tonă

Forms

tonă f (plural tone)^[1]

Etymology

It is borrowed from French tonne,^[2][3][1] and according to MDA2, Tiktin and the DLR also borrowed from German Tonne.^[4][5][6] Both words first meant “a large cask”.^[7][8]

The French word continues Medieval Latin tunna (“large cask”), recorded from the 8th century, which was taken from a Gaulish word; it is usually compared with Old Irish tonn (“skin”), through “skin bag, wineskin” to “cask”.^[9][10] The German word was borrowed from the same Latin word in Old High German times and was used early as a unit of measure.^[8][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin dates the first record to about 1700, in a document published by Iorga.^[5] MDA2 and the DLR quote a document of before 1802 that acknowledges receipt of „1 tonă pește” “one ton of fish”.^[4][6]

Semantic evolution

Costinescu's dictionary of 1870 still glosses the word as a large wooden vessel with two bottoms, as well as the quantity it holds, after French tonne.^[11] The modern sense is the metric unit of 1,000 kilograms, which Șăineanu and Scriban give, Scriban adding that it measured the cargo of a ship or a wagon.^[12][7] Compounds name units of transport: tonă-kilometru, tonă-registru for the volume of a ship and tonă-forță.^[2][4] The plural is used loosely for a very large quantity, and in teenage slang a tonă is a thousand lei.^[6][13] An old synonym was tonelă.^[4]

Timeline

• c. 1700 – the first record, in a document published by Iorga.^[5]
• before 1802 – „1 tonă pește” in a document.^[4][6]
• 1870 – Costinescu glosses it as a large cask.^[11]
• 1929 – Șăineanu gives the unit of 1,000 kilograms.^[12]

Meanings

Noun

1. A tonne, a unit of mass of 1,000 kilograms: Camionul transporta zece tone de grâu.^[2][4]
2. tonă-kilometru: a unit of transport volume, one tonne moved over one kilometre.^[2]
3. tonă-registru: a unit of the internal volume of a merchant ship, about 2.83 cubic metres.^[2][4]
4. tonă-forță: a unit of force, the weight of a body with a mass of one tonne.^[4]
5. (slang) A thousand lei.^[13]

Related words

• tunel
• German Tonne

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 1131
3. ^ Marcu, Florin; Maneca, Constant (1986), Dicționar de neologisme, 3rd ed., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, p. s.v. tonă
4. ^ 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, 1238
5. ^ a b c Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. tonă
6. ^ a b c d Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. tonă
7. ^ a b Scriban, August (1939), Dicționaru limbii românești (etimologii, înțelesuri, exemple, citațiuni, arhaizme, neologizme, provincializme), Iași: Presa Bună, p. 1329
8. ^ a b Kluge, Friedrich; Seebold, Elmar (2011), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 25th ed., Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, p. 920
9. ^ Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
10. ^ Pfeifer, Wolfgang, et al. (1993), Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, 2nd ed., Berlin: Akademie-Verlag; digital revised version in the DWDS, dwds.de
11. ^ a b Costinescu, Ion (1870), Vocabularu romano-francesu, 2 vols., Bucuresci, p. 2, 622
12. ^ a b Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 657
13. ^ a b Volceanov, George (2007), Dicționar de argou al limbii române, București: Niculescu, p. s.v. tonă