Petar Skok

Petar Skok (; 1 March 1881 – 3 February 1956) was a Croatian linguist and onomastician. His central work is the four-volume etymological dictionary of Serbo-Croatian.

Biography Skok was born to a Croatian family in the village of Jurkovo Selo, Žumberak. From 1892 to 1900 he attended the Higher Real Gymnasium in Rakovac near Karlovac. At the University of Vienna (1900 – 1904) he studied Romance and Germanic philology and Indo-European studies, passing his professorship exam in 1906. He received Ph.D. with a thesis on South French toponomastics.

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, Naša pomorska i ribarska terminologija na Jadranu [Our Sea-faring and Fishing Terminology on the Adriatic] (Split, 1933) Dolazak Slavena na Mediteran [The Arrival of Slavs on the Mediterranean] (Split, 1934) Pregled francuske gramatike I–II [An Overview of French Grammar] (Zagreb, 1938–1939) Osnove romanske lingvistike, I–III [The Basics of Romance Linguistics] (Zagreb, 1940) Slavenstvo i romanstvo na jadranskim otocima: Toponomastička istraživanja I–II [Slavic and Romance on the Adriatic Islands: Toponomastic Studies] (Zagreb, 1950) Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika I-IV [An Etymological Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian Language] (Zagreb, 1971–1974)

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".

Legacy In the honour of Petar Skok etymological-onomastics conferences are held with contributions of Croatian and foreign experts. So far six of them have been held, chronologically in Zagreb (1987), Zadar, Pula, Krk, Vukovar and in Korčula (2006).