Talk:gintã

Borrowed?

Hi @Word dewd544,

Judging by the comparison table that I have assembled here, this Aromanian word shows a quite unexpected outcome of Latin /ɡ/ before a front vowel. Could it be borrowed from, for example, Albanian gjinde (with initial /ɟ/)? Even though the latter was itself borrowed from Romance. Nicodene (talk) 17:18, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi. It seems the original form, at least in Romanian, was just 'gint', and the form gintă was a later 19th "Latinism" that never fully caught on (although I'm not sure you could really call it that, since it seems to just be a modification) https://www.dex.ro/gint. Anyway, as for the Aromanian gintã, I agree that the phonetic outcome is unexpected, and honestly, I'm not really sure where it fits in considering the Romanian equivalent. It is plausible that it was borrowed from or influenced by the Albanian in this form, but I'm not sure about the form ghimtã. Word dewd544 (talk) 20:42, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

@Word dewd544 Could Aromanian simply have borrowed this from Romanian? The unetymological final schwa is also shared between them (except for the Aromanian variant ginti). Nicodene (talk) 21:06, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Not impossible, but I don't think it's the most likely, especially as this was not even a particularly common word in Romanian by the late 19th-early 20th century when Aromanian began coming into contact with it again and adopting/borrowing the occasional term. Could be that that form in particular was influenced by a Romanian form. Unfortunately there isn't much good documentation on all this. Word dewd544 (talk) 19:47, 21 February 2023 (UTC)