vindeca

Forms

vindeca (third-person singular present vindecă, past participle vindecat) 1st conjugation^[1] vendeca, the usual form of the 16th and 17th centuries: „Vendecă-mă, Doamne, că smentiră-se oasele meale” “Heal me, Lord, for my bones are troubled” in the Psaltirea Scheiană.^[2][3] Regional vindica.^[4]

Etymology

It is inherited from Latin vindicō (“to claim; to set free; to avenge”).^{[5][4][6][3][7][1]} It survives as Aromanian vindic “to heal”.^[8][9] Elsewhere the Latin verb means “to avenge”: Italian vendicare, French venger, Catalan venjar, Spanish vengar and Portuguese vingar.^[5]

Tiktin calls the change of meaning peculiar to Romanian.^[3] Ciorănescu explains it, after Rohlfs, from the Latin sense “to set free”, through the idea of putting something back in its first state.^[5] Șăineanu also started from “to free”, that is, to free from an illness.^[10] The Latin verb is formed on vindex (“defender, protector”).^[1]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki of the early 16th century, at Psalm 6: „Mă vindecă că neputincios sânt” “heal me, for I am weak”.^[11][4][2]

Semantic evolution

Besides healing, the old language used the verb for closing a gap: in Dosoftei's lives of the saints a rock splits and closes again over a saint, and a saint closes a prison and its seals again.^[12][3] It could also mean “to dry up” waters.^[12] Today it is used of people and of wounds that close, and figuratively of grief and longing.^[6][4] Regional idioms are a se vindeca cu zeamă de clopot “to be healed with bell broth”, that is, to be dying, in Moldavia, and a se vindeca “to die” in Muntenia.^[4]

Plant names come from it: vindecătoare “garlic mustard” and vindecea “betony”.^[5] The neologisms vindicativ and vindictă came from French.^[5]

Timeline

• early 16th century – vindecă in the Psaltirea Hurmuzaki, the first record.^[11][4]
• 16th century – vendecă in the Codicele Voronețean.^[2][3]
• 1688 – „vindecă pre Avimeleh” “he healed Abimelech” in the Bucharest Bible.^[3]

Meanings

Verb

1. To heal, to cure; reflexive: to recover from an illness.^[6][4][1]
2. Reflexive, of wounds: to close, to scar over.^[6][4]
3. (figurative) To relieve or end a grief, a sorrow or a longing.^[6][4]
4. To break someone of a bad habit.^[4]
5. (obsolete) To close, to seal; to dry up.^[12][3]

Word family

• vindecător
• vindecea
• vindecare
• vindecătoare

Related words

• Aromanian vindic
• Latin vindicō

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Academia Română (1965–2010), Dicționarul limbii române (DLR), serie nouă, tom I–XIX, București: Editura Academiei Române, p. s.v. vindeca
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. vindeca
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Academia Română, Institutul de Lingvistică „Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” (2010), Micul dicționar academic, 2nd ed., 4 vols., București: Univers Enciclopedic Gold, p. 2, 1482
5. ^ a b c d e 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. vindeca
6. ^ a b c d e DEX (2009), Dicționarul explicativ al limbii române [Explanatory dictionary of the Romanian language], Bucharest: Editura Univers Enciclopedic, p. 1199
7. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter, p. 9347
8. ^ Papahagi, Tache (1963), Dicționarul dialectului aromân, general și etimologic, București: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romîne, p. 1110
9. ^ 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, 185
10. ^ Șăineanu, Lazăr (1929), Dicționar universal al limbei române, 6th ed., Craiova: Scrisul Românesc, p. 1, 697
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 6:2
12. ^ a b c Costinescu, Mariana; Georgescu, Magdalena; Zgraon, Florentina (1987), Dicționarul limbii române literare vechi (1640–1780): termeni regionali, București: Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, p. 1, 314