Tracing the origin of S-Cr. novac 'money'

The paper points at the imprecision of the hitherto prevailing etymology of S-Cr. novac ‘money’ as an univerbization departing from the adjective nov ‘new’, through an undated and undefined *novi penez /dinar. After a review of previous interpretations and the corpus of lexicographic attestations of the noun novac, the areal distribution of its earliest Croatian and Serbian attestations (from the 16th and 17th centuries respectively), as well as the 18th century Sln. novz ‘nummus ungaricus’ is taken as an indication of Hungarian source of influence. Hence the nomination impulse is found in Latin, the official language in medieval Hungary, where in some 15th century legal documents from the Zagreb court the syntagm novorum denariorum (Gen. pl.) occurs simultaneously and synonymously with the nominalized adj. novos (Acc. pl.). The semantic borrowing into local Slavic novac /novec ‘new coin (initially 1/100 of a dukat)’, evolves into ‘coin of small value’ and eventually, through a negative phrase nemati ni novca ‘to be broke’ (lit.: ‘to have not a single penny’) into ‘money (in general); wealth’. In both meanings it entered the vernaculars of the entire Štokavian territory (some time during the 18th century), which is reflected in folk poetry, paremiology, etc. The term novac has suppressed the previously widespread Slavic term penezi /pjenezi /pinezi and entered a co-existence with the Turcism para f. ‘coin’, pare pl. ‘money’ which lasts into this day. Since the nomination from the adj. nov is unique among standardly known terms for money (cf. Buck s.v.), a precious onomasiological parallelism to this formation is discovered in Serb. dial. novica ‘a Turkish 20 gr coin’, ‘a fake coin’