Jovan Hadžić

Jovan Hadžić (pseudonym Miloš Svetić; Sombor, 8 September 1799-Novi Sad, 28 April 1869) was a Serbian writer and legislator. He signed his literary work as Miloš Svetić.

Biography

Jovan Hadžić is remembered as a founder of the Matica Srpska and as the most persistent opponent of Vuk Karadzic's orthographic reform. However, Hadzic was also a poet and translator, a legislator in the Principality of Serbia, as well as an active public figure. Having established a commendable reputation through his early poetry, many people thought him to be a worthy successor of Lukijan Musicki. As a student in Pest, Hadzic founded Matica Srpska in 1826, modeled in part after the recently-established but dormant Magyar Tudos Tarsasag (Hungarian Scholarly Society) which eventually became the Hungarian Academy. In addition to books, it published journal Serbski Letopis, founded two years earlier by Georgije Magarasevic, Pavel Jozef Safarik and Lukijan Musicki in Novi Sad, where Magarasevic was professor and Safarik the director of the Serbian gymnasium there.

Vuk Karadzic foresaw that the biggest battle in the future would be the battle for orthography. Hadzic wrote "Sitnitze jezykoslovne" (Language Details) in 1837, in which he attacked Vuk's reforms. He signed it with a pseudonym, Miloš Svetić. Once a supporter of Vuk, Hadzic was now an opponent, like Metropolitan Stevan Stratimirovic who passed away a year earlier (1836). Vuk responded to Hadzic in kind, two years later. Other events at the time worked in favor of the vernacular, converging to make 1847 a decisive year. Vuk's translation of Novi Zavjet (The New Testament) appeared that year, demonstrating that the language he proposed was able to express higher thoughts, indeed.

References

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