spinteca

Forms

spinteca (third-person singular present spintecă, past participle spintecat, third-person subjunctive spintece) 1st conjugation^[1] Moxa's chronicle has the older spenteca: „O spentecară și scoaseră coconul dentr-însa” “they cut her open and took the child out of her”.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Vulgar Latin *expanticō (“to rip open the belly”), formed on pantex (“belly, paunch”), plural pantices (“bowels”).^{[4][5][3][6][7][1]} The same Latin noun gave pântece.^[4][1] Candrea and Densusianu explain the vowel: the reconstructed form first gave ⟨*spîntecare⟩, and the unstressed vowel then became /i/ before the following /e/.^[8]

South of the Danube it is Aromanian spãntic.^[9][10][4] Romance verbs of the same formation include Venetian spantegar (“to scatter, spread”), with dialect forms in the Abruzzi and Calabria meaning “to torment” and “to open”.^[4][7][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in Moxa's chronicle of 1620, in the form spenteca, where it tells how a woman was cut open to bring out her child, who was therefore named Caesar.^[5][3][2]

Semantic evolution

The first sense is ripping open the belly of a living being.^[3][2] Dosoftei's Lives of the Saints has „îi spintecară pântecele” “they ripped open his belly”.^[3] From this the verb came to mean cutting or splitting anything in two, wood among other things, and tearing cloth.^[4][6] The Bucharest Bible of 1688 already uses it for parting the sea, and later writers for cutting through the air or a landscape.^[3][6]

The Slavonic–Romanian lexicons of 1660–1682 give the participle spintecat for Slavonic киесаръ “Caesar”, the same link that Moxa's story makes.^[11] Romanian derivatives are spintecător and spintecătură “slit, gash”.^[4]

Timeline

• 1620 – spenteca in Moxa's chronicle, the first record.^[5][3]
• 1660 – spintecat for Slavonic киесаръ “Caesar” in a Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[11]
• 1688 – spinteca in the Bucharest Bible, for parting the sea.^[3]

Meanings

Verb

1. To rip open the body of a living being with a long, deep cut of a sharp instrument.^[6][1]
2. To stab, to kill by stabbing; reflexive, to stab one another.^[6]
3. To split a fibrous or metal material along its grain.^[6]
4. (figurative) To cut swiftly through the air or water: Avionul spintecă norii.^[6][12]
5. To tear clothes or cloth.^[6]

Word family

• spintecător
• spintecătură

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. spinteca
3. ^ a b c d e f g h Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. spinteca
4. ^ 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. spinteca
5. ^ a b c Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 955
6. ^ a b c d e f g h DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 1040
7. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 3032
8. ^ Candrea, I.-A.; Densusianu, Ov. (1907–1914), Dicționarul etimologic al limbii române: elementele latine (A–Putea), București, p. 1394
9. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 968
10. ^ Pascu, Giorge (1925), Dictionnaire étymologique macédoroumain, 2 vols. (I: Les éléments latins et romans; II: Les éléments grecs, turcs, slaves, albanais, germaniques, magyars, néologismes, créations immédiates, obscurs), Iași: Cultura Națională, p. 1, 144
11. ^ 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. spintecat
12. ^ Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2002), Noul dicționar explicativ al limbii române, București: Litera Internațional, p. s.v. spinteca