ^ a b c Pușcariu, Sextil (1905), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der rumänischen Sprache I: Lateinisches Element, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, p. 94
6. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
7. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 685
8. ^ a b c d e Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 5496
9. ^ 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 118:124
10. ^ 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. minte
11. ^ a b c d e f g h DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 657
12. ^ 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. minte
13. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Deuteronomy 1:13
14. ^ 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. 399
15. ^ Macrea, Dimitrie; Petrovici, Emil (coord.) (1955–1957), Dicționarul limbii romîne literare contemporane, 4 vols., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 3, 84