Neostvareno tvorbeno-semantičko gnijezdo naziva kòsa
The Unrealised Semantic-Formation Nest of the Term kòsa [Hair]

Summary/Abstract: All the terminology related to hair dressing in the Croatian language is derived from the galicism friseur, for two reasons: (1) the concept of hair dressing didn’t exist in widely spoken language, thus there was no need for related terminology; and (2) when the concept appeared, it was inherited from the higher social groups, so the lower groups took the already adopted, yet foreign, vocabulary for it. Since the phonetic structure of the adopted semantic system is unnatural to any Slavic language, here we derive the hair-dressing terminology from the Croatian word kòsa, the root of which (kos-) can be found in all Slavic languages and was derived by apophony from the common Indo-European root *kes-. We show that the formation space of this root is free and therefore it is the best choice among the 3 different possibilities (kòsa, vlȃs and šíšati). Consequently, we form a completely new semantic-formation system from it, even introducing new terms which haven’t evolved only due to the mentioned phonetic barriers, and the concepts of which have been expressed only descriptively. Moreover, we have derived an equivalent system from an analogous Old Slavonic root kosmъ. These systems do not only indicate the formation possibilities of substitutions for some loanwords in Croatian; they also reveal the new dimension of the concept-formation relation (1-2 above) which we prove to be particularly fruitful for the formation of native substitutes.

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