Re: Croats and Slavs

george knysh schrieb:

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> --- On Mon, 6/29/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...
> <mailto:tgpedersen%40hotmail.com>> wrote:
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> ****GK: On the matter of the historical "Croats": I am leaning towards
> the notion that they might have been named after their initial
> organizer. The name does appear separately in the list of the migrant
> clans given by Constantine Porph. in the mid-10th c. If the Avar Khan
> Bayan appointed an Avar warrior called "Horvat" (or something similar)
> to the task of putting together Avaria's northern defenses in and along
> the Carpathians (against the threatening Turks of Asia who conquered
> Kerch in 576 and made demands on Constantinople against the Avars), this
> Horvat might have drafted a considerable numbern of subject Slavs (and
> others) into his divisions (or whatever they were called), and the
> various groups would become "Horvat's men" = Croats. There are many
> historical analogies to this onomastic procedure.****

I am far away from sustaining I have been deeply involved into this
matter regarding the name of the Croats but at a simply overview, it
appears that their name cannot be discussed without the name of their
most appropiate relatives, the Serbs. To me, it appears to be the very
one and the same word Cr.w- which has been once rendered as hrv- and
once as srb- both beeing forms of an older *sr.w-; the velar "k" in the
"european" denomination for "croats" appears to be a modern rendering of
natively "h" in hrvat; of course the suffix "-at" here asks for an
explanation as well; as I already wrote in *sr.w-, I suspect the
initial form has been with "s" as in the name of the serbs and the form
with "h" is a younger one...
As for the meaning of this *sr.w-, here I don't try to make any
speculation:-))



Alex