urdina

Forms

urdina (third-person singular present urdină, past participle urdinat), 1st conjugation^[1] The present is urdin, rarely urdinez; regional forms are urdini and ordi (present ord).^[2][3]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin ōrdinō (“to set in order, arrange”).^{[4][3][5][2][6][7][1]} Tiktin explains the sense from “put in rows” to “go in succession, one after another”.^[6] The Latin verb is formed from ōrdō (“order, row”).^[1][8] It survives south of the Danube: Aromanian urdin “to go from place to place, to go often”, and Megleno-Romanian ordin “to order”.^[4][9][10] It is a doublet of ordona.^[1] Cihac linked it with Old Church Slavonic лиꙗти (lijati, “to pour”);^[4] Ciorănescu rejects this as impossible.^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is the Codicele Voronețean (about 1563–1583), in Acts 24:23: the centurion was to keep Paul without hindering any of his own „se nu urdinre la dânsul” “from coming to him”.^[5][6][2]

Semantic evolution

In the old language it meant “to go often somewhere or to someone, to come and go”: Dosoftei has a saint going often to church, the Bible of 1688 roads on which people walk (Isaiah 59:8), and Muste's chronicle Turks moving up and down a highway.^[6][2] Documents of 1826–1837 still use it, and regional speech keeps it: suitors who “kept coming” for a week, sheep taken daily in winter to the hay stores in northern Transylvania, and bees going in and out of the hive, from which urdiniș “hive entrance” is named.^[2][5][6] An old law code uses it for repeated sexual relations.^[2]

The sense “to have diarrhoea”, also in urdinare, is recorded in dictionaries from the 19th century;^[2][11] Pontbriant glosses it French foirer.^[2][11] Regionally it has also come to mean “to talk a lot and to no purpose”.^[2][5]

Timeline

• c. 1563–1583 – urdinre in the Codicele Voronețean, Acts 24:23.^[5][6]
• c. 1660–1670 – glossing Slavonic prihoditi “to come” in the lexicon Lex.St.^[12]
• 1688 – urdină in the Bucharest Bible, Isaiah 59:8.^[6]
• 1826–1837 – still used in documents.^[2]
• 1862 – “to have diarrhoea” in Pontbriant's dictionary.^[11]

Meanings

Verb

1. (obsolete, regional) To go frequently to someone or somewhere, to make the same journey again and again.^[3][1]
2. (popular) Of bees, to go in and out of the hive entrance.^[5]
3. (obsolete, regional) To have diarrhoea.^[3][5]
4. (regional, figurative) To chatter on without purpose.^[5]

Word family

• urdinare
• urdiniș

Related words

• ordona
• ordin
• ordine
• Aromanian urdin
• Latin ōrdinō

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. urdina
3. ^ a b c d DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 1175
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. urdina
5. ^ 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, 1386
6. ^ 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. urdina
7. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 6090
8. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
9. ^ Cunia, Tiberius (2008), Dictsiunar a limbãljei armãneascã, Editsii Timpurarã (after T. Papahagi, Ș. Mihăileanu and I. Dalametra; online at dixionline.net), p. 1063
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, 137
11. ^ a b c Pontbriant, Raoul de (1862), Dictiunaru romano-francesu, Bucuresci: A. Ulrich / Göttingen: Dieterich, p. 764
12. ^ 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. urdina