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Reformer of the Serbian language.
Vuk Stefanovic Karadžić
Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic - Every Serb has to be tankful to this man. He was genious. Thanks to him, writing and reading Serbian is piece of cake. His writing reform has brought to the ideal system where one sound is represented by only one letter, and one letter represents only one sound which means: write as you talk and read as it is written. It takes about 2 minutes to learn Serbian from any foreign language...
Born; November 7, 1787
Tršić, Ottoman Empire (Principality of Serbia)
Died; February 7, 1864
Vienna, Austrian Empire
Occupation; Linguist
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (Serbian Cyrillic: Вук Стефановић Караџић) (November 7, 1787 - February 7, 1864) was a Serbian linguist and major reformer of the Serbian language.
Karadžić was born in the village of Tršić, Ottoman Empire (now 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. It was believed at the time that witches feared wolves (as it is dangerous beast), and therefore the name would protect him from any evil they could inflict. 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 Turk's occupation of Serbia. After the first uprising failed in 1813, he fled to Vienna, where he wrote the most significant works of his career.
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.
In addition to these linguistic reforms, Vuk also made great contributions to folk literature, using peasant culture as the foundation. Because of his peasant upbringing, he closely associated with the peasant's oral literature, compiling it to use in his collection of folk songs, tales, and proverbs. While Vuk hardly considered peasant life romantic, he highly regarded it as an integral part of Serbian culture. He collected several volumes of folk prose and poetry, including a book of over 100 lyrical and epic songs learned as a child and written down from memory. He also published the first dictionary of vernacular Serbian. For his work he received little financial aid, at times living in poverty. He died in Vienna.
Major works
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
Quotes
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).
Tršić (Тршић) is a village in the municipality of Loznica, located in the Mačva region of Serbia.
It is famous as the birthplace of the Serbian language reformer Vuk Stefanović Karadžić; The village was destroyed by Ottoman forces during the Serbian Uprising, but has been recreated as a museum to Vuk, and now attracts many visitors.
The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (Serbian: српска/Вукова ћирилица, srpska/Vukova ćirilica) is one of the two alphabets used to write the Serbian language, the other being the Latin script (latinica, латиница). It is an adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet for the Serbian language, and was developed in 1818 by Vuk Karadžić, a Serbian linguist. The alphabet was officially adopted in 1868.[citation needed]
Karadžić based his alphabet on the Cyrillic alphabet, on the simple principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written" (Serbian: Пиши као што говориш и читај како је написано, Piši kao što govoriš i čitaj kako je napisano). The Serbian Latin alphabet is the same as the Croatian alphabet, and was mostly developed by Ljudevit Gaj. The two alphabets are entirely interchangeable, with each letter in one having a corresponding letter in the other.
The Cyrillic alphabet is seen as being more traditional, and has official status in Serbia and the Republika Srpska (Bosnia and Herzegovina), although the Latin alphabet has gained widespread usage during the course of 20th century. The Serbian Latin alphabet is more common in Montenegro. The Serbian language and Cyrillic script also have official status in Bosnia and Herzegovina (at the Federal level) and in the Brčko District (the Latin alphabet is used officially in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina).
The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, together with the works of Krste Misirkov and Venko Markovski, were used as bases for the Macedonian alphabet.
The Alphabet
The following table provides the upper and lower case forms of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, along with the Serbian Latin equivalent and the IPA value for each letter:
Cyrillic Alphabet
Latin alphabet
IPA А а
A
/a/ Б б
B
/b/ В в
V
/v/ Г г
G
/ɡ/ Д д
D
/d/ Ђ ђ
Ð
/ʥ/ Е е
E
/ɛ/ Ж ж
Ž
/ʒ/ З з
Z
/z/ И и
I
/i/ Ј ј
J
/j/
Cyrillic Alphabet
Latin alphabet
IPA К к
K
/k/ Л л
L
/l/ Љ љ
Lj
/ʎ/ М м
M
/m/ Н н
N
/n/ Њ њ
Nj
/ɲ/ О о
O
/ɔ/ П п
P
/p/ Р р
R
/r/ С с
S
/s/ Т т
T
/t/
Cyrillic Alphabet
Latin alphabet
IPA Ћ ћ
Ć
/ʨ/ У у
U
/u/ Ф ф
F
/f/ Х х
H
/x/ or /h/ Ц ц
C
/ʦ/ Ч ч
Č
/ʧ/ Џ џ
Dž
/ʤ/ Ш ш
Š
