Original scientific paper
BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ORIGIN AND STRUCTURE OF THE ZADAR – KVARNER (ZD–KV) AND ŠIBENIK – HVAR (ŠB-HV) THALASSOFAUNA TERMINOLOGY
Šme Županović
; Split
Abstract
The Tomans who persisted in the cites and on islands preserved their culture, customs and laws. This has been corroborated by the fishery terminology which we recorded when making our rounds along the eastern coast of the Adriatic. It is a well known fact that prior to the Tomans these areas were inhabitated by the Greeks with their well developed fishery and its ermits terminology. Consequently, it is to suppose that they taught the Croatians the skill of fishing and the fishery terminology. This process developed more rapidly when the Roman-Croatian symbiosis had already been well developed in the Middle Ages and the conquerors were confronted with the necessity of giving names to the then unknown notions. They took over the names given by the peoples living there and via the Dalmatian Romans from the Greeks.
The Croatian parts of the present-day vocabulary referring to the Adriatic fauna would originate later on mostly as one of the alternate names among the many.
Leaving out of consideration the dubious Illyrian substratum the other substrata can be established more or less exactly. So, for instance, in addition to the Mediterranean layer, which was preserved along our Croatian coast as well as in the whole Mediterranean, there is another layer of the Greco-Latin origin which our ancestors took over from them for living together with the aborigines. This Roman layer can be divided into: a) Dalmatian, b) Venetian and c) South-Italian. In addition to the names taken over from the then peoples, namely, by their mediation also from the Greeks, the Croatians themselves gave the names of Croatian origin especially to the economically unimportant species. Some words taken over from other neighbouring languages were included but adapted to the spirit of our language (calchi linguistici).
Our fishery terminology connected with the sea shows exceptional abundance which can be explained by the fact that only the Croats among other Slavic peoples came into the Mediterranean sphere of culture in the Middle Ages already and here, as seen from this paper, they took over many names created by the Greeks and Romans through the Dalmatian Romans and, subsequently, by the Venetians at the time of their rule. This is why the terminology in the heterogenous languages are often of the same origin. Therefore, any purism in this sense would be a real nonsense as the origin of our thalassofauna terminology points best to how much these polygenims of our fishery terminology are mutually connected and how much we, the Croats, have been organically bound up with the Mediterranean both in the past and in the present.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
138074
URI
Publication date:
1.2.1996.
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