Đuro Daničić

He was born in Novi Sad,^[2] in the family of Orthodox priest Jovan Popović. He attended schools in Novi Sad and Bratislava, and studied law at the University of Vienna. He published his first papers under the name Đuro Daničić in 1845, after the heroic Senj Uskok from a folk poem, and a name that he continued to use throughout the rest of his life. Under the influence of Vuk Karadžić and Franz Miklosich he started studying Slavic philology, to which he subsequently devoted his entire career. In 1856, he became the librarian of the People's Library in Belgrade and secretary of the Society of Serbian Literacy, and, in 1859, professor of the Belgrade Velika škola. In 1866 he was invited to Zagreb to serve as a secretary general of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU).^[3] He served as a secretary general on two occasions between 1866-1873 and 1877-1882.^[2] From 1873 he taught as a professor at Belgrade's Velika škola, and in 1877 he returned to Zagreb where he played a key role in preparing the Yugoslav Academy's Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian Language. He was the editor of the first volume (A–Češuļa) that was published from 1880 to 1882.^[3] His death in 1882, in Zagreb, interrupted that work and he was buried in Marko's cemetery in Belgrade.^[2]

Daničić played a key role of laying the foundation of Serbian philology, grammar and historical lexicography on the basis of principles set by Vuk Karadžić.^[3] His translation of the Old Testament, mostly from German sources, also influenced Croatian translation literature.^[3] Daničić also assisted Karadžić in his translation of the New Testament into Serbian in 1847. After undergoing a revision, both translations were accepted and are still in use today by the Serbian Orthodox Church and its members.^{[citation needed]}

In 1847, he published an influential polemical essay The War for Serbian Language and Orthography,^[2] where he opposed linguistic ideas of Miloš Svetić, the pseudonymous Jovan Hadžić, Karadžić's main opponent, and supported Karadžić's phonemic orthography. He gave the theoretical background to Karadžić's concepts in his numerous linguistic works.^[4] In the following years he published a number of books and articles codifying the grammar on the basis of Karadžić's work. He described the morphology in the Small Serbian Grammar (1850), later revised and republished a number of times as Forms^[a] of Serbian (later also: or Croatian) Language; in a series of articles published from 1851 to 1872 (republished in a single volume in 1925) he described the accentual alternations of inflected words; in Serbian Syntax (1858) he described the usage and meaning of grammatical cases.^[6] In 1850 he was among the co-signees of the Vienna Literary Agreement.

Daničić also studied older Serbian literature and produced widely used editions of old texts, such as Theodossus' Hagiography of Saint Sava (1860), Domentian's Hagiographies of Saint Simeon and Saint Sava (1865), Gospel of St. Nicholas (Nikoljsko jevanđelje) (1864), Lives of Serbian Kings and Archbishops (1866) and numerous others. On the basis of medieval charters, legal texts, annals and hagiographies he compiled the Dictionary of Serbian Literary Antiquities (1863–1865), the first historical dictionary of a modern Slavic language (preceded by Franc Miklošič's and Alexander Vostokov's Church Slavonic dictionaries), covering around 30 000 words.^[7][b] The dictionary contains a mixture of vernacular and Serbian Church Slavic lexis, reflecting the diglossic state of medieval Serbian texts,^[9] although Daničić minimised the amount of religious vocabulary inherited from Old Church Slavonic, aiming to describe vocabulary of more distinctly Serbian character.^[10]

Daničić's later works, History of Forms (1874, on historical inflectional morphology), Stems (1876, on historical derivational morphology), Roots (1877, an etymological dictionary) and the first volume of Yugoslav Academy's (JAZU) historical Dictionary (1882) have been criticised for their excessive reliance on August Fick's and August Schleicher's outdated and defective Indo-European reconstructions.^[11][12] In the JAZU Dictionary Daničić made use of several new Latin letters, one of which, ⟨Đđ⟩, subsequently became a standard part of Gaj's Latin alphabet.^[13] Daničić died soon after the publication of the first volume of the dictionary; the remaining work was taken up by following generations of linguists and continued up to 1976, when the final, 23rd volume was published.

Daničić started scientific work as a supporter of Karadžić's ideas of linguistic pan-Serbism (attribution of Shtokavian dialect and written heritage to Serbian ethnos). His early works were dedicated to "Serbs of Catholic faith", for which he was criticized by young Vatroslav Jagić. In 1857, he published "Differences between Serbian and Croatian Language" where he equated Croatian with the Chakavian dialect. However, his attitudes shifted towards promotion of pan-Yugoslavian ideology, much closer to the viewpoints of Illyrian movement, with which he was closely cooperating. That included linguistic unity of Croats and Serbs and the opinion that the Croatian literature is at the same time Serbian and vice versa. His linguistic papers were titled using "Croatian or Serbian" qualifier when he published in Zagreb, and "Serbian or Croatian" when published in Belgrade.^{[citation needed]}