Vuk Stefanović Karadžić

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić

Born	November 7, 1787 Tršić, Serbia
Died	February 7, 1864 Vienna, Austria
Occupation	Linguist

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (Serbian Cyrillic: Вук Стефановић Караџић) (November 7, 1787 - February 7, 1864) was a Serbian linguist and major reformer of the Serbian language.

Karadžić was born in the village of Tršić, Ottoman Empire (now Serbia) near Loznica. His first name "Vuk" means "wolf", which he was given because all his brothers and sisters died of tuberculosis, leaving him the sole survivor. It was believed at the time that witches feared wolves, and therefore the name would protect him from any evil they could inflict. Apart from learning to read and write in the Tronoša monastery, he educated himself. He took part in the First and Second Serbian uprisings against the Ottoman Turk's occupation of Serbia. After the second uprising failed in 1813, he fled to Vienna, where he wrote the most significant works of his career.

Karadžić reformed the Serb literary language and standardized the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles. (In everyday usage, but less accurately, his alphabet is often termed a phonetic alphabet.) This made it one of the most usable in the world.

Karadžić's reforms of the Serbian literary language modernized it and distanced it from Serbian and Russian Church Slavonic, instead bringing it close to common folk speech, specifically, to the dialect of Eastern Herzegovina which he spoke. Karadžić was, together with Đuro Daničić, the main Serbian signatory to the Vienna Agreement of 1850 which, encouraged by Austrian authorities, laid the foundation for the later Serbo-Croatian language, various forms of which are used in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia today.

In addition to these linguistic reforms, Vuk also made great contributions to folk literature, using peasant culture as the foundation. Because of his peasant upbringing, he closely associated with the peasant's oral literature, compiling it to use in his collection of folk songs, tales, and proverbs. While Vuk hardly considered peasant life romantic, he highly regarded it as an integral part of Serbian culture. He collected several volumes of folk prose and poetry, including a book of over 100 lyrical and epic songs learned as a child and written down from memory. He also published the first dictionary of vernacular Serbian. For his work he received little financial aid, at times living in poverty. He died in Vienna.

[edit] Major works

Primer of the Serbian language (1814)
Dictionary of the Serbian language (1st ed. 1818, 2nd ed. 1852)
New Testament (translation into Serbian) (1st partial ed.1824, 1st complete ed. 1847, 2nd ed. 1857)
Serbian folk tales (1821, 1853, 1870 and more)
Serbian folk poems, vol. 1 (1841)
Serbian epic poetry (1845 and more)
Deutsch-Serbisches Wörterbuch (German-Serbian Dictionary) 1872
(more)

[edit] Quotes

Write as you speak and read as it is written. (The essence of modern Serbian spelling)

In Serbian: Пиши као што говориш и читај како је написано (Piši kao što govoriš i čitaj kako je napisano)

Although the above quotation is usually attributed to Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, it is in fact an orthographic principle devised by the German grammarian and philologist Johann Christoph Adelung. Karadžić merely used that principle to push through his language reform (as stated in the book "The Grammar of the Serbian Language" by Professor Ljubomir Popović).

The attribution of the quote to Karadžić is a common misconception in Serbia. Due to that fact, the entrance exam to the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade (Serbia) occasionally contains a question on the authorship of the quote (as a sort of trick question).