toarce

Forms

toarce (first-person singular present torc, third-person singular present toarce, past participle tors, third-person subjunctive toarcă), 3rd conjugation^[1][2]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin torqueō (“to twist, turn”), in the third-conjugation form *torcere of spoken Latin.^{[3][4][2][1][5]} The verb survives in all four branches: Aromanian torcu, Megleno-Romanian torcu and Istro-Romanian torcu.^[4][6][7] Its Romance cognates include Italian torcere, Sardinian tòrchere, Occitan torser, French tordre, Catalan torcer, Spanish torcer and Portuguese torcer.^[4][8] The Latin verb is from Proto-Indo-European *terkʷ- (“to turn”).^[1][9]

Earliest recorded meaning

In the 16th-century psalters the verb still has the Latin sense of turning, as a reflexive “to turn back”: Tiktin's first record is the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki of the early 16th century, at Psalm 9:4, and MDA2's the Psaltirea Scheiană (c. 1573–1578).^[2][10][11] The sense “to spin” appears in a Gospel text of Coresi and in the New Testament of 1648, „nu lucră, neci toarce”, “they toil not, neither do they spin”.^[12]

Semantic evolution

Romanian narrowed the Latin “to twist” to twisting fibre on a spindle, while the general sense of turning stayed with the compound întoarce; the old reflexive “to turn back” died out.^[10][13] The sense was later extended to spinning by machine.^[3][10] Of cats, toarce means to purr, from the likeness of the sound to the whirr of a spindle.^[3][13] Ungureanu compares Tuscan fa le fusa “to purr”, literally “to make spindles”.^[14] Figuratively one spins a thread of thought, and old phrases rest on the spinning sense: nu i-a tors mamă-sa pe limbă “he speaks his mind freely”.^[2][10]

Timeline

• early 16th century – toarce in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki, in the sense “turn back”.^[2][11]
• c. 1573–1578 – the reflexive “to turn back” in the Psaltirea Scheiană.^[10][12]
• 1648 – “to spin” in the New Testament, Luke 12:27.^[12]
• 1688 – the women who spun goats' hair, in the Bucharest Bible, Exodus 35.^[15][2]

Meanings

Verb

1. To spin: to draw fibres from a distaff and twist them into thread by hand with a spindle, or by machine.^[3][10][1]
2. Of cats, to purr.^[3][2][1]
3. (obsolete, reflexive) To turn back, to change direction.^[10][12][4]

Word family

• torcător
• tors
• întoarce
• întors
• întorsătură
• răstoarce

Related words

• stoarce
• Aromanian torcu
• Latin torqueō

Usage notes

A-și toarce pe limbă means to think before speaking, and n-am tors pe el “I didn't spin for it” is said of something one can do without.^[10][2][16]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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. toarce
3. ^ a b c d e DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 1129
4. ^ 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. toarce
5. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 8798
6. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 1041
7. ^ Capidan, Theodor (1935), Meglenoromânii III: Dicționar meglenoromân, București: Academia Română, p. 296
8. ^ Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier, p. s.v. torcere
9. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
10. ^ 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, 1231
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 13:8
12. ^ a b c d Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. toarce
13. ^ a b Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 656
14. ^ Ungureanu, Dan (2024), Istoria limbii române, Chișinău: Cartier, p. 365
15. ^ Biblia, adecă Dumnezeiasca Scriptură a ceii vechi și a ceii noao leage, București, 1688 (ed. 1988, tricentennial edition), p. Ex 35:25
16. ^ Macrea, Dimitrie; Petrovici, Emil (coord.) (1955–1957), Dicționarul limbii romîne literare contemporane, 4 vols., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 4, 445