BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:Because linguistics interests me more than Croatian separatist movements.I understand that. Linguistics is a much harder science than political science.
BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:And the entire Illyrian group was extinct by the 6th century, not the 12th.Where is the evidence for that?
BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:I said Wikipedia references are your friend.OK, I've looked into the reference for the Hungarian origin. Well, the text there is rather unclear. Why does the author think that "Zabrag" is the older form of the name Zagreb, just because it's attested in Chronicle of the Hungarian Anonymous? The simplest explanation is that it's scriber error, given that in both the modern name and the earliest attested name 'g' comes before 'b'.
I agree with him that 'z' in those early attestations probably didn't stand for the 'z' sound, but I don't see any particular reason to assume it stood for the 'ch' sound. 'Z' was probably used to denote any sibilant affricate sound, like I've said, "Bizovci" was rendered in Latin documents as "Bisofzy", and here 'z' obviously denoted the 'ts' sound. The simplest explanation is that it stood for the 'dz' sound, which existed in Old Croatian, and it regularly changed to 'z' in Modern Croatian. The author there explains away the change from 'ch' to 'z' as "an incorrect reading of old attestations". Well, that implies that the name "Zagreb" wasn't used all along. Is there any evidence of that? There are folktales about how the name "Zagreb" came to be, some of them written down in the 18th century, that's not what we would expect if the name "Zagreb" wasn't widely used all that time.
