Re: [tied] Re: Croatians and the Carpathians

The problem is that an etymology based exclusively on might-have-beens and an irregular phonetic resemblance is not persuasive enough (and why should the Croatians rather than any other Slavic tribe have been named after the mountains?). It's something you can imagine, but not sell to linguists as a well-supported proposal. I do not claim that the phonological problems I pointed out make this etymology impossible, but they do make it look fanciful and difficult to defend. Slavic groups often adopted ethnonyms derived from geographical names -- especially river-names -- but I don't know of a single case of a *suffixless* tribal name of this type. We are talking of the name of the Croatians, not of the Carpathians, after all. In brief, people settling in or near "X" may call themselves "X-ians", but not "X's".

Piotr

----- Original Message -----
From: MCLSSAA2@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 7:04 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Croatians and the Carpathians

Someone wrote:- > But early Germanic *xarvað- would have become Common Slavic > **xorvod- > **xravod- in dialects related to Croatian. > Besides, where is the "-ian" part? One would definitely expect an > ethnonymic suffix like *-ên(-in)- or *-ak- in a name derived from a > mountain range. At the time of the big migrations, all sorts of peoples were moving into and across the area, and likely local place names were passed about repeatedly with more or less distortion among and between native and immigrant speakers of many sorts of dialacts and languages, and exact etymological routes might not be reliable. As well as regular phonetic rules, there would be "Ypres-to-Wipers"- style familiarizing distortions, and plain simple mishearings. For example, in Old Norse the Biblical name [Elizabeth] ended up as [Ellisíf] = "old-age - wire", and [Jerusalem] as [Jórsala] (compare Uppsala in Sweden). I can still imagine some migrating Slavs picking up Germanic [harvað] (a form attested in a Viking-age Old Norse poem) directly or indirectly and after a few passages between speakers of different dialects it might end up as [hrvat] used for itself by a group of Slavs who lived for a while in the Carpathians.