Radoslav Katičić

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Radoslav Katičić (born in Zagreb in 1930) is a Croatian linguist, historian and culturologist.

After graduating at the University of Zagreb on the theme from the field of Indo-European comparative grammar, Katičić began extensive studies in general linguistics, ancient Balkan languages, indology and Croatian language history. He became the head of Slavic philology department at the University of Vienna in 1977 (position he was to hold until retirement).

A pre-eminent authority in Croatian language questions and history, fluent in more than 20 languages, Katičić's scientific contribution can be divided in four fields:

general linguistics and paleobalkans studies (mainly based on transformational grammar approach), consisting of works written in English:
- A Contribution to the General Theory of Comparative Linguistics (the Hague-Paris, 1970)
- The Ancient Languages of the Balkans, 1-2 (the Hague-Paris, 1976)

linguistic-stylistic works on aspects and history of various European (ancient Greek, Byzantine) and non-European literatures:
- Stara indijska književnost/Old Indian literature, Zagreb 1973

numerous studies on Croatian language history, from the inception of the Croats in the 7th century onwards. Katičić has charted the meanderings in continuity of Croatian language and literary idiom, from earliest stone inscriptions and Glagolitic medieval literature in Croatian version of Church Slavonic to the works of Renaissance writers like Marin Držić and Marko Marulić who wrote in Croatian vernacular. Also, he explored the language standardisation and wrote representative syntax of modern Croatian (Sintaksa hrvatskoga književnoga jezika/Syntax of Croatian literary language, Zagreb 1986), based on texts of such contemporary authors like Miroslav Krleža and Tin Ujević and one of the few syntaxes of any language written consistently on the principles of the transformational grammar

great synthetic works that explore the beginnings of Croatian civilization in a multidisciplinary fashion based on philology, archaeology, culturology, paleography and textual analysis
- Uz početke hrvatskih početaka/Roots of Croatian roots, Split 1993
- Litterarium studia, Vienna-Zagreb, 1999 (in German and Croatian)