The Origin and evolution of the term “Karst”

Even some recently published works including manuals, textbooks and lexicons, related to this topic contain inexact, not precise, discordant or wrong statements. Recent linguistic studies provide some new results regarding the word karst. The paper repeats some well known facts about the origin of the term karst but at the same time it gives some new results and interpretations. The name of the plateau in the background of the Trieste Bay (the Adriatic Sea) which the Slovenes call Kras, Italians Carso and Germans Karst is of pre-roman origin and Latinised into Carsus. The original name had the base *Karus- (Ptolemy wrote Kαρουσαδίω óρɛι) from the root *kar- meaning rock, stone. From the Latinised form Carsus developed Slovene, Italian and German names according to the rules of their languages. From the Central Europe the easiest and practically the only way leading to the Mediterranean was the road from Vienna to the port of Triest. Travellers across the Karst described this unusual country and its natural phenomena, mostly with negative connotation and subsequently other limestone landscapes were compared to Karst. In 1830 F. J. H. Hohenwart wrote that “karst is not on the Karst only, but it stretches from the plain of Friuli to the Greek islands. Most of the descriptions of the Karst from that period were published in German language and this is the reason why the German form of the name became the international karstological term, the karst.