Radoslav Katičić

Radoslav Katičić (pronounced

As a stipendist of the Greek government, he visited Athens in 1956-57, and in 1958 he was elected as an assistant at the Department for Comparative Indo-European Grammar at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb.^[2]

In 1959, he received his Ph.D. with the thesis Pitanje jedinstva indoeuropske glagolske fleksije ('The question of unity of Indo-European verbal flexion').

In 1976, he became a full professor of Slavic philology at the University of Vienna, Austria.^[2]

In 1973, he was selected as an extraordinary member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (now

In 2005, he became the head of Council for Standard Croatian Language Norm. He served in that role until council's abolition in 2012.

Work

In the past twenty years he chiefly researched on the topic of history of Croatian grammar, philology, early Croatian Middle Ages, engaging in extensive synthetic research of the key periods of history of Croatian literature and the reconstruction of Proto-Slavic ceremonial texts, sacral poetry of mythological content, and legislative literature. Some aspects of his work meet criticism, primarily his puristic approach to the linguistic terminology,^[3] the primordialist view of nations,^[4][5][6] and subjectivity in articles on language policy.^[4][7] Besides, his syntactic description has been judged negatively by other Croatian syntacticians.^{[8][9][10][11]}

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
  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,
  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)