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Milan Rešetar

Milan Rešetar (February 1, 1860 – January 14, 1942) was a Croatian and Serbian linguist, literary historian and numismatist.

Milan Rešetar
Born(1860-02-01)February 1, 1860
Dubrovnik, Austrian Empire
DiedJanuary 14, 1942(1942-01-14) (aged 81)
Florence, Italy
Occupationlinguist, Ragusologist, literary historian

Biography

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Rešetar was born in Dubrovnik. After the gymnasium in Dubrovnik, he studied classical philology and Slavic languages in Vienna and Graz. He worked as a high-school professor in Koper, Zadar and Split, and later a professor of Slavic studies on the universities of Vienna and Zagreb). He was a student of Vatroslav Jagić.[1]

Rešetar was a notable member of the Serb-Catholic movement in Dubrovnik.[2] In his earlier years he followed the notion that speakers of Chakavian are Croats and speakers of Shtokavian are Serbs; later in his life he regarded Serbs and Croats as one single nation.[3][4] In accordance with that position, he published two versions of his Serbo-Croatian grammar - one with examples in Latin script and examples in Cyrillic script: Elementar-Grammatik der serbischen (kroatischen) Sprache / Elementar-Grammatik der kroatischen (serbischen) Sprache (1916).[5] After retirement, he moved to Florence where he died 1942.

The main areas of his works included dialectology and accentology of Serbo-Croatian, particularly of Shtokavian (Der štokavische Dialekt, Vienna, 1907), as well as critical editions of 15th to 18th century Dubrovnik writers for the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts. He also wrote a monograph on Molise Croats (Die serbokroatischen Kolonien Süditaliens, 1911).

This volume concerns itself with the highly-interesting South Slavic enclave in Molise of the province of Naples, the three communities of Montemitro, San Felice del Molise, and Acquaviva Collecroce. Remote from the lines from which the greater events of history moved in the Middle Ages, the three communities have remained singularly conservative of ancestral type in habit and speech. Even at the present they lie remote from the travel routes and scarcely touched by the modern life of Italy save in so far as the Government reaches out to them hands collecting taxes and drawing their youth into military service. The moot point of the period at which this Molise colony was founded and the circumstances under which it came to fixity is carefully discussed with a full apparatus of historical record. Upon the same point the author, with great skill in the interpretation of speech record, masses the weight of his philological acumen in the linguistic section of the work. He succeeds in orienting the Molise dialect upon the great body of Slavic speech and shows where the migration was derived; and, by a critical examination of speech forms, is able to identify the period quite independently of the formal record of documents. It affords a most interesting example of the contribution of philology to the art of a historian.

— From a review in Bulletin of the American Geographic Society (Vol. 45, No. 4 (1913) pp. 303–304) by William Churchill.

He produced a critical edition of Petar II Petrović Njegoš's The Mountain Wreath with philological commentary. He was also engaged in the field of numismatics (Dubrovačka numizmatika, 2 vols., 1924-1925), inheriting the interest and coin collection from his father Pavle, the last commander in Kotor during Petar II Petrović Njegoš's lifetime. His collection is now kept at the National Museum in Prague.

Works (selection)

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Rešetar wrote in Serbo-Croatian, German and Italian.

References

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  1. ↑ Vienna's Slavistics Faculty
  2. ↑ "'PITANJE BOŠKOVIĆA' Dr. Nikola Tolja: Posrbljenje Dubrovčana bio je čin otpora Beču i Pešti". Slobodna Dalmacija (in Croatian). 2012-02-07. Retrieved 2012-03-27.
  3. ↑ Ćavar, Martina (2005). "Nacrt za životopis Milana Rešetara (1860.–1942.)". In Maštrović, Tihomil (ed.). Zbornik o Milanu Rešetaru. Zagreb: Hrvatski studiji. pp. 414–415.
  4. ↑ Rešetar, Milan (2001) [1912]. "Mea culpa". In Samardžija, Marko (ed.). Jezikoslovne rasprave i članci [Franjo Iveković, Ivan Broz, Tomo Maretić, Vatroslav Rožić, Milan Rešetar, Antun Radić, Nikola Andrić, Dragutin Boranić]. Stoljeća hrvatske književnosti. Zagreb: Matica hrvatska. pp. 301–304.
  5. ↑ "Rešetar, Milan", Hrvatska enciklopedija (in Croatian), Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, 1999–2009, retrieved January 19, 2014
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