prag

Forms

prag n (plural praguri)^[1] A regional variant prav is recorded.^[2]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Old Church Slavonic прагъ (pragŭ).^{[3][2][4][5][1]} In Old Church Slavonic the word meant the doorpost or door frame.^[6] It comes from Proto-Slavic *porgъ (“threshold”), which also gave Russian порог (porog), Polish próg and Serbo-Croatian prȁg.^[7][1] Vasmer compares Lithuanian pérgas (“fishing canoe”) and Latin pergula (“projecting structure”).^[8]

DER lists the same form south of the Danube, Aromanian prag and Megleno-Romanian prag, and compares Bulgarian праг (prag) and Albanian prak.^[3] Capidan derives the Megleno-Romanian word from Bulgarian.^[9] Cihac also gave the Albanian variant prjak.^[10]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in Coresi's Lucrul apostolesc of 1563: „Pavel stătu spre prag, feace cu mâna cătră oameni” “Paul stood at the threshold and beckoned with his hand to the people”.^[2][4][5]

Semantic evolution

From the threshold the word passed to the whole door and, by extension, to the house and the family, as in din prag în prag “from house to house”.^[11][2] The upper beam of the door frame is pragul de sus, and the proverb about hitting one's head on it means learning from a bad experience.^[4][2] Figuratively the word names a limit or the eve of a new period, as in în pragul iernii “on the threshold of winter”.^[12][2]

A threshold across a river gave the sense of rapids: Miron Costin writes of the first rapids of the Dnieper, „pragul cel dintâi al Niprului”.^[4] DER and DEX list further senses: a sandbank or rock bar in a river, a waterfall, and an old sense of the pillar of a bridge.^[3][11][2] Modern technical uses add a step-shaped projection on a piece of wood or metal, the bridge of a stringed instrument, and in physics and medicine the threshold value of a stimulus.^[11] In folk speech the word also names the pubic region.^[3][4][2]

Timeline

• 1563 – Coresi's Lucrul apostolesc, the first record.^[2][4][5]
• 1645 – praguri of the gates in a city wall, in the Romanian translation of Herodotus.^[5]
• 1649 – pragul glosses Slavonic прагъ in Mardarie's lexicon.^[13]
• 1688 – the Bucharest Bible.^[14]
• 1801 – prág “threshold” in Klein's dictionary.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. The threshold, the lower horizontal part of a door frame or gate, a little above the ground; in sport, the board marking the take-off line of a jump;^[11][2] pragul de sus the lintel.^[11][2]
2. A door or gate; by extension a house, a home, a family.^[11][2]
3. (figurative) The start of a new situation or period; a limit between two situations or periods.^[11]
4. A natural rise of a riverbed, a bar of deposits, or a raised step of the ocean floor; a rock step hard to cross; a rock wall over which water falls in a cascade.^[11][2]
5. (technology) A step-shaped projection on a piece of wood or metal that fits into a groove of another piece.^[11]
6. (physics, medicine) The minimum or maximum value of a quantity at which a phenomenon still occurs: prag de excitabilitate “excitability threshold”.^[11]
7. The small piece of wood or bone on which the strings of some stringed instruments rest; the bridge.^[11][2]

Word family

• prăgar

Related words

• Old Church Slavonic прагъ (pragŭ)

Usage notes

Common expressions are a călca pragul “to enter or leave a house, to visit”, a pune piciorul în prag “to take a firm stand, to refuse”, a bate pragurile “to go from door to door”, and a se lovi cu capul de pragul de sus “to learn the hard way”.^[11][2] The proverb până nu dai cu capul de pragul de sus, nu vezi pe cel de jos says that one learns only through misfortune.^[4]

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 497
3. ^ 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. prag
4. ^ a b c d e f g Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. prag
5. ^ a b c d Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. prag
6. ^ Kurz, Josef; Hauptová, Zoe (eds.) (1958–1997), Slovník jazyka staroslověnského / Lexicon linguae palaeoslovenicae, 4 vols. + supplements, Praha: Academia; digital ed. gorazd.org
7. ^ Derksen, Rick (2008), Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 4, Leiden / Boston: Brill, p. 413
8. ^ Vasmer, Max (1964–1973), Ètimologičeskij slovar' russkogo jazyka, transl. and suppl. by O. N. Trubačev, 4 vols., Moskva: Progress
9. ^ Capidan, Theodor (1935), Meglenoromânii III: Dicționar meglenoromân, București: Academia Română, p. 230
10. ^ Cihac, A. de (1879), Dictionnaire d'étymologie daco-romane II: Éléments slaves, magyars, turcs, grecs-moderne et albanais, Frankfurt am Main, p. 285
11. ^ 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. 859
12. ^ Breban, Vasile (1980), Dicționar al limbii române contemporane de uz curent, București: Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, p. 460
13. ^ 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. pragul
14. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Ieșirea 12:7
15. ^ 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. 423