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The name "Kosovo"
By: J. P. Maher Ph. D.
Professor Emeritus of Linguistics
Northeastern Illinois University Chicago
"Kosovo" is a Serbian place name, more fully "kosovo polje",
meaning the 'field
(or plain) of blackbirds'. "Kosovo Polje" lies just outside the city
of Prishtina.
Ornithology lesson: Among North Americans, Australians, and South Africans,
only ornithologists can identify the species in question. Kosovo's
"black bird" is
no crow, nor raven, no starling nor grackle, but "turdus merula", European
cousin of the North American rusty-bellied thrush ("turdus migratorius"),
which
Yanks call the "robin".
In Britain and Ireland "robin" is the name of another species, "erithacus
rubecula".
(The "four and twenty 'blackbirds' baked in a pie", of the English
rhyme, were
of the species "merula", in Serbian called "kos". From this term "kosovo"
is the
derived possessive adjective.
Like America's harbinger of spring, the black bird called "kos" in Serbian
language sings sweetly in the springtime and early summer.
For North Americans the feel of the Serbo-Croatian place name "Kosovo"
can
only be had from a free translation, "Field of Robins".
Albanians have borrowed the word from the Serbs, whose once overwhelming
majority was driven down, especially since the Congress of Berlin,
by savage
aggression from Albanians incited then and in WW I by Austria-Hungary
and
Germany, in World War II by Mussolini's puppet Albanians, and after
WW II by
the discriminatory ethnic cleansing of the Stalinist dictator Josip
Broz.
Native Indian place names in America have no meaning in English: e.g.
"Michigan" means nothing in English. In Ojibwa "mishshikamaa" means
"it is a
big lake". Just so the place names of Ireland have transparent meaning
in Gaelic
but are meaningless tags in the colonialist English, e.g. "Dublin"
is Gaelic "dubh lin"
'black pool', and "Kildare" is "cil dara" 'church of the oak', Just
so the names
of the Serbian province of Kosovo are clear Serbian formations, but
have no
meaning in the Albanian language.
Proof of the Serbian origin of the name and the loanword status of the
immigrant Albanian term is that the word "kosovo" has a clear etymology
to
anyone who knows a Slavic language, while Albanian "Kosova" is an opaque,
meaningless place name in the Albanian language.
Kosovo is Serbian.
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