Abstrakt
The paper presents an analysis of the so-called iotation and its morphophonological effects in a variety of South Central Romani spoken in a multiethnic village in southwestern Slovakia. (The data have been acquired through the author's long-term linguistic fieldwork in the locality.) In many dialects of Romani, including the variety in question, a number of suffixes may be analyzed as beginning in an underlying palatal approximant /j/, whose elision triggers a morphophonological alternation of the preceding consonant, e.g. pheň a [pʰeɲa] [sister NOM.PL] 'sisters' (LEFTWARDS ARROW phen 'sister'). The Romani variety in question stands out in exhibiting a complex pattern of iotation morpho-pho-no-logy, with several different effects in differing structural contexts.
In this paper I will first present an overview of the grammatical distribution of the under-lying palatal approximant, viz. in noun inflection, perfective verb inflection, and verb derivation. Second, I will illustrate the different effects of iotation, viz. a) palatalization, e.g. angrusť a [ˈaŋgrusca] [ring-NOM.PL] 'rings' (LEFTWARDS ARROW angrust i 'ring'); b) gemination, e.g. posiťť a [ˈposicːa] [pocket NOM.PL] 'pockets' (LEFTWARDS ARROW posiť i 'pocket'); and c) palatalization and gemination, e.g. búťť-a [ˈbuːcːa] [thing-NOM.PL] 'things, works' (LEFTWARDS ARROW bút i 'thing, work').
Third, I will analyze the phonological and gram-matical conditioning of the different effects of iotation. And, finally, I will show that some of the iotation rules in this Romani variety have been copied from Hungarian (cf. e.g.
Siptár & Törkenczy 2000) and briefly discuss the role of language contact in complexifying the morphophonology of a language.