Jernej Kopitar
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Jernej Kopitar (21 August, 1780 - 11 August, 1844) was a Slovene linguist and philologian.
Kopitar was born in the small Carniolan village of Repnje near Vodice, in what was then the Habsburg Monarchy and is now in Slovenia. After graduating from the lyceum in Ljubljana, he became a private teacher in the house of baron Sigmund Zois', a renowned enterpreneur, scientist and patron of arts. Kopitar later became Zois' personal secretary and librarian. During this period, he became acquainted with the circle of Enlightenment intellectuals that gathered in Zois' mansion, such as the playwright and historian Anton Tomaž Linhart and the poet and editor Valentin Vodnik.
In 1808, he moved to Vienna, where he studied law. At the same time, he developed an interest in the comparative analysis of the Slavic languages, to which he would devote all his later life. He became employed as a librarian and later an administrator at the Vienna Court Library. He later become the chief censor for books written in Slavic languages and Modern Greek.
Among European linguists, he was considered a valued scientist and thinker. In 1808, he published the first grammar of Slovenian, called Grammatik der slavischen Sprache in Krain, Karnten und Steyemark ("A Grammar of the Slavic language in Carniola, Carinthia, and Styria"). In his work Glagolita Clozianus (1836), he published the first critically revised, translated, and annotated version of the Freising Manuscripts, the oldest known work in Slovene and the first work in any Slavic language written in the Latin alphabet. In the same work, he advanced the Pannonian Theory of the development of Common Slavic - a theory that is now in vogue again through modern paleolinguistic studies and arhaeology.
Under the influence of the efforts of a group of contemporary Carinthian Slovene philologians, especially Urban Jarnik and Matija Ahacel, Kopitar sought to educate a new generation of linguists who would develop grammars and textbooks, advocate orthographic reform, and collected folk literature. Due to these efforts, he was given a chair in Slovene at the Ljubljana Lyceum in 1817.
In the 1820s and 1830s, Kopitar became involved in the so-called "Slovene Alphabet War" (Slovene: Abecedna vojna, or Črkarska pravda), a debate over orthographic reform. He supported radical reforms of the old bohoričica orthography, advanced first by Peter Dajnko and then by Franc Serafin Metelko. Kopitar's main opponent in the conflict was the philologist Matija Čop. Čop convinced the renowned Czech scholar František Čelakovský to publish a devastating critique on the proposed alphabet reforms, which undermined Kopitar's authority. The issue was resolved with the compromise adoption of Gaj's Latin alphabet. Čop and Kopitar also disagreed on the issue of whether the Slovenes should develop their own national culture. Kopitar favored gradual evolution towards a common literary language for all South Slavic peoples, with Slovene dialects remaining the colloquial language of the peansantry. Čop, on the other hand, insisted on the creation of a high culture in Slovene that would follow contemporary literary trends. One of the main supporters of Čop's project, the poet France Prešeren, sharply criticized Kopitar's views, which led to frequent confrontations between the two.
Politically, Kopitar was a supporter of Austroslavism, a doctrine aimed at the unity of Slavic peoples within the Austrian Empire. He was also a staunch conservative, and supporter of the Metternich regime, with a paternalistic approach to the peasant culture. On the other side, Čop and Prešeren emphasized the cultivation of the Slovene language as the means for the emergence of a lay Slovene intelligentsia that would foster and develop a specific Slovene identity within the framework of Slavic solidarity. After the "Alphabet War" in the 1830s, Kopitar's political and cultural influence in his native Slovene Lands diminished significantly. At the same time, however, he gained influence among other South Slavic intelligentsia, especiallythe Serbian one. He influenced Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in forming a new standard for the Serbian literary language based on common use.
His tombstone is displayed in the Navje Cemetery in Ljubljana, at the edge of the former St. Christopher's Cemetery. A neighbourhood in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, called Kopitareva Gradina, is named after him.
[edit] References
- Lencek, Rado. To Honor Jernej Kopitar 1780-1980. Papers in Slavic Philology, no. 2. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1982.
- Merchiers, Ingrid. Cultural nationalism in the South Slav Habsburg lands in the early nineteenth century: the scholarly network of Jernej Kopitar (1780-1844). Munich: Sagner, 2007.
