--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
> ******GK: "Roman" is "Rzymianin" in Polish, as far as
> I remember. And in Ukrainian it's "Rymlianyn". Not a
> borrowing from Serbo-Croatian either.*****
The change *Bj > /Bl'/ (where B stands for any PSl labial, i.e. /m/,
/v/, /p/ or /b/) took place root-initially everywhere in Slavic, but
only dialectally before a suffixal *j (hence <zemja> vs. <zeml'a>
depending on the language). This is why *rim-jan- yielded Pol.
Rzymian- but Ukr. Ryml'an- and SCR. Rimljan-. Anyway, the development
of a lateral from /j/ after a labial is so unusual and so
characteristically Slavic that there can be no mistake about the
origin of Rom. Râm and Râmleni.
Piotr