Re: The City of Ravenna

>continuing Illyrian *rawi:na:, cognate to Lat. <rui:na> 'downfall,
>rubbish, ruin'. Hubschmid, like Pokorny, tends to refer IE
>substratal words of this sort to "Veneto-Illyrian", but I think we
>can distinguish Venetic from Illyrian here. Historical Venetic has
>all five short vowels, but historical Messapic (the Illyrian of
>southeastern Italy) has only four, since */o/ fell together with
>/a/. Hubschmid's Alpine protoforms *rowa, *rowja, *rowi:ke, and
>*rówino- are Venetic, but *rawi- and *rawa:- are Illyrian. The
>river <Plavis> on Venetic land, now <Piave>, reflects the /o/-grade
>of IE *pleu-, and indicates that Paduan Venetic was superposed on
>an earlier Illyrian stratum.

Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovinj on the coast of the Istrian
peninsula (Ital. Rovigno, Istriot Ruveigno). Arupinium; Mons
Rubineus; later Ruginium & Ruvinium.

>However, since I have not studied Romanian place-names in general,
>this is ONLY a guess.

Mainstream (incl. Romanian) linguists have deemed (singular) rovina,
(plural) rovine as a Bulgarian loanword rovina. In Romanian, rovina
is some kind of marshy "rippa". So, to a certain extent, similar
semantics as in the case of Engl. ravine < rapine < rapina.

George