Vuk Stefanović Karadžić
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (
Serbian Cyrillic:
'ук Стефановић Караџић) (
November 7,
1787 -
February 7,
1864) was a
Serb linguist and major reformer of the
Serbian language.
 |
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić |
Karadžić was born in the village of
Tršić,
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. 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 occupation and left detailed accounts of them.
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.
He collected several volumes of folk prose and poetry and created all the works listed below. For his work he received little financial aid, at times living in poverty. He died in
Vienna.
*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)
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).
*
Free ebook of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic at
Project Gutenberg*
Vuk's Foundation (in Serbian)
*
The New Testament translation by Karadžić (in Serbian)
