There was also an Old Church
Slavic variant with <u>: <rumU, rumIsk-> (cf. OHG Ro:ma/Ru:ma,
Gothic Ru:ma, Arabic Ru:m 'Byzantium' for a similar treatment of the vowel).
This <rum-> can't be a very old loan, for otherwise foreign *u: would have
yielded OCS <y>, so it was probably picked up somewhere in the Balkans.
The form *rimU (OCS rimU, Russian Rim, Polish Rzym, Czech R^ím, etc.) must come
from the same or similar direction as Polish <krzyz*> 'cross'
(virtual *kriz^I), ultimately from <crucem> via some north Romance dialect
and I suppose Bavarian (Old Bavarian <kruzi>) and/or East Central German
(cf. also Polish z*yd, Hungarian zsidó 'Jew' (ultimately from <iu:daeum>).
There must be a detailed solution waiting to be found somewhere (I know of an
article by Stieber that discusses these words, but my access to library
resources is limited at the moment). I can only speculate that something like
dialectal *ru:m-isk- 'Roman' became *rümisch ~ *rimisch (cf. jiddisch), was
borrowed into Slavic as *rim-Isk- and yielded *rim- as a back-formation. I wish
I knew more about German historical dialectology.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 1:22 PM
Subject: [tied] Rim-?
Why Slavic Rim- etc for
Rome?
Torsten