The Italian word pugnale ‘dagger’ has been borrowed by several Balkan languages and Ottoman-Turkish, but some of these loans show a peculiar phonetic feature, namely the change of the vowel u to i in the first syllable. Two scholars, Gustav Meyer and Henrik Barić, tried to explain this feature by opposing arguments: according to Meyer the change originated in Turkish, according to Barić in Albanian. This paper aims to reanalyze the whole question and to demonstrate that Barić’s view is much likelier both for phonetic reasons and on the basis of documentary and lexicographical data.
