(December 2, 2019 at 12:04 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:(December 2, 2019 at 9:57 am)FlatAssembler Wrote: I find those etymologies with Croatian for "hill" or Croatian for "to scoop" or Croatian for "to dig" to be very questionable. The Croatian word for "hill" is "brijeg" ('j' is always pronounced as 'y' in "yes" in Croatian), ultimately from German "Berg". Change from "ije" to "e" is typical of the Zagreb dialect, but 'b' and 'g' switching places would be very unusual. The Croatian for "scoop (water from a well)" is "grabiti", and a change from 'a' to 'e' would be unexpected. As far as I know, there is no evidence that "grebati" ever meant "to dig", it means "to scratch", and it almost certainly comes from the same root as Greek for "to engrave/write", γραφειν. The usual word for "to dig" in Croatian is, and has always been, "kopati", it probably comes from the same root as Greek for "to dig", σκαπτειν.
But perhaps the best argument for rejecting any sort of Croatian etymology for "Zagreb" is the fact that the earliest attested name for Zagreb in Latin is "Zagrabiensem". The letter 'z' didn't stand for 'z' in Medieval Latin, the sound 'z' was denoted with 'j' or 's': the Medieval Latin name for Zadar was written as "Jadera" (possibly influenced by probably unrelated ancient name "Iader"), the Medieval Latin name for Bizovac (the name in the local dialect being "Bizovci", 'c' being pronounced 'ts') was "Bisofzy", and the name of the river "Zala" in Hungary was almost always written "Sala" in Medieval Latin documents. The 'z' in "Zagrabiensem", in all likelihood, stood for the 'dz' sound, which existed in Old Croatian, but changed to 'z' in Modern Croatian. The "Za-" in "Zagreb" doesn't come from the Croatian prefix "za-".
As for it coming from Hungarian, I see one reason to assume that it doesn't: Hungarian has vowel harmony, and Hungarian name for Zagreb is "Zagrab", presumably because "Zagreb" wouldn't be a phonotactically valid word in Hungarian. So, doesn't it seem much more likely that the Croatian name "Zagreb" is more original, considering that a change from "Zagreb" to "Zagrab" would be regular in Hungarian, but a change from "Zagrab" to "Zagreb" would be irregular in Croatian?
Then "capital city" means something different in English than what I thought it meant.
It means a governmental and administrative centre. Does it mean something else in Croatish?
Boru
Osijek and Split are governmental and administrative centres as much as Zagreb is, yet they are never called capital cities ("glavni grad"). OK, Split is sometimes called that way by the Slobodna Dalmacija ("Independent Dalmatia") movement.
BTW, what do you think about the Dalmatian Independence movement? And what about Istria Independence movement? I think that their ideas of reviving Dalmatian and Istriot languages are hardly achievable even if it weren't for the Zagreb government preventing them, and that the attempt to do that would cause a lot of economic damage. OK, maybe reviving Istriot is possible (many people there speak Italian, which is related to Istriot, and Istriot, unlike Dalmatian has a few remaining native speakers), but reviving Dalmatian (that died out completely in the late 19th century, and isn't actually well-attested, and in a region in which the vast majority of the people speak Croatian, which is only very distantly related to Dalmatian) certainly isn't.