002 Zora, prozor, zoran, … Što je korijen?

Zor?

Zora means “dawn”, and is used as a girl’s name - both the Croatian and English versions.

I’ve wondered about the origin of this word – as you do when you are learning Croatian with Mateja at SpeakCro because she often challenges me to think about the korijen of words.
 

Then I noticed some commonality among words such as zora, prozor and zoran – obviously, all have zor in them.

But that doesn’t help much because I don’t know of any meaning contained in zor, and my favourite (and huge) dictionary doesn’t list zor as a word.
​

I did a search for Croatian words containing the letters zor, and found all of these:

• dalekozor
• iluzoran/iluzorna/iluzorno
• nadzor
• nadzornik
• obzor/obzorje
• pozornica
• pozornost
• pozorno
• prizor
• prozor
• retrovizor
• televizor
• upozorenje
• uzor
• uzorak
  
• zora
• zoran
• zvijezdozor

 

Wow! I didn’t know the meaning of all of these words, but there is an obvious common theme isn’t there? Something to do with vision, watching, or seeing?

And then, lo and behold, I found an entry for the noun zor in Wiktionary: 

And everything became obvious. I could see it all. [Yes, painful puns, but I am staying with them.]

Well then, back to those zor words ...


​

Dijete koristi dalekozor.
Pitam se što ili koga gleda.
Image by nightowl from Pixabay

Ova struktura je iluzorna.
Nemoguće je.
Image by Michael Fuchs from Pixabay

Ovo mjesto je pod nadzorom.
Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay

Radnik i nadzornik.
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Ako stojimo na plaži, obzor je otprilika 4.7 km od nas.
Druge riječi su obzorje i horizont.
Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

Kakva pozornica!
Možda će to večeras biti opera?
Image by Tracy Lundgren from Pixabay

Studenti daju pozornost profesoru.
Oni pozorno slušaju i gledaju.
Image by Nikolay Georgiev from Pixabay

Kakav prizor na baletu!
Koji je ovaj balet?
Image by skeeze from Pixabay
​

Sunce prolazi kroz prozor.
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Motor ima dva retrovizora
Image by Igor Ovsyannykov from Pixabay

Ovo je stari stari televizor.
Pitam se da li je crno-bijel?
Image by Alexander Antropov from Pixabay

Upozorenje! Pazi na klokane.
Ne, ovo nije u centru Sydneyja!
Image by Maike und Björn Bröskamp from Pixabay

Nelson Mandela je bio uzor mnogima.
Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay

Tri kišobrana imaju uzorak, i dva su bez uzorka.
Image by Louise Dav from Pixabay

Ovo je zora, nije sumrak.
U kojem smjeru gleda osoba koja meditira?
Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Galileo je koristio zvijezdozor.
To je stara riječ. Sada se zove teleskop.
Image by suju from Pixabay

Nije mi zorno kako mogu prikazati riječ zoran.
Što mislite?

Click here to go to   Aha! Croatian: A ROAD MAP
​