Re: Roumania...

At 2:28 am -0400 13/4/99, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond A. Brown scripsit:
>
>> That reminds that 'Rome' in English did change to /ru:m/ during the great
>> vowel shift of the Tudor period (IIRC this pronunciation is implied
>> somewhere in the Shakespearean corpus)
>
>In the great description of Falstaff's death in _Henry V_:
>
>"He was rheumatic [Rome-atic], and talk'd of the whore of Babylon
>[insulting Protestant name for the Pope]".
Thanks for the reference :)

[....]
>
>> I guess something similar is the case with Romania.  It surely is the
>> reason that now the high central vowel is spelt with a-circumflex only in
>> the roma^n-  words, i-circumflex being used elsewhere.
>
>Yes, the a-circ is used only in words clearly derived from "Rome".
>But I don't think the English vowel shift can be relevant when clearly
>the source of "R[o]umania" is French.
Sorry - what I meant is that there was parallelism between the learned
restoration of 'o' in English /rum/ and the what I understood P. M. ARKTAYG
to be saying about the earlier _Romanian_ 'rumi^n- ' being changed to
'roma^n- '.  The change to /u/ in the initial unstressed syllable of the
word is like we find in 'Rumansch', one of the names for Swiss
Rheto-Romance.

The English did come via the French 'Roumanie' etc, but that in term if
I've understood P. M. ARKTAYG correctly derived from what was once native
Romanian.  And indeed one of characteristics, I believe, of eastern Romance
(which admittedly I'm less familiar with than western Romance) is the
tendency to reduce unstressed /o/ to /u/.

Ray.