turn

Forms

turn n (plural turnuri)^[1] Old texts have a plural turnure, beside the modern turnuri: „turnure cu cornure” “towers with horns”.^[2][3]

Etymology

It is borrowed from German Turm (“tower”), taken through the Transylvanian Saxon dialect form turn.^[4][3][5] DEX and the neologism dictionaries give only the standard German form, and MDA2 compares French tour.^[6][7][5] Borcia argued for a direct loan from the Saxons: the Romanian word matches their form closely, the Saxons were the first to build castles and towers in Transylvania, and some of these towers were named after the word, as the Red Tower, ⟨Turnul Roșu⟩.^[8] Cihac had derived the Romanian word from Slavic, which in turn took it from German, but Borcia found the sounds of every Slavic form hard to reconcile with it.^[9][8] Ciorănescu lists the neighbouring forms Serbo-Croatian torm, Serbo-Croatian turan, Slovene turen and Hungarian torony.^[4]

The German word goes back to Middle High German turn and Old High German turn, borrowed from an Old French *torn that the diminutive tornele presupposes; that form continues Latin turris (“tower”), itself borrowed from Ancient Greek τύρσις (túrsis).^[10][11] Pfeifer explains the final /n/ by the influence of tornō (“to turn on a lathe”), since the Roman tower could also be a movable siege tower; the /m/ of modern German is an East Central German form that spread with Luther.^[10][1]

Earliest recorded meaning

Tiktin dates the first record to 1469, in a document of the Slavo-Romanian chancery.^[3] In Romanian texts it first appears in the psalters: Coresi's psalter of 1570 has it at Psalm 101:7, and the Psaltirea Scheiană, which MDA2 gives as the first record, has the psalmist say he became like a night raven in a tower.^[12][5][2] Coresi's Gospel book uses it of a man who plants a vineyard, fences it and builds a tower.^[2]

Semantic evolution

The first sense is a tall building, standing alone or part of a castle, church or town wall, and it has stayed the main one.^[6][2] The Tower of Babel was turnul Vavilonului in Nicolae Costin, and the 1688 Bible has the builders say „să ne zidim noao cetate și turnu” “let us build ourselves a city and a tower”.^[2][3] The word named places as well: Cihac lists ⟨Turnu Măgurele⟩, ⟨Turnu Severin⟩ and ⟨Turnu Roșu⟩, and the Romanians call the Saxon village of ⟨Neppendorf⟩ near Hermannstadt ⟨Turnișor⟩.^[9][8]

The chess piece, the rook, is another sense, now also called tură.^[6][13] The figurative turn de fildeș “ivory tower” names an artist's or a scholar's withdrawal from the world around him.^[6][3] Technical phrases include turn de răcire “cooling tower”, turn de sondă “derrick” and turn de extracție “headframe”.^[6][5]

Timeline

• 1469 – first record, in a Slavo-Romanian document.^[3]
• 1570 – turn in Coresi's psalter, Psalm 101:7.^[12]
• c. 1573-1578 – turnu in the Psaltirea Scheiană, MDA2's first record.^[5][2]
• 1649 – the word in Mardarie's Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[14]
• 1688 – the Tower of Babel in the Bucharest Bible, Genesis 11:4.^[3][2]
• 1801 – túrn in Klein's dictionary.^[15]
• 1825 – turnu in the Lexicon de la Buda, glossed with Latin turris and German Thurm.^[16]

Meanings

Noun

1. A tower: a tall building, round or many-sided, standing alone or part of a larger structure; also, rarely, a factory chimney.^[6] Turn de apă is a water tower, turn de răcire a cooling tower.^[6][5][1]
2. (chess) The rook; also called tură.^[6][1]

Word family

• turnuleț
• turnușor
• turnișor
• turnuț

Related words

• tură
• turlă

Usage notes

The phrase turn de fildeș “ivory tower” describes a writer's or an artist's isolation from the realities around him.^[6][17] The neologism dictionaries list a second turn in geology, a prominent isolated rock formation of prismatic shape in limestone or conglomerate, compared with German Turm and French tour.^[7][18]

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. turn
3. ^ a b c d e f g Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. turn
4. ^ a b 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. turn
5. ^ a b c d e f Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 1305
6. ^ 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. 1155
7. ^ a b Marcu, Florin; Maneca, Constant (1986), Dicționar de neologisme, 3rd ed., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, p. s.v. turn
8. ^ a b c Borcia, Ioan (1903–1904), Deutsche Sprachelemente im Rumänischen, Leipzig (in Weigand, Zehnter Jahresbericht des Instituts für rumänische Sprache zu Leipzig), p. 78
9. ^ a b Cihac, A. de (1879), Dictionnaire d'étymologie daco-romane II: Éléments slaves, magyars, turcs, grecs-moderne et albanais, Frankfurt am Main, p. 428
10. ^ a b Pfeifer, Wolfgang, et al. (1993), Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, 2nd ed., Berlin: Akademie-Verlag; digital revised version in the DWDS, dwds.de
11. ^ Kluge, Friedrich; Seebold, Elmar (2011), Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 25th ed., Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter, p. 936
12. ^ 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 101:7
13. ^ Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 673
14. ^ 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. turn
15. ^ Gáldi, László (ed.) (1944), Samuel Klein: Dictionarium valachico-latinum. Primul dicționar al limbii române, Budapest: Királyi Magyar Pázmány Péter Tudományegyetemi Román Intézet (Klein's dictionary of 1801, with Gáldi's etymological study), p. 461
16. ^ Lesicon românescu-latinescu-ungurescu-nemțescu quare de mai mulți autori, în cursul a trideci și mai multor ani s-au lucrat (1825), Buda: Typographia Universității (the Lexicon of Buda, ed. Petru Maior et al.), p. 728
17. ^ Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2002), Noul dicționar explicativ al limbii române, București: Litera Internațional, p. s.v. turn
18. ^ Marcu, Florin (2000), Marele dicționar de neologisme, București: Saeculum Vizual, p. s.v. turn