Starting forward slash issue on Laravel 4.1

Spotted an issue with latest version of Laravel (maybe since version 4.1.6? not sure) when generating the links in the language bar caused by a '/' not present anymore in the beginning of the $path variable (and therefore no str_replace is happening creating links like 'en/acerca').
In a DRY way I choose to add a starting forward slash when $path doesn't start with it.