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

South Slavic, világ-o ‘world’ from Hungarian, and pepš-o ‘black pepper’ from Czech)
take the borrowed nominative plural suffix -i and the reshaped oblique singular suffix
-os-. Other inflectional classes show different markers, but the principle remains the
same.
Similarly, pre-Greek and early Greek loan-verbs show full morphological
integration and are structurally indistinguishable from indigenous verbs. Post-Greek
loan-verbs, on the other hand, are marked out by an overt (and dedicated) adaptation
marker, the Greek-origin suffix -in-, which is added to an inflectional stem of the source
verb (e.g. vič-in- ‘to shout’ from Serbo-Croatian vič-, dógoz-in- ‘to work’ from
Hungarian dolgoz-), and followed by regular indigenous inflections. The suffix, which
is a pre-inflectional though non-derivational morpheme, was extracted from lexical
borrowings of Greek verbs with the present stem in -in-. Though none of these have
been retained in Selice Romani, the suffix has been extended to those Greek loan-verbs
that originally contained a different suffix, e.g. rum-in- ‘to destroy, break, damage,
spoil’ from Greek rim-az- ‘to ravage’. Dialect comparison suggests that the suffix -in-
was originally specialized for non-perfective adaptation of some transitive loan-verbs in
Romani (Matras 2002: 130). In Selice Romani, however, it has developed into a
general, aspect- and valency-neutral, verb-adaptation marker. 20 Nonce loan-verbs from
Slovak or Czech show a distinct pattern of morphological adaptation: their infinitive
stems get adapted by the Hungarian-origin adaptation suffix -ál-, 21 in addition to the
regular adaptation suffix -in-, e.g. sledov-ál-in- ‘to observe, follow’ from Slovak/Czech
sled-ov-a-.
In adjectives, the distinction between xenoclitic and oikoclitic inflection, which
is attested in most Romani dialects and reconstructable for Early Romani (e.g. Boretzky
& Igla 2004: 112–113), has been lost due to internal analogical developments in all
South Central dialects of Romani, including Selice Romani (cf. Elšík et al. 1999: 334,
Elšík & Matras 2006: 329). All borrowed adjectives – i.e. not only those borrowed from
Selice Romani’s pre-Greek contact languages – now inflect exactly like indigenous
adjectives and employ the former oikoclitic inflectional suffixes. In loanwords from pre-
20 The Greek-origin suffix *-(V)s-, which appears to have been the marker of perfective adaptation of all
loan-verbs and of non-perfective adaptation of intansitive loan-verbs (Matras 2002: 130), has acquired
novel functions in Selice Romani (cf. Elšík 2007+).
21 Although Kenesei, Vago, and Fenyvesi (1998: 357–358) describe the Hungarian suffix -ál- as a de-
nominal verb-deriving marker, their examples show that it is in fact a verb-adapting suffix, which is
synchronically distinct from the de-nominal verb-deriving suffix -(V)l.
Elšík Loanwords in Selice Romani 26 of 65