Re: [tied] The Magic Mountain

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 23942
Date: 2003-06-27

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 that are _indisputably_ Slavic but
must come from the language of some of 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 (the conventional OCS-oriented spelling of PSl. reconstructions
is confusing). The case of <daltë> has already been discussed at great
length on Cybalist. Celebrated examples include <karutë> and <matukë>
for *koryto 'trough' and *motyka 'hoe'. Here we have Proto-Slavic forms
preserved like flies in amber or like those Proto-Germanic words
deep-frozen in Finnish. Familiarity with Albanian is priceless for
students of Slavic; it's a crying shame that Albanian remains the most
neglected branch of IE.

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. 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 :-). 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. The
assumption of a Slavic source is simply safer on methodological grounds
-- ask Ockham. As for borrowing the same word twice during prolonged
contact, well-known examples are aplenty.

Piotr