Two Serbian place names ending in ‑iš of Romanian origin: Mriš and Dešiška

Abstract

The suffix -iş is among the most productive in Romanian toponymy, and is mostly used for deriving drymonyms (names of forests) with the name of a tree as their usual derivational stem. (Micro)toponyms of the kind are frequent in the parts of Serbia with a Romanian-speaking (Vlach) population, but they also occur where there have been no Vlachs for centuries. To the already recorded examples (Periš in Svrljig, documented since 1455, from Rom. periş 'pear grove'; Val(u)niš near Babušnica from Rom. aluniş, 'hazel grove') further two are added here: Mriš, a hill in Zaglavak, probably from Rom. meriş, 'apple grove', with a reduction and syncope of the pretonic vowel in Serbian or already in Romanian pronunciation;and Dešiška, or Desiš in the fifteenth century, a village in Toplica, from Rom. desiş, 'thicket', 'bush'). In an additional overview of the origin of the Rom. suffix -iş the assumption is made that it goes back to the South Slavic -iš (< CSl *-yš') in such a way that the Serbian word gustiš was used as a model for forming the appellative desiş (Rom. des < Lat. densus, 'thick', 'dense'), whence it was abstracted in Romanian and used further on in this function, competing with the inherited -et < Lat. -ētum.