mustață

Forms

mustață f (plural mustăți)^[1] The eastern form is musteață (plural musteți): Dosoftei has „iară musteața, acoperindu-i gura, să mesteca cu barba” “and the moustache, covering his mouth, mingled with the beard”.^[2][3] Regional plurals include mustațe and mustețe.^[4]

Etymology

It is inherited from Vulgar Latin *mustacea, from Ancient Greek μύσταξ (mústax, “upper lip, moustache”).^{[5][6][4][2][3]} Wiktionary starts from Medieval Latin mustācium, recorded in the plural ⟨mustācia⟩ in a 7th-century gloss, a loan from Byzantine Greek μουστάκιον (moustákion).^[1] The word is found in Aromanian mustatsã and Megleno-Romanian mustață.^[5][7][8] Related words are Italian mostacchio, Spanish mostacho, Albanian mustakje and Serbo-Croatian mustač.^[5] The Greek noun was a Doric and Laconian word, and Beekes thinks its variants point to Pre-Greek.^[9]

DER notes, after Capidan, that a Bulgarian word for the moustache was borrowed from Romanian.^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin's first record is a Slavonic-Romanian document of 1568.^[3] In Romanian texts MDA2 and DLR start with Dosoftei's lives of the saints (1682–1686), with the form musteața.^[4][2] The Slavonic–Romanian lexicons of the 1660s already gloss Slavonic усъ with it.^[10]

Semantic evolution

The word names the hair on the upper lip, and is often plural with singular meaning.^[2][6] By likeness it came to mean an animal's whiskers, the antennae of insects and crustaceans, the barbels of fish, the awns of grain, the silk of maize and the fine roots of maize, onions and vines.^[6][4] In building it names steel rods left outside a concrete piece and wires that hold a false ceiling.^[6]

Its phrases are about smiling and drinking: a-i râde mustața “to be glad”, a râde pe sub mustață “to laugh up one's sleeve”, a trage la mustață “to drink heavily”.^[6][3] La mustață “by a whisker” is common in the press of the 2000s, though the construction is older.^[11]

Timeline

• 1568 – a Slavonic-Romanian document, the first record.^[3]
• c. 1660–1670 – glosses Slavonic усъ in a Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[10]
• 1682–1686 – musteața in Dosoftei's lives of the saints.^[4][2]
• 1688 – mustața lui in the Bucharest Bible (2 Samuel 19:24).^[2][3]
• 1825 – the Lexicon de la Buda gives the sense “root fibre” beside “moustache”.^[12]

Meanings

Noun

1. moustache: the hair that grows on a man's upper lip;^[6][4][1] a râde pe sub mustață “to laugh up one's sleeve”.^[6][4][1]
2. (in the plural) the whiskers around an animal's muzzle.^[6][4]
3. Each of the antennae of an insect or crustacean.^[6]
4. (in the plural) the awns of grain;^[6][4] (popular) the silk of maize; the fine roots of maize, onions or vines.^[6][4]
5. (in the plural, building) wires holding a false ceiling, or steel rods left outside a concrete piece.^[6]

Word family

• mustăcios
• mustăcioară
• mustăci
• mustăceală

Related words

• Aromanian mustatsã
• Ancient Greek μύσταξ (mústax)

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. mustață
3. ^ a b c d e f Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. mustață
4. ^ 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. 2, 83
5. ^ a b c d 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. mustață
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 684
7. ^ Cunia, Tiberius (2008), Dictsiunar a limbãljei armãneascã, Editsii Timpurarã (after T. Papahagi, Ș. Mihăileanu and I. Dalametra; online at dixionline.net), p. 688
8. ^ Capidan, Theodor (1935), Meglenoromânii III: Dicționar meglenoromân, București: Academia Română, p. 199
9. ^ Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
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, p. s.v. mustață
11. ^ Dimitrescu, Florica (1997), Dicționar de cuvinte recente, 2nd ed., București: Logos (with the 3rd ed., 2013, in CLRE), p. s.v. mustață
12. ^ 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. 409