Đuro Daničić

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Đuro Daničić (Ђуро Даничић) (born April 4, 1825 in Novi Sad, died November 17, 1882 in Zagreb), was Serbian philologist, translator, linguistic historian and lexicographer.

1 Biography
2 Works
3 Selected works
4 External links

[edit] Biography

He was born as Đorđe Popović in the family of Orthodox priest Jovan Popović. He attended schools in Novi Sad and Bratislava, and studied laws at University of Vienna. He published his first papers under name Đuro Daničić in 1845, after the heroic Senj's Uskok from a folk poem; that name he will continue to use throughout the rest of his life. Under influence of Vuk Karadžić and Franc Miklošič he started studying Slavic philology, to which he subsequently devoted his entire career. In 1856, he became the librarian of People's Library in Belgrade and secretary of Society of Serbian Literacy, and 1859. professor of Belgrade Lyceum (Velika škola). In 1866, he was elected for secretary general of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU) in Zagreb, where he played a key role in preparing the Academy's Dictionary, "Croatian or Serbian Dictionary of JAZU". He was the redactor of the 1-st volume (A-češula) that was published from 1880 to 1882. g.). The death in 1882 interrupted his work and his body was buried in Marko's cemetery in Belgrade.

[edit] Works

Up to these days Daničić has remained the biggest worker on documentation and attestation of Serbian language. Even when his theoretic interpretations were not of highest scientific standard, analysis of material was performed thoroughly and reliably. Daničić translated the Old Testament himself, mostly from German sources, and helped Karadžić translating the New Testament into Serbian in 1847. After undergoing a revision, both translations are accepted and are still in use by Serbian Orthodox Church.

In 1847, he published renowned polemics essay "The War for Serbian Language and Orthography", where he opposed linguistic ideas of the main Karadžić's opponent Miloš Svetić, and supported Karadžić's phonemic orthography. He gave the theoretical background to Karadžić's concepts in his numerous linguistic works.

Daničić also studied the Serbian older literature and his redactions of old manuscripts are still in use, like Theodossus' Hagiography of Saint Sava (1860), Domentian's Hageographies of Saint Simeon and Saint Sava (1865), Gospels of Nicholas (Nikoljsko jevanđelje) (1864), Lives of Kings and Archbishops Serbian (1866) and numerous others.

Daničić started scientific work as supporter of Karadžić's ideas of linguistic pan-Serbism (attribution of Shtokavian dialect and written heritage to Serbian ethnos). His early works were ostensibly devoted to "Serbs of Catholic faith", for which he was criticized even by young Vatroslav Jagić. In 1857, he published "Differences between Languages Serbian and Croatian" (written using the old orthography) where he identified Croatian with Chakavian dialect. However, his attitudes evaluated towards promotion of pan-Yugoslavian ideology, much closer to the viewpoints of Illyrian movement, whom he was closely cooperating with. That included linguistic unity of Croats and Serbs and the opinion that the Croatian literature is at the same time Serbian and vice versa. His linguistic papers were titled using "Croatian or Serbian" qualifier when he published in Zagreb, and "Serbian or Croatian" when published in Belgrade.