Radoslav Katičić

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

After graduating from the University of Zagreb inIndo-European comparative grammar, Katičić began extensive studies in general linguistics, ancient Balkan languages, indology and Croatian language history. He became the head of the Slavic philology department at the University of Vienna in 1977 (a position he held until his retirement).

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

  • General linguistics and paleo-Balkan 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 the continuity of Croatian language and litature, from the earliest stone inscriptions and Glagolitic medieval literature in the Croatian version of Old Church Slavic to the works of Renaissance writers such as Marin Držić and Marko Marulić, who wrote in a Croatian vernacular. He also explored language standardization and wrote a syntactic description of modern Croatian (Sintaksa hrvatskoga književnoga jezika/Syntax of Standard Croatian, Zagreb 1986), based on texts by contemporary authors such as Miroslav Krleža and Tin Ujević and this is one of the few syntactic descriptions 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, archeology, culturology, paleography and textual analysis
    • Uz početke hrvatskih početaka/Roots of Croatian roots, Split 1993
    • Litterarium studia, Vienna-Zagreb, 1999 (in German and Croatian)

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