Drovnjak not Drobnjak - an obvious example of distorting toponyms with Serbian linguistic basis

Abstract

The paper presents a distinct example of how the name of a well-known geographical area in the Durmitor Mountain (Old Herzegovina, today Montenegro) became distorted from ?Drovnjak? to ?Drobnjak?, to illustrate and discuss an enduring process of altering toponymswith Serbian linguistic basis, under Western, Latin, and Roman Catholic cultural influences, particularly in the last 100 years along with the establishment of Serbo-Croatian linguistic community. Here, the Old Church Slavonic (Serbian) geographical name ?Drovnjak?, which comes from the word ?tree? (?????), is considered as a Greek vitacism and changed to betacism ?Drobnjak?. Phoneme ?v? (vita) is replaced by phoneme ?b? (beta), the same as it is in the case of names: Byzantium (Vizantija, Serb.), Babylon (Vavilon, Serb.), Arabia and Arabian Sea (Aravija, Aravijsko more, Serb.), etc. The paper also presents other examples of the process of distortion of toponymswhere the phoneme ?nj? (pronounced /?/) changes to ?n? (pronounced /n/) (as in Tusinja-Tusina, Petnjica-Petnica) and ?lj? (pronounced /?/) to ?l? (pronounced /l/) (as in Pljevlja-Plevlja), etc. Clear orthographic norms of common standard language that required writing toponymsin the form used in the local dialect were not respected. This paper can be an incentive for similar researches in territories where Serbs predominantly live or used to live, so that such distorted toponymscould be restored to their original forms, as part of the process of new standardization of geographical names led by the Commission for the Standardization of Geographical Names of the Republic of Serbia.