Milan Rešetar

Milan Rešetar (by Th. Mayerhofer, 1904)

Milan Rešetar ( Serbian - Cyrillic Милан Решетар , also Milan von Rešetar ; born February 1, 1860 in Dubrovnik , † January 14, 1942 in Florence ) was a Serbo-Croatian linguist , Slavist , numismatist and historian .

Life

Education and academic career

Milan Rešetar grew up as the son of the district chief Pavle Rešetar († 1880) in Dubrovnik. After high school he studied Slavic and Classical Philology from 1877 to 1880 at the Universities of Vienna (with Vatroslav Jagić ) and Graz . In 1882 he passed the teaching examination in Serbo-Croatian and Classical Philology and was a secondary school teacher in Koper in 1882 , in Zadar in 1883 and in Split from 1884, where he was a teacher from 1887 to 1891. After receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1889, Rešetar worked from 1891 as the editor of the Croatian edition of the Reichsgesetzblatt ( List državnog zakona ) in Vienna. Teaching activities as a private lecturer (since 1895) and associate professor (1904) was followed by the full professorship for Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna from 1910 to 1918, which was followed by the professorship at the University of Zagreb in Yugoslavia , which arose after the First World War . After his retirement, Milan Rešetar moved to Florence, where he died in 1942.

In 1902 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg .

linguistics

Rešetar's linguistic research interests were the history of the štokavian and čakavian dialects of Serbo-Croatian. His compendium The Serbo-Croatian Colonies in Southern Italy , published in 1911, deserves special attention , in which he described the history, ethnology and language ( grammar and vocabulary ) of the Molises Slavs in an unrivaled way and recorded their oral traditions. Even after he retired in 1929, he continued his linguistic activity in numerous and extensive studies on the development of the Serbo-Croatian language, its dialects, accents and phonetics. Furthermore, he edited works of older Croatian literature for the then Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts and did research on historical and literary-historical topics of the Republic of Ragusa .

numismatics

Rešetar's numismatic interest evidently aroused the important collection of Ragusan coins inherited from his father, which he had described in the posthumous publication La zecca della Repubblica di Ragusa (1891/92). His father's collection formed the basis for his own comprehensive presentation of Ragusan coinage in two volumes: Dubrovačka numizmatika (1924–25). After Rešetar had scientifically cataloged his father's coin collection in the two volumes printed in Cyrillic, he initially tried in vain to sell the collection to the Yugoslav King Alexander I. He later sold the collection and his library to the Czech National Museum and the Czech National Library in Prague, respectively . He has devoted himself to numismatic topics in around twenty other smaller works, some of which he also wrote in Italian and German .

Self-image

Considered his place of origin as a Croat today , he is also counted among the Serbian minority in Croatia , not least because he described himself as a Serbian Catholic , later a Yugoslav . The reason for this is in its orientation towards the idea founded by the autodidact Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864), who was ingenious according to Rešetar , that the Serbo-Croatian linguistic community also had a uniform identity , which Karadžić called Serbian . Rešetar thus follows contemporary considerations of linguistics: Similar to the German Indo-Europeanist August Leskien Rešetar In its elementary grammar of the Serbo-Croatian language , the prestigious than ethnic unity Serbo-Croats only differed in terms of their religious affiliation. From such an understanding, his theses, regarded as largely out of date or rejected in Croatia, about the spread of the čakavian dialect, which Rešetar also calls Croatian and which consequently would never have been spoken in his home town of Dubrovnik, can be seen: the standardization of the literary language was all the easier are, as the majority of Serbo-Croatians anyway the dialect introduced by Vuk [Karadžić] in the literature - the so-called Štokavic - speaks from home and, which was particularly decisive for the Catholic Croats, the city of Dubrovnik in Dalmatia since the end of the 15th to at the beginning of the 19th century had developed a very active literary activity, which developed in a dialect very close to Vuk's. A possible reason for this attitude could have been the search of the Slavic upper class in and around Dubrovnik for a new identity, which became necessary after the end of the Ragusa Republic and the failure of the Illyrian movement .

Scientific merit

In terms of their technical content, Rešetar's numismatic studies and - with minor restrictions on transliteration - the editions of Ragusan poems and plays from the Renaissance and Baroque periods are still considered authoritative. From today's perspective, perhaps his greatest merit remains the comprehensive standard work on the history of language and linguistics on the Molise Slavonic language .

Writings and essays (selection)

• The Serbo-Croatian Colonies of Southern Italy , Vienna 1911 (Southern Slavic Dialect Studies; 5; Writings of the Balkan Commission, Linguistic Department; 9) - Italian translation with updated bibliography: Le colonie serbocroate nell'Italia meridionale (PDF; 3.46 MB) Campobasso 1997.
• Elementary grammar of the Serbo-Croatian language , 3rd revised. Ed., Berlin 1957 (first: Elementary grammar of the Croatian language / elementary grammar of the Serbian language , Zagreb 1916).
• Dubrovačka numizmatika [Mint history of Ragusa (Dubrovnik)], 2 volumes, Belgrade 1924/25.
• The Štokavian dialect , Vienna 1907 (Writings of the Balkan Commission, Linguistic Department; 4). ( archive.org )
• Antologija dubrovačke lirike [Anthology of Ragusan Poetry], Belgrade 1894.
• Najstarija dubrovačka proza [Oldest Ragusan literature], Belgrade 1952 (Posebna izdanja: Odeljenje Literature i Jezika / Srpska Akademija Nauka; 192).
• The Čakavština and its former and present borders. In: Archives for Slavic Philology , 13 (1890).
• Ispravci i dodaci tekstu starijeh pisaca dubrovačkijeh [corrections and additions to texts by older Ragusan writers]. In wheel JAZU 119 (1894).
• Zadarski i Ranjinin lekcionar [The Lectionary of Zadar and That of Ranjina], Zagreb 1894 (Djela JAZU 13).
• The ragusan documents of the 13th-15th centuries Century. In: Archives for Slavic Philology 16-17 (1894-95).
• Rešetar Collection. In: Monthly Journal of the Numismatic Society in Vienna 10 (1916).
• Stari dubrovački teatar [The old ragusan theater]. In: Narodna starina 1 (1922).
• Nikša Zvijezdić, dubrovački srpski kancelar XV. vijeka [Nikša Zvijezdić, a Serbian Ragusan chancellor of the 15th century]. In: Glas - Srpska kraljevska akademija, 169 (1936).
• Najstariji dubrovački govor [The oldest ragusan dialect]. In: Godišnjak Srpske kraljevske akademije 50 (1940).

literature

• N. Stančić:  Rešetar Milan from. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 9, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-7001-1483-4 , p. 86 f. (Direct links on p. 86 , p. 87 ).

Web links

Wikisource: Milan Rešetar  - Sources and full texts

Commons : Milan Rešetar  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Milan Rešetar in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry ÖBL , Vol. 9 (1988), p. 86 f.
2. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Milan Rešetar. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed October 19, 2015 (Russian). 
3. ↑ Ivan Rengjeo: Numismatics and numismatic literature in Croatia. In: Numismatic Literature of Eastern Europe and the Balkans , 1, (1960), p. 7
4. ↑ Ragusiana the collection Rešetar ( Memento of 10 October 2012 at the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ List of Croatian professors at the chair for Slavonic Philology at the University of Vienna on the website of the "Scientific Institute of Burgenland Croats"
6. ↑ See Milan Rešetar: Elementary grammar of the Serbo-Croatian language , p. 10
7. ↑ Milan Rešetar: Elementary grammar of the Serbo-Croatian language , p. 11
8. ↑ For the historical context with special consideration of the situation in Dubrovnik see Ivo Banac : "The Confessional Rule and the Dubrovnik Exception: The Origins of the 'Serb-Catholic' Circle in Nineteenth Century Dalmatia" . In: The Slavic Review , 42, pp. 448-74 (1983).
9. ↑ See Edmund Schneeweis: Foreword to the third edition, p. 3: “Rešetar had his work published in two different editions: in one the Serbo-Croatian text is printed in Cyrillic, in the other, however, in Latin. In terms of content, the two editions are completely identical. "