Loanwords in Selice Romani, an Indo-Aryan language of Slovakia 1 ...

volja ‘will; mood’ was probably borrowed without any phonological adaptation before it
has changed to present-day Selice Romani vója ‘good mood’, due to regular Hungarian-
induced phonological developments. One of the few clear instances of pre-Hungarian
phonological adaptation is the change [y > u] in Early Romani kurko ‘Sunday; week’, a
loanword of Medieval Greek kyrikó(n) ‘Lord’s (day); Sunday’ (Tzitzilis 2001: 327).
5.2. Morphological integration of loanwords
Loanwords that are assigned the status of an inflected Selice Romani word class (noun,
verb, or adjective) are, as a rule, morphologically integrated into Selice Romani
inflectional patterns. However, there is a general division in Romani between two major
diachronic layers of loanwords with regard to their degree of integration: loanwords
from pre-Greek contact languages are fully integrated and indistinguishable from
indigenous words on morphological grounds, whereas loanwords from post-Greek
contact languages are, or can be reconstructed to have been in Early Romani, overtly
marked by various morphological means as loanwords. Loanwords from Greek, which
is the source of most loanword markers (e.g. Bakker 1997), are split between these two
layers: some Hellenisms, presumably the early ones, are fully integrated, while others,
presumably the later ones, are overtly marked as loanwords. This diachronic division is
synchronically reflected as a morphologically encoded etymological compartmental-
ization of the lexicon: older loanwords, together with indigenous words, have what I
term oikoclitic morphology, while more recent loanwords have xenoclitic morphology.
The distinction between oikoclisis and xenoclisis, which can be reconstructed for Early
Romani, has undergone a variety of analogical developments in individual Romani
dialects, affecting not only individual lexemes, but also whole inflectional and
derivational classes (see Elšík & Matras 2006: 324–333 for an overview).
The distinction between the full integration (oikoclisis) of earlier loanwords and
marked integration (xenoclisis) of later loanwords is well retained in Selice Romani
noun inflection. Xenoclitic loanwords are characterized by borrowed nominative
suffixes, mostly of Greek origin, and by analogically reshaped oblique stem suffixes
(see Elšík 2000, Matras 2002: 80–85 for details). For example, oikoclitic masculine
loan-nouns in -o (e.g. čár-o ‘bowl, dish’ from Dravidian, ťirm-o ‘worm’ from Persian,
and kurk-o ‘Sunday; week’ from Greek) take the indigenous nominative plural suffix -e
and the indigenous oblique singular suffix -es-, whereas xenoclitic masculine loan-nouns
in -o < Early Romani *-os (e.g. fór-o ‘town’ from Greek, prah-o ‘dust, powder’ from
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