From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
Message: 9113
Date: 2001-09-06
>There was also an Old Church Slavic variant with <u>: <rumU, rumIsk-> (cf. OHG Ro:ma/Ru:ma,Me too. How old is the Umlaut in words like <römisch>, and is it old
>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.