Re: [tied] The Magic Mountain

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

> 27-06-03 15:27, m_iacomi wrote:
>
>> That doesn't fit Romanian <mãgura> since there is *no* Slavic
>> loanword to exhibit rhotacism of VlV. Either the word would be
>> a strange singular case of *very* early Slavic loanword, or the
>> word is pre-Slavic. At this point, I would pick by far the second.
>
> It's _very_ early but not that singular, and certainly not isolated.
> Albanian reveals a few other words

For Albanian, yes. For Romanian, no. In this case, Romanian hints
through rhotacism _and_ stress it could hardly be linked to Slavic.

> [...] the very first Slavs who made it into the Balkans, perhaps as
> early as AD 600. Those words show the characteristic substitution
> of Albanian /a/ and /u/ for PSl. *o and *y, which were still
> pronounced [a] and [u:] at the early stage of common Slavic

As said: Albanian word does not exclude the hypothesis of an early
Slavic loanword. It fits well. Unlike Romanian word which does not
fit well in this theory.

> Now <magullë> for *mogyla [magu:la:] shows exactly the same pattern
> and allows one to assume a pre-rhotacism loan into both Albanian
> and Romanian from a common source.

Why *both*?! Things gravitate around magical threshold A.D. 600:
that's the epoch from which one can infer the first Slavic loanwords
entered Romanian, but none with rhotacism. That is: rhotacism should
have been no longer active after A.D. 600. [Rosetti goes even further
by stating that Slavic /l/ _could not_ rhotacize since it has a
different pronunciation from Latin and substrate /l/; that would
relax timeline of rhotacism, allowing it to extend up to Common
Romanian period and would rule out any possibility for rhotacized
words to have Slavic origins].

> If it's the only good example of Romanian rhotacism in a Slavic
> loan, so be it: the reason is that the _oldest_ layer of such loans
> is very thin; we'd better be grateful for this single example

The thin layer of the oldest Slavic loanwords recognized as such,
still doesn't contain any rhotacized word, only VlV, as in Slavic.
Considering it as "good example" would imply that the mentioned
thin layer should be restricted to this only word. That doesn't
sound like a very probable assumption. And one has to explain also
stress pattern modification.

> Independent borrowing from Iranian is of couse a possibility, but
> a less likely one, since the word is not directly attested in
> Iranian, while it's found everywhere in Slavic.

There was another possibility out of this Iranian connection.

> The assumption of a Slavic source is simply safer on methodological
> grounds -- ask Ockham.

... but you yourself recognized that Slavic word remains basically
unexplained. That means it should be probably a post-PIE specifical
construction or loanword, which could very well located at some
historical moment on the Satem branch, before its' further split.
It's obvious that the word entered at some moment in Slavic or
in one of its' ancestors, and Ockham has nothing to do with the
choice of the historical moment of entrance. That is: nothing
obliges us to infer it was invented or loaned by Proto-Slavs.
Slavic origin theory for Albanian word doesn't require it, but
Romanian phonetism and stress, and presence of the word "moGoro"
`low hill` and toponym "Mogoro" in Campidanese (with proparoxytone
stress, cf. M. Wagner) are suggesting the word was already in
Mediterranean region prior to Slavs' arrival. That would require
an insertion in a Satem (sub-)branch before split of Proto-Slavic.

> As for borrowing the same word twice during prolonged contact,
> well-known examples are aplenty.

That's true, I used a bad argument.

Regards,
Marius Iacomi