A Note on Slavic Loans in Romanian: [l] Revisited

Brian D. Joseph

The Ohio State University

It is my great pleasure to offer this small piece in recognition of the fine scholarship

through which Marius Sala has contributed to our understanding of Romanian, Judeo-Spanish,

and the Balkan linguistic situation more generally. My topic concerns a detail of contact

phonology in the Balkans specifically involving Slavic and Romanian and focuses ultimately on

the development of one word. It is thus a minor contribution, to be sure, dwarfed by the

voluminous work of Professor Sala, but it is nevertheless offered in a spirit of respect and

admiration.

As is well-known (and one can consult a work such as Sala 1998:152 for confirmation of

the basic facts), the regular and most general outcome in Romanian of a Latin single (i.e.,

nongeminate) intervocalic [l] is [r]. This development is shown by such cases as Lat. basilica >

Rmn. biseric 'church', caelum > cer 'sky', dolere > durea hurt, exvolre > zbura 'soar', qualem

> care which, and solem > soare 'sun', among many others. In initial position or before

consonants, Latin [l] is regularly retained, though adjacent vowels can determine other outcomes;

relevant examples include Lat. laudre > Rmn. lavda 'praise', lingua > limb language, or

saltare > slta hop. These treatments of Latin [l] have all the hallmarks of language-internal

Neogrammarian-style sound change, including regularity and the presence of phonetic

conditioning, but nonetheless the claim has been put forth that there is a contact-related

dimension to one aspect of this complex of changes involving [l].

substratum may have played a role in the development of Latin [l] into Romanian. For Hamp,

as noted in Hamp 1989 for instance, the emergence of Romanian as a distinct language was the

result of a portion of an Albanoid population in the Balkans (the precursor to attested

Albanian) shifting to Latin and thus creating Romanian. Drawing then on the fact that Romanian

alters earlier [l] systematically only in intervocalic position, and further that in intervocalic

position, Albanian shows its own special development of early [l], changing it to the velarized

lateral now written in the standard orthography as ll (Hamp 2002:245), Hamp suggests that the

Albanoid speakers who shifted to Latin and thereby created Romanian brought to the language

shift their own characteristic treatment of intervocalic [l]; that treatment, in his view, carried over

into their pronunciation of their adopted Latin and ultimately led to the Romanian [r] in that

position. The shared restriction of a particular outcome of a lateral in intervocalic position is the

key in his account to understanding the relationship between the Albanian development and the

Romanian one. The Albanian velar [] gives a wide range of reflexes in regional Albanian

dialects, so it is conceivable that one such outcome could have led eventually to [r], especially

since perhaps as much as a millennium, or even more, passed from the time of the presumed shift

of Albanoid speakers to Latin up to the first attestations of Romanian (16th century).

On the face of it, given other ancient parallels between Albanian and Romanian,1 Hamps

proposal is intriguing and worthy of consideration; Sala (1998: 152) does express some doubts

1
I have in mind here the 70 or so old shared vocabulary items between Albanian and Romanian, e.g. Alb. mal

mountain / Romn. mal mountain, river bank, Alb. sorr /Romn. cioara blackbird, Alb. mosh age Romn. mo

old man (cf. Katii 1976:152, Sala 1998:81), though Hamp 1989 has drawn attention to parallels in stress rules,

and Joseph 1999 discusses parallels in the syntax of the preposition with (Alb. me / Romn.. cu, both requiring an

unmodified object to be in the definite form).

particular proposal.2 Still, whatever the assessment of Hamps hypothesis, there is another

aspect to the development of l in Romanian where language contact of a different sort is involved

but where some details remain to be explained. It is one such detail that I hope to illuminate

here.

Romanian experienced contact with speakers of Slavic at a period after the developments

with Latin [l] had run their course. The dating of this contact is shown by several considerations,

but among them is the fact that [l] is retained in Slavic loanwords into Romanian, even in

intervocalic position. Examples that show this retention include lopata > lopat shovel, kobyla

> cobil plow line, and pola > poal lap, among others. Following Petrucci (1999), one can

note a single apparent exception to this otherwise simple adoption by Romanian of Slavic [l]

without alteration, namely mgur hillock, borrowed from Proto-Slavic *magula 'hillock'. It is

often assumed, as noted by Petrucci, that this word may have been borrowed at an earlier stage

than the other Slavic words in Romanian, at a time when the l > r change was still alive or even

before it happened. Such a hypothesis certainly gives the right results for this word, although it

might be hard to reconcile it with Hamps view of why Latin intervocalic [l] was altered, since in

his account it is not necessarily the case that the Slavic intervocalic [l] would have been

phonetically identical with what the Latin sound had become in proto-Romanian. Moreover,

assuming hillock to be an early loan word is a rather ad hoc assumption, without independent

support, and raises the question of why this word alone should have been borrowed so early.

Another approach, then, to an explanation of mgur would be to look to a different source for it

2
Sala is somewhat skeptical, as he says Nici n acest caz nu este nevoie s se explice transformarea lui l- n r prin

influena substratului traco-dac.

there is a different story behind mgur, that is pursued here.

In particular, it turns out that there is a Latin word that has an appropriate shape and

meaning to have provided some relevant input affecting Romanian mgur. This word is

magalia, glossed in the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Glare 1968, s.v.) as huts, tents; it appears to

be a Punic word, and quite possibly is related to another Punic loanword into Latin, mapalia,

also meaning huts. This latter Punic word is said to be cognate with a Hebrew form mappalah

meaning ruins. Taking all this together, it seems reasonable to suppose that underlying this

etymon there could well have been a form with a meaning of something like heaps. If such a

form, especially if the Hebrew ending ah is taken as basic, had been brought over into Latin and

had led to a (presumably plural) *magala, from which magalia could have been derived, then the

elements needed for an account of Romanian mgur are present. In particular, this presumed

Latin *magala, with an original meaning of *heaps (from which the denotation huts and then

tents could easily have developed), would be expected to have produced a Romanian form

*mgar- (or the like).3 Given an assumption of an original sense of heaps, this word can be

said to have had mound-like semantics, and as such, it could well have impinged on or

influenced the form that the semantically and formally similar Slavic *magula took in Romanian.

That is, a cross of a *mgar- heap, mound, from the presumed Latin *magala, with *mgul

hillock, from Slavic *magula, could well have yielded the attested Romanian mgur hillock.

This form was thus a loanword from Slavic but not an early loan; rather, it was a loanword

reshaped by the influence of a native word.

3
The presumed *magala offers a better source for the accentuation of mgur. I thank Dr. Catalin Anghelina of The

Ohio State University for help with details of the historical phonology involved here.
 My specific suggestion, then, for explaining the r- in mgur is that Romanian

borrowed Slavic *magula in the usual way for Slavic words, giving Romanian *mgul, but that

this form was blended with (crossed with or contaminated by) *mgar-, the outcome of the

predecessor to attested Latin magalia, aided by the fact that magalia was a word with similar

semantics and a similar phonic form. This semantically and phonically based blending thus

yielded mgur hillock.4

The account offered here is admittedly somewhat speculative, based really on

circumstantial evidence rather than on directly attested developments. 5 Still, by way of

enhancing the plausibility of such an account, let me conclude by mentioning a possible parallel

for the sort of mixing envisioned here in which there is interaction between a word inherited

from Latin and a loan word. That is, the long-standing problematic outcome negur, ostensibly

from Latin nebula cloud, where the g- is unexpected,6 may well reflect influence from Slavic

mbgla fog, a word in a similar semantic sphere that has as well a medial g- and a liquid; that

is, attracted by the similar semantics and phonic shape, a Latinate *nebur in Romanian and a

Slavic borrowing *mgla- could well have crossed, yielding negur.

4
Under the view that analogy represents the influence of one form over another, such a blend or contamination

would be a type of analogy. Note also Jeffers & Lehiste 1979, who treat contamination as leveling within a

semantic paradigm.
5
It is perhaps no more speculative than the suggestion of Cioranescu 1966: s.v. that mgur is a creacin

expresiva; Cioranescu also reviews some of the other suggestions made in the literature for the etymology of

mgur, and finds none of them wholly satisfactory.

substrate but that others see as a Latinate form.

language change (borrowing and contamination) and thus, I would argue, it cannot be dismissed

out of hand. That it provides an explanation for this otherwise difficult detail about the outcome

of Slavic [l] in Romanian is a welcome side-benefit.

References

Cioranescu, Alejandro. 1966. Diccionario etimologico rumano. Tenerife: Biblioteca

Filologica.

Glare, P. G. W. 1968ff. Oxford Latin Dictionary. New York : Oxford University Press.

Hamp, Eric P. 1989. Yugoslavia A Crossroads of Sprachbunde. Zeitschrift fr Balkanologie

25.1.44-47.

Hamp, Eric P. 2002. On Serbo-Croatians Historic Laterals. Of All the Slavs My Favorites:

Studies in Honor of Howard I Aronson on the Occasion of his 66th Birthday, ed. by Don

Dyer, et al. (= Indiana Slavic Studies, 12.) Bloomington, IN: Slavica, pp. 243-50.

Jeffers, Robert & Ilse Lehiste. 1979. Principles and methods for historical linguistics.

Cambridge: MIT Press.

Joseph, Brian D. 1999. Romanian and the Balkans: Some Comparative Perspectives. The

Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences. Studies on the Transition from Historical-

Comparative to Structural Linguistics in Honour of E. F. K. Koerner. Volume 2:

Methodological Perspectives and Applications, ed. by S. Embleton, J. Joseph, & H.-J.

Niederehe. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 218-235.

Katii, Radoslav. 1976. The Ancient Languages of the Balkans. The Hague: Mouton.
Petrucci, Peter R. 1999. Slavic features in the history of Romanian. Munich: LINCOM Europa

(LINCOM Studies in Romance Linguistics 8).

Sala, Marius. 1998. De la latin la romn. Bucureti: Univers Enciclopedic.

Authors address:

Department of Linguistics

The Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio USA 43210-1298

e-mail: joseph.1@osu.edu