Re: [tied] Romanian and Slavic

From: Rex H. McTyeire
Message: 6008
Date: 2001-02-10

Piotr:
> 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.

I agree generally. Checking locally since tweaking Sergei :-).."pond" fits
into local "balta" as well..if small..and sometimes the intermittent aspect
is lost...a small pond fluctuating with rain is also a balta..even if it
never completely dissipates. Related and cute: a frog, from one of the
latter is a "pui de balta" (Pond Chicken :-) I guess I will concede the
point to Sergei, :-(
as related small "wetnesses" seems to carry the point..but the locals do
distinguish balta from mlastina sharply..they aren't interchangeable or
synonymous.

> By the way, the Romanian vocabulary is Slavicised almost as much as
English is Franco->Latinised.

Agree..but I sometimes have disputed the degree or level. What per centage
would you put
on the degree of Slavicization? (below you mentioned "twice as great" re
Romance lexical components?)

>(cincisprezece '15' is cinc-spre-zece 'quinque-super-decem' like OCS pe~tI
na dese~te),

Da, dar: it is beginning to loose out to a shortening of form (all "teens").
Both are now accepted in even formal speech:

(cincisprezece) is becoming (cincispe) rapidly, only briefly pausing at
(cincispre).

>...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).

Concur completely. Thanks.

Cu Stima
Rex H. McTyeire
Bucharest, Romania
<rexbo@...>