Talk:rotella

Romanian rotilă

 * shouldn't Romanian rotilă be added under descendants? Morphologically, it somewhat differs from the inherited roată which leads me to believe that an internal creation (as proposed by DEX) isn't necessary. It also looks a lot like the Spanish equivalent rodilla. --Robbie SWE (talk) 09:38, 1 February 2022 (UTC)


 * @Robbie SWE Thank you for pinging. From a brief survey of inherited forms, it does not seem that the outcome of Latin /-ĕlla/ is /-ilə/:
 * agnella > mia~mială
 * buccella > bucea
 * catella > cățea
 * margella > mărgea
 * porcella > purcea
 * sella > șea~șa
 * stella > stea
 * turturella > turturea
 * vitella > vițea
 * To judge by these, rotella should have yielded *roțea or similar.
 * That said, it is not clear to me where the -ilă of Romanian rotilă may come from. Nicodene (talk) 10:07, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
 * You make a great point - the suffix -ilă is pretty rare and unproductive in Romanian. The only terms I could find were arăpilă, flămânzilă, jarchilă, orbilă, prăsilă, rotilă, rotoghilă, sărăcilă , sucilă, surzilă  and zorilă. But I can't help but wonder how rotilă came about, being so simillar to Latin rotella both in meaning and morphology. Robbie SWE (talk) 10:25, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
 * @Robbie SWE The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology mentions it as an augmentative, but does not elaborate on its origin. In at least the name-forming usage, it bears some resemblance to the Gothic -ila and its Germanic cognates, although that can easily be a coincidence. This book review, on the other hand, seems to suggest (p. 4) that a Slavic origin is likely, although even as a Russian speaker, it isn't clear to me what they have in mind. (It would be excellent if we could access the original study.) The nearest thing that comes to mind is *-dlo, which in Bulgarian does yield -ilo in some cases- but I do not see much of a semantic connection. Nicodene (talk) 11:05, 1 February 2022 (UTC)
 * That's weird since it seems to create diminutives - none of the words mentioned above are augmentative. Robbie SWE (talk) 11:17, 1 February 2022 (UTC)