Regularities in Adriatic nesonymia

Abstract

This work is a continuation of the research which has been carried out on the Adriatic islands by P. Skok. It is not a critique of Skok's insights which are all valid but a kind of supplement and commentary. The author pays greater attention to small islands and the language manifestations in their names. Reasons which condition grammatical gender in nesonyms are given special attention. The regularity which generally prevails on large and populated islands (masculine gender) does not apply to small and uninhabited islands (masculine and feminine gender). The author established that as far as the length of the name is concerned, it is shorter the more important is the referent (larger and inhabited islands) and it is longer, consisting even of two terms, if the island is smaller and not inhabited. There are many exceptions especially in the second group of islands. The author also addresses the question pertaining to the correspondence between the name of the island and the name of its most important settlement. Five large islands are not named after their settlements, more precisely, there are no names of settlements on them corresponding with the name of the island. These are the islands of Mljet, Brač, Čiovo, Šolta and Dugi otok. It is generally assumed that this is the case because in antiquity no town developed on the these islands. If this is the case, the question arises why did this happen. A possible answer to this question falls outside the framework of linguistic inquiry. In conclusion the author glances at the tendencies of naming islands, especially the small ones. An attempt is made to determine the semantic fields which are most prominent in the procedure of denomination and it is concluded that the most representative appelatives in nesonyms are those coming from the sphere of geographical terms, phytonyms and metaphors.