plăcintă

Forms

plăcintă f (plural plăcinte)^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin placenta (“flat cake”).^[2][3][4][1] Ciorănescu notes that Romanian is the only Romance language to keep the word, and that the sounds of the dialects confirm the derivation.^[2] Latin had borrowed it from Ancient Greek πλακόεντα (plakóenta), the accusative of πλακόεις (plakóeis, “flat”), which is from πλάξ (pláx, “flat surface”).^[1][5]

The word survives in Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian: Aromanian plãtsintã and Megleno-Romanian plățintă.^[2][6][7] Its doublet is placentă, a modern borrowing of the same Latin word through French.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin's first date is 1545, a record in the Slavonic documents of the principalities.^[4] Mardarie's lexicon of 1649 glosses plăcintă with Slavonic “oil bread”, and the Bucharest Bible of 1688 uses plăcinte for the unleavened cakes anointed with oil of Exodus 29.^[8][9][4] MDA2 dates the word to the Romanian Herodotus of 1645.^[3]

Semantic evolution

Zaicz thinks the Romanian word first named a kind of flatbread made with milk and eaten with meat.^[10] Today it is a pastry of layered dough sheets filled with cheese, meat, fruit or vegetables.^[11][3] Many sayings use it: la plăcinte înainte, la război înapoi “first at the pies, last in battle”, and to count the layers of the pie is to calculate too much.^[4][11] A plăcintă that someone prepares for you is an unpleasant surprise.^[11][4]

Hungarian borrowed the word as Hungarian palacsinta, recorded from 1577, first for a flat cake, then, from about 1600, for the thin pancake; from Hungarian it spread to the Austrian German Palatschinke, Czech palačinka, Slovak palacinka and Serbo-Croatian palačinka.^[12][2] Ciorănescu also derives a Ruthenian paljacyinta from the Romanian word.^[2]

Timeline

• 1545 – first record, in a Slavonic document.^[4]
• 1577 – Hungarian palacsinta, borrowed from Romanian.^[12]
• 1645 – plăcintă in the Romanian Herodotus.^[3]
• 1649 – glossed “oil bread” in Mardarie's lexicon.^[8]
• 1688 – plăcinte for the unleavened cakes of Exodus 29 in the Bucharest Bible.^[9]
• 1705 – plăcintar “pie maker”.^[13]

Meanings

Noun

1. A pie or pastry of sheets of dough with a filling of cheese, meat, fruit and the like.^[11][3]
2. (figurative) An unpleasant surprise, a nasty trick prepared for someone: a-i pregăti cuiva o plăcintă.^[11]
3. (botany) In plăcinta-porcului, a name of the hogweed Heracleum palmatum.^[11]

Word family

• plăcintar
• plăcintărie

Related words

• placentă
• Aromanian plãtsintã
• Hungarian palacsinta

Usage notes

Set phrases: a găsi plăcinta gata “to profit from someone else's work”;^[11][3] se vinde ca plăcinta caldă “it sells like hot cakes”;^[11][3] a număra foile la plăcintă “to split hairs”.^[11][3]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f 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. plăcintă
3. ^ a b c d e f g h Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 410
4. ^ 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. plăcintă
5. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 863
7. ^ Capidan, Theodor (1935), Meglenoromânii III: Dicționar meglenoromân, București: Academia Română, p. 226
8. ^ 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. plăcintă
9. ^ a b Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Exodus 29:2
10. ^ Zaicz, Gábor (ed.) (2006), Etimológiai szótár: magyar szavak és toldalékok eredete, Budapest: Tinta Könyvkiadó
11. ^ 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. 830
12. ^ a b Benkő, Loránd (ed.) (1967–1976), A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára, 3 vols., Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, p. 3, 67
13. ^ Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. plăcintar