Product Code Database
Petar Skok (; 1 March 1881 – 3 February 1956) was a Croatian linguist and onomastics. His central work is the four-volume etymological dictionary of Serbo-Croatian.
As a high-school professor he taught in Banja Luka and served as a librarian of the Royal museum in Sarajevo. In the period from 1919 to his retirement, he worked at the Romance seminar department of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb, and taught French language and literature at Viša pedagoška škola in Zagreb.
He started writing as a gymnasium student, having published literary reviews under the pseudonym of P. S. Mikov. Later he devoted himself completely to southeastern Europe linguistic studies, chiefly of Romance languages: Vulgar Latin, Dalmatian, with special interest to Romance influence on Croatian dialects and other languages in Southeast Europe. He studied the history of Slavs, languages and interactions of languages from eastern coast of Adriatic into hinterland with special care to onomastics. Thanks to Skok's effort, the centre of Croatian onomastics studies has been since 1948 in the institution which is today Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics.
Skok died in Zagreb.
He left in manuscript an unfinished etymological dictionary that was published posthumously by his disciple and co-worker Valentin Putanec in four volumes under the title of Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika, 1971–1974. It is the most extensive complete Serbo-Croatian etymological dictionary, with more than 10 000 headwords. In the words of academic August Kovačec, Skok's etymological dictionary is a synthesis of "his scientific efforts as a whole in the fields of etymology and linguistics generally" and represents the most notable "contribution of a scientific individual to Croatian language and the study of Croatian language in the 20th century".
|
|
