Petar Skok

Who was Petar Skok?

Petar Skok was a Croatian linguist, and one of the world's foremost onomastics experts.

Skok was born 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 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, 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.