temă

Forms

temă f (plural teme)^[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin thema, and the dictionaries name further models beside it: French thème, Italian tema, German Thema and Modern Greek θέμα (théma).^{[2][3][4][5][1]} DEX gives the Latin word and compares French and Italian, Tiktin gives Greek and Latin, and Wiktionary only the modern languages.^[4][5][1]

The Latin word is a borrowing of Ancient Greek θέμα (théma, “something laid down; a deposit; a proposition”), a noun formed on the verb τίθημι (títhēmi, “to put, to place”).^[6][7][8] In Latin it was a term of rhetoric, the case proposed for debate, and of astrology, a horoscope.^[9]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin dates the first record to 1800, in a work of Molnar.^[5] MDA2's first record is Budai-Deleanu's Romanian–German lexicon, and the word is in Negulici's dictionary of neologisms of 1848 in the sense “subject, matter, plan of a speech”.^[2][10]

Semantic evolution

The first sense is the subject of a speech, a work of art or a piece of writing; in a line quoted by the DLR, Asachi wishes the fatherland to be the theme of the poets' muse.^[3][10] The school sense came early too: Costinescu in 1870 gives both the subject and a passage set for a pupil to translate from his own language into a foreign one, and Scriban and Șăineanu still give that translation exercise; today it is any written exercise, especially homework.^{[11][12][13][4]}

The musical sense, the melody on which a piece or a set of variations is built, and the grammatical one, the stem of a word, are in Scriban and Șăineanu;^[12][13][14] French thème took its musical sense in the 19th and 20th centuries.^[12][13][14] The DLR quotes the phrase pe tema… “on the subject of…” from 20th-century writers.^[3]

Timeline

• 1800 – first record, in Molnar.^[5]
• 1818 – in Budai-Deleanu's Romanian–German lexicon.^[2]
• 1848 – temă “subject, matter” in Negulici's dictionary of neologisms.^[10]
• 1870 – the school sense, a passage for translation, in Costinescu.^[11]
• 1886 – temă glossed German Aufgabe and Thema in Barcianu.^[15]
• 1941 – Sadoveanu uses temă for a province of the Byzantine Empire.^[3][2]

Meanings

Noun

1. A theme, subject, topic: the main idea developed in a work or a speech; an aspect of reality that a work of art reflects.^[4] Pe tema… means “on the subject of…”.^[4][2][1]
2. (music) A melodic motif on which a piece is built;^[4][2] temă cu variațiuni is a theme with variations.^[4][2]
3. A written exercise set to pupils or students, especially homework: Copiii își fac temele după-amiaza.^[4][1]
4. (linguistics) The stem of a word: the root together with a thematic vowel and any suffixes or prefixes, common to all the forms of the word.^[4][2]

Related words

• tematic
• tematică
• teză

Usage notes

MDA2 and the DLR list a rare second temă as a separate headword: a province of the Byzantine Empire, the division that replaced the Roman province, used by Sadoveanu in 1941 and taken from French thèmes, compared with Greek.^[3][2] Wiktionary gives it as a historical sense of the same word.^[1]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 1196
3. ^ 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. temă
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. 1116
5. ^ a b c d Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. temă
6. ^ Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ Babiniotis, Georgios (2010), Ετυμολογικό λεξικό της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας [Etymological Dictionary of Modern Greek], Athens: Κέντρο Λεξικολογίας, p. 557
8. ^ Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
9. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
10. ^ a b c 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. temă
11. ^ a b Costinescu, Ion (1870), Vocabularu romano-francesu, 2 vols., Bucuresci, p. 2, 605
12. ^ a b c Scriban, August (1939), Dicționaru limbii românești (etimologii, înțelesuri, exemple, citațiuni, arhaizme, neologizme, provincializme), Iași: Presa Bună, p. 1309
13. ^ a b c Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 646
14. ^ a b Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
15. ^ Barcianu, Sava Popovici (1886), Dicționar român-germân și germân-român, revised by D. P. Barcianu, part I: român-germân, Sibiu: Institut tipografic, p. 642