naviga

Forms

naviga (third-person singular present navighează, past participle navigat) 1st conjugation^[1] The first record has the older form năvega: „…vînt bun năvegară mai încolo” “with a fair wind they sailed further on”.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is borrowed from French naviguer, Italian navigare and Latin nāvigō (“to sail”): DEX and the neologism dictionaries name all three, Tiktin only the Italian verb, MDA2 only the French one.^{[4][5][6][7][3]} The DLR names the Italian and the French verb.^[2] The Latin verb is formed from nāvis (“ship”) and agō (“to drive”).^[8] The French verb was itself borrowed from Latin in the 14th century.^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin dates the first record to 1812, in Petru Maior's history of the beginnings of the Romanians, where the form is năvega “to sail”.^[7][2] MDA2 cites the same passage from the 1834 Buda printing of the book.^[3]

Semantic evolution

The verb first meant travelling by ship: Maior uses it again in „Cînd năvegam”, glossed by the DLR as “when we went by ship”.^[2] Negulici's dictionary of 1848 still lists it under the Latinist form navigare and explains it as “to float on a water with a ship”.^[9] Damé conjugates it with the present navighez.^[10]

With aircraft the sense widened to flying, and the verb is used of ships and aircraft as well as of the people who travel in them or steer them.^[4][11] Around 2000 a computing sense appeared, moving from one document or site to another through hypertext links, first in phrases such as navigând pe Internet.^[12][4]

Timeline

• 1812 – năvega “to sail” in Petru Maior's history, the first record.^[7][2]
• 1848 – navigare in Negulici's dictionary of neologisms.^[9]
• 1862 – naviga “to sail” in Pontbriant's dictionary.^[13]
• 1869 – naviga as an equivalent of Hungarian hajóz in Barițiu's dictionary.^[14]
• 2000 – navigând pe Internet, the computing sense, in the press.^[12]

Meanings

Verb

1. (of ships) To sail, move on water;^[4][3] (of aircraft) to fly, move through the air or through space.^[4][3]
2. (of people) To travel by ship or aircraft; to steer a ship or aircraft, to navigate.^[4][1]
3. (computing) To move from one piece of information to another in a hypertext document; to surf the internet: navighează ore întregi pe site-uri de știri.^[4][12][1]

Word family

• navigare

Related words

• navigator
• navigație
• navă
• Latin nāvigō

Usage notes

The present tense is navighez, navighează;^[3][4] MDA2 also records a rare present navig.^[3][4]

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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. naviga
3. ^ 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. 2, 100
4. ^ 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. 691
5. ^ Marcu, Florin; Maneca, Constant (1986), Dicționar de neologisme, 3rd ed., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, p. s.v. naviga
6. ^ Marcu, Florin (2000), Marele dicționar de neologisme, București: Saeculum Vizual, p. s.v. naviga
7. ^ 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. naviga
8. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ a b Negulici, I. D. (1848), Vocabular romînesc de toate vorbele streine întroduse pînă acum în limba romînească și de toate cuvintele ce s-ar mai putea introduce încă, București, p. s.v. navigare
10. ^ Damé, Frédéric (1893–1895), Nouveau dictionnaire roumain-français, 4 vols., Bucarest: Imprimerie de l'État, p. s.v. naviga
11. ^ Macrea, Dimitrie; Petrovici, Emil (coord.) (1955–1957), Dicționarul limbii romîne literare contemporane, 4 vols., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 3, 164
12. ^ a b c Dimitrescu, Florica (1997), Dicționar de cuvinte recente, 2nd ed., București: Logos (with the 3rd ed., 2013, in CLRE), p. s.v. naviga
13. ^ Pontbriant, Raoul de (1862), Dictiunaru romano-francesu, Bucuresci: A. Ulrich / Göttingen: Dieterich, p. 462
14. ^ Barițiu, George (1869), Dictionariu unguresc-romanescu, Brașov, p. 216