Radoslav Katičić (; 3 July 1930 – 10 August 2019) was a Croatian and Yugoslav linguist, classical philologist, Indo-Europeanist, Slavist and Indologist, one of the most prominent Croatian scholars in the humanities.

Biography

Radoslav Katičić was born on 3 July 1930 in Zagreb, which was part of Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the time. In 1949, he graduated at the classical gymnasium in his home town.

At the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, he received a degree in Classical Philology in 1954. The same year he started working as a part-time librarian at the Seminar for Classical Philology at the same faculty. His first scientific works were on Ancient Greek philology and Byzantine studies. the primordialist view of nations, and subjectivity in articles on language policy. Besides, his syntactic description has been judged negatively by other Croatian syntacticians.

Katičić's scholarly contributions which consists of more than 150 titles (books and papers) can be divided in five fields:

  • General linguistics and Paleo-Balkan studies (mainly based on transformational grammar approach), consisting of works written in English:
  • A Contribution to the General Theory of Comparative Linguistics (the Hague-Paris, 1970)
  • The Ancient Languages of the Balkans, 1-2 (the Hague-Paris, 1976)
  • Linguistic-stylistic works on aspects and history of various European (Ancient Greek, Byzantine) and non-European literatures:
  • Stara indijska književnost/Old Indian literature (Zagreb, 1973)
  • Numerous studies on Croatian language history, from the inception of the Croats in the 7th century onwards. Katičić has charted the meanderings in the continuity of Croatian language and literature, from the earliest stone inscriptions and Glagolitic medieval literature in the Croatian recension of Church Slavonic to the works of Renaissance writers such as Marin Držić and Marko Marulić, who wrote in a Croatian vernacular. He also explored language standardization and wrote a syntactic description of modern Croatian (Sintaksa hrvatskoga književnoga jezika/Syntax of Standard Croatian, Zagreb, 1986), based on texts by contemporary authors such as Miroslav Krleža and Tin Ujević.
  • Synthetic works that explore the beginnings of Croatian civilization in a multidisciplinary fashion based on philology, archeology, culturology, paleography and textual analysis:
  • Uz početke hrvatskih početaka/Roots of Croatian roots (Split 1993)
  • Litterarium studia (Vienna-Zagreb, 1999, in German and Croatian)
  • Reconstruction of Proto-Slavic sacral poetry and Slavic pre-Christian faith:
  • Božanski boj: Tragovima svetih pjesama naše pretkršćanske starine (Zagreb, 2008)
  • Zeleni lug: Tragovima svetih pjesama naše pretkršćanske starine (Zagreb, 2010)
  • Gazdarica na vratima: Tragovima svetih pjesama naše pretkršćanske starine (Zagreb, 2011)
  • Vilinska vrata: I dalje tragovima svetih pjesama naše pretkršćanske starine (Zagreb, 2014)
  • Naša stara vjera: Tragovima svetih pjesama naše pretkršćanske starine (Zagreb, 2017)

References

  • Academician Katičić's homepage
  • Katičić's biography, at the Matica hrvatska's website