Romanian and Slavic

--- In cybalist@..., "Rex H. McTyeire" <rexbo@...> wrote:

> I dunno...proto-slavic may be a Russian invention ..like Scythia :-)
> Marsh is "mlastina" , and "balta" is just water that goes away....slowly.
> (Carefully preserved ?)

Slavic *bolto is attested with a range of meanings that include 'mud', 'puddle, pool', 'marsh, wetland' and the like. The Romanian meanings of balta ('pond, floodplain') are well within that range. Mlastina is Slavic too. By the way, the Romanian vocabulary is Slavicised almost as much as English is Franco-Latinised. The number of Slavic loanwords (mainly from OCS, which was the church and chancery language in Romania for several centuries, and other South Slavic sources) is twice as great as the Romance lexical component! Of course the most common words are predominantly (if by no means exclusively) of Latin origin, but there are Slavic borrowings even among grammatical words and interjections (e.g. da 'yes'). Romanian composite numerals do not follow the Latin model but calque Slavic constructions (cincisprezece '15' is cinc-spre-zece 'quinque-super-decem' like OCS pe~tI na dese~te), and Slavic *sUto '100' was borrowed as suta, replacing the Romance numeral.

Balta < *bolto is a rare example of an *early* Slavic loan in Romanian. The fact that liquid metathesis failed to affect it proves that it was borrowed before the main wave of Slavic influence that began with the territorial expansion of the First Bulgarian Kingdom in the 9th and 10th centuries. The other known examples are dalta 'chisel' < *dol(b)to- and gard 'fence' < *gordU. Greek toponyms of Slavic origin are typically more archaic than Slavic words in Romanian, which shows that the expanding Slavs in the 6th c. were first attracted by the rich southern provinces rather than by Dacia, which had been devastated during the Great Migrations. The progress of the Bulgarians lost its impetus towards the end of the 10th c. and the First Kingdom was absorbed by Byzantium in 1018, which gave the Romanised peasants a chance to keep their Romance language while assimilating Slavic and Magyar settlers. Old Romanian was certainly a seriously endangered language in the 10th c. (Latin died out in all the neighbouring provinces).

Piotr