engleski

One Way to „read” the Islands

A landscape can be “read“ as a system of communication, within which naming is the most explicit way of shaping and identifying the landscape. It is well known that place names never occur randomly. They regularly provide valuable data on the ethnolinguistic affiliation of the community that created them. From an anthropological point of view, we can analyze how humans perceive and experience their relationship with the landscape, the relationship that is often reflected in narratives that are constructed upon those place names. Almost all of the larger Adriatic islands, except the island of Dugi Otok (Long Island), were named long before Roman times, any of these names were recorded in ancient sources. A large number of Croatian islands preserved a continuity of their names for centuries, however, a form of the name has been modified along with the changes of the ethnic composition of the population. After settling on the islands the Croats adopted existing names from earlier Romance population, but the initial content of names for the new settlers became unrecognizable. Place names are one of the key factors in shaping the perception of the landscape in the eyes of the community that uses them. This is even more true for the nesonyms (names of the islands) since the island is a very specific form of landscape. When an island community is not able to understand and interpret the name of their island with the means of their own language, they often create new interpretations that in most cases have nothing to do with the actual etymology of the name. However, those folk etymologies eventually become part of the collective memory of the island community. New narratives are constructed and “upgraded” through generations with the aim of the story to be meaningful for the local community. The paper will analyze a few selected names of the Croatian islands and compare the actual and popular etymology of these names.

island studies, nessonyms, names of islands, Adriatic

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