soartă

Forms

soartă f (plural sorți)^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin sors (“lot; fate”).^{[2][3][4][5][1]} The older form, now archaic, is soarte.^[1][6] The masculine sorț was made from the plural ⟨sorți⟩, understood as a masculine.^[5] The Latin noun goes back to Proto-Indo-European *ser- (“to bind”), through a form meaning “joining”.^[1][7]

It survives south of the Danube: Aromanian soarti.^[8] The Romance cognates include Italian sorte, French sort, Catalan sort, Spanish suerte and Portuguese sorte.^[9][6] Wiktionary mentions a derivation from exorta (“risen”) as less likely;^[1][5][10] Tiktin and the REW take it only for the sense “placenta”.^[1][5][10]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is soarte “lot” in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki of the early 16th century (Psalms 21:19 and 77:60).^[11] In Coresi's Psalter God „după soarte împărți lor pământul” “divided the land among them by lot”.^[5] MDA2 dates the word to the Psaltirea Scheiană.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The old sense is the lot that is cast or drawn: the Bucharest Bible says „puseră sorți și căzu sorțul pre Iona” “they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah”.^[5] From it came “the share given by lot, an inheritance”, as with the Levites who are to have no sorț among the children of Israel.^[5] Anton Pann has cea mai bună soartă for “the best match” for a girl.^[5]

The sense “fate, destiny” is the usual one in the modern language.^[5][4] The lot also served in conscription: young men went la sorți to be chosen for military service.^[5][2] The plural sorți keeps the sense of the lot itself.^[2]

Timeline

• c. 1500–1520 – soarte “lot” in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki, the first record.^[11]
• 1570 – the plural sorți in Coresi's Psalter (Psalm 21:19).^[12]
• c. 1573–1578 – soarte in the Psaltirea Scheiană (Psalm 77:54).^[2][5]
• 1688 – sorți and sorțul in the Bucharest Bible (Jonah 1:7).^[5]
• 1893 – la sorți of young men drawing lots for military service.^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. fate, destiny: the supernatural power believed to decide everything that happens in a person's life.^[4][2][1]
2. The situation a person or a community is in at a given time; one's lot.^[4][2]
3. The course of an action; its outcome, the denouement.^[4][13]
4. (in the plural sorți) Lots: a way of choosing by dice, tickets and the like;^[2] a trage la sorți “to draw lots”.^[2]

Related words

• sorti

Usage notes

In some regions the word also means the placenta;^[5][10][8] Tiktin and the REW derive this sense from Latin exorta, and Aromanian soarti has it too.^[5][10][8] MDA2 also records an old soartă as a variant of sort “kind”, a borrowing from French.^[2]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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, 921
3. ^ Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. soartă
4. ^ a b c d e DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 1029
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. soartă
6. ^ a b Scriban, August (1939), Dicționaru limbii românești (etimologii, înțelesuri, exemple, citațiuni, arhaizme, neologizme, provincializme), Iași: Presa Bună, p. 1217
7. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
8. ^ a b c Cunia, Tiberius (2008), Dictsiunar a limbãljei armãneascã, Editsii Timpurarã (after T. Papahagi, Ș. Mihăileanu and I. Dalametra; online at dixionline.net), p. 956
9. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
10. ^ a b c d Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 3027
11. ^ 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 77:60
12. ^ 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 21:19
13. ^ Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2002), Noul dicționar explicativ al limbii române, București: Litera Internațional, p. s.v. soartă