Re: Croatians and the Carpathians

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: MCLSSAA2@...
> To: cybalist@...
> 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.

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> 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
>
>

How about this:
Originally "hrvatski jazyk (jezyk, ezyk?)" 'Carpathian language'.
Then (after "Karpaty" is adopted as the Slavic name of the
mountains), a back-formation "Hrvat" 'Croat' is made from the now
opaque "hrvatski".

Torsten