The Medieval Attestations of Croatian Pre-Slavic Island Names

Abstract

The oldest attestations of toponyms on the Croatian territory originate from ancient sources, i.e. from the inscriptions and texts prior to the arrival of Slavic tribes on the East Adriatic coast. These are explicitly pre-Slavic toponyms. Some of them survived early medieval migrations and preserved their linguistic continuity in Croatian as borrowings from Romance into Slavic. The medieval attestations of these toponyms serve as a link between ancient and contemporary names, and can provide much information on the linguistic development of Slavic and Romance in that period, as well as on early contacts between Roman and Slavic people in the area. This paper studies one group of Croatian pre-Slavic toponyms, island names, by documenting and interpreting their medieval attestations. The data studied include written sources of 9th–13th c. For each island name, the author lists and describes their medieval attestations, tracing their linguistic development. The author attempts to determine whether these attestations are Romance or Slavic and to detect the oldest attestation that can be considered Croatian. The analysis concludes that 1) the majority of medieval attestations are Romance; 2) some Slavic traits can be found in Byzantine attestations from the 10th c., and 3) the oldest reliable Croatian attestations of this group of island names appear in Croatian texts from the 13th c.

Keywords

• island names
• Croatian islands
• medieval attestations
• pre-Slavic toponymy
• early Romance-Slavic contacts