urzi

Forms

urzi (third-person singular present urzește, past participle urzit) 4th conjugation^[1]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin ōrdiō (“to lay the warp; to begin”), the active form that spoken Latin used beside the deponent ōrdior.^{[2][3][4][5][1][6]} It survives south of the Danube: Aromanian urdzãscu.^[2][7][8] Ciorănescu also lists Megleno-Romanian urdzós.^[2] Its Romance cognates include Italian ordire, Occitan ordir, Catalan ordir, French ourdir, Spanish urdir and Portuguese urdir.^[2][6]

The Latin verb was a weaving term, “to lay the warp”, which came to mean “to begin”.^[9] It belongs to the family of ōrdinō (“to arrange”) and ōrnō (“to equip, adorn”).^[10]

Earliest recorded meaning

MDA2's first record is in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki of the early 16th century.^[5] In the psalters the verb renders the Slavonic osnovalŭ esi “thou hast founded”: Coresi's Psalter of 1570 has „Întru începute tu, Doamne, pământul urziși” “In the beginning, Lord, thou didst found the earth” (Psalm 101:26).^[11][12]

Semantic evolution

The old texts use the verb in two senses.^[11][4] One is the weaving term: Coresi describes the seamless coat as „necusut, de sus urzit” “without seam, woven from the top”.^[4] The other is “to found, build, create”: Miron Costin writes of the Solca monastery that Ștefan Vodă had founded (o urzise) in his first reign, and the Bucharest Bible of 1688 has Abraham build (au urzit) the altar, for Greek ᾠκοδόμησεν.^[11] The 17th-century Slavonic–Romanian lexicons gloss urzesc with Slavonic osnovajǫ “I found”.^[13] Tiktin found the sense “to create” nearly obsolete.^[11]

From preparing a web of threads the verb came to mean preparing a plot in secret, and it is used of a spider spinning its web.^[3][14] Șăineanu also records it of maize putting out its silks.^[15]

Timeline

• c. 1500–1520 – the first record, in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki.^[5]
• 1570 – urziși “thou didst found” in Coresi's Psalter.^[12]
• c. 1660–1670 – urzesc “I found” in a Slavonic–Romanian lexicon.^[13]
• 1688 – au urzit “built” of Abraham's altar in the Bucharest Bible.^[11]
• 1801 – urzesc glossed with Latin ordior in Klein's dictionary.^[16]

Meanings

Verb

1. To warp: to lay out the warp threads and set them up on the loom before weaving.^[3][5][1]
2. (figurative) To found or build; to conceive, compose; to invent.^[3]
3. (regional, intransitive) To take shape, come into being.^[3]
4. (figurative) To plot, to hatch a scheme in secret.^[3][1]
5. Of a spider: to spin its web.^[5][14]

Word family

• urzeală
• urzit
• urzitor
• urzitură
• urzire

Usage notes

A regional verb urzi is a variant of urdi “to boil whey to make urdă cheese”, a separate word.^[5][17]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ 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. urzi
3. ^ a b c d e f DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 1177
4. ^ a b c Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. urzi
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, 1396
6. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 6093
7. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 1088
8. ^ Cunia, Tiberius (2008), Dictsiunar a limbãljei armãneascã, Editsii Timpurarã (after T. Papahagi, Ș. Mihăileanu and I. Dalametra; online at dixionline.net), p. 1065
9. ^ Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
10. ^ Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
11. ^ a b c d e Tiktin, Hariton (2000–2005), Rumänisch-deutsches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., revised by Paul Miron and Elsa Lüder, 3 vols., Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, p. s.v. urzi
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 101:26
13. ^ a b 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. urzesc
14. ^ a b Macrea, Dimitrie; Petrovici, Emil (coord.) (1955–1957), Dicționarul limbii romîne literare contemporane, 4 vols., București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 4, 600
15. ^ Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 682
16. ^ 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. 465
17. ^ Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 1386