Ljudevit Gaj

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Ljudevit Gaj

Ljudevit Gaj (August 8, 1809, Krapina

Krapina

Krapina is a town in northern Croatia and the administrative centre of Krapina-Zagorje county with a population of 4,647 and a total municipality population of 12,950 ....
– April 20, 1872, Zagreb

Zagreb

Zagreb is the Capital and the largest city of Croatia. Zagreb is the Culture of Croatia, Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Cinema of Croatia, Economy of Croatia and Government of Croatia center of the Croatia....
) was a Croatia

Croatia

Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a Central European country at the crossroads of Pannonian Plain, Balkans, and the Mediterranean Sea....
n linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was the central person of the Croatian national reformation or the Illyrian Movement
Illyrian movement

Illyrian movement , also Croatian national revival , was a cultural and political campaign initiated by a group of young Croatian intellectuals during the first half of 19th century, around the years of 1835-1849 ....
. He was of German-Slovak descent.

In 1830 in Buda he printed the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief Basics of the Croatian-Slavonic Orthography"), which was the first common Croatian orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Orthography is derived from Greek language ????? orth?s and ???fe?? gr?phein ....
book (after the works of Ignjat Ðurdevic and Pavao Ritter Vitezovic

Pavao Ritter Vitezovic

Pavao Ritter Vitezovic was a noted Croatian writer, historian, linguist and publisher.Pavao Ritter Vitezovic was born in Senj to a family of a Military Frontier....
).

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Ljudevit Gaj (August 8, 1809, Krapina

Krapina

Zagreb

Croatia

Orthography

Pavao Ritter Vitezovic

Pavao Ritter Vitezovic was a noted Croatian writer, historian, linguist and publisher.Pavao Ritter Vitezovic was born in Senj to a family of a Military Frontier....
). The book was printed bilingually, in Croatian

Croatian language

Croatian language is a South Slavic languages which is used primarily in Croatia, by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in neighbouring countries where Croats are Indigenous peoples, in Italian region of Molise, and parts of the Croats diaspora....
and German

German language

German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
. The Croatians used the Latin alphabet

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented. Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezovic and the Czech orthography

Czech alphabet

The Czech alphabet is a version of the Latin alphabet, used when writing Czech language. Its basic principles are "one sound - one letter" and the addition of diacritical marks above letters to represent sounds alien to Latin....
, using one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. He used diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. The term derives from the Greek language d?a???t???? ....
s and the digraph

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph, bigraph , or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined....
s lj and nj.

The book helped Gaj become famous throughout the country. Suddenly he became the leader of young talented intellectuals, led by the same ideas about the Croatian language and people. When in 1834 he succeeded where fifteen years ago Ðuro Matija Šporer hadn't - to get the agreement from the royal government of Habsburg Monarchy

Habsburg Monarchy

The Habsburg Monarchy covered the territories ruled by the junior Austria branch of the House of Habsburg , and then by the successor House of Habsburg-Lorraine , between 1526 and 1867/1918....
to make a Croatian daily newspaper - he was already seen as the leader. Finally, on January 6 1835, Novine Horvatske ("The Croatian News") appeared, and on January 10th, it got the literary addition Danica Horvatska, Slavonska i Dalmatinska ("The Croatian, Slavonia

Slavonia

Slavonia is a geographical and historical region in eastern Croatia. It is a fertile agricultural and forested lowland bounded, in part, by the Drava river in the north, the Sava river in the south, and the Danube river in the east....
n, and Dalmatia

Dalmatia

Dalmatia is a region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, situated mostly in modern Croatia and spreading between the island of Rab in the northwest and the Bay of Kotor in the southeast....
n Daystar"). It was a big progress in realising the idea of marking the Croatian literature

Croatian literature

Medieval period*Vi?eslavs baptismal font* Kartular of Supetar* Valun tablet* Plomin tablet*Ba?ka Tablet* Apostol of Mihanovic,...
as unique. The "Novine Horvatske" were printed in Kajkavian dialect

Kajkavian dialect

Croatian Kajkavian dialect is one of the three main dialects of the Croatian language. The name of the dialect, like those of its correspondents, ?tokavian and Cakavian, is named after the interrogative pronoun kaj ....
until the end of that year, while "Danica" was printed in Shtokavian dialect

Shtokavian dialect

Shtokavian or ?tokavian is the main dialect of the Bosnian language, Croatian language and Serbian language languages.The ?tokavian dialect is spoken in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the southern part of Austria?s Burgenland, and in part of Croatia....
along with Kajkavian.

In early 1836 the publications' names were changed to Ilirske narodne novine ("The Illyrian People's News") and Danica ilirska ("The Illyrian Morning Star") respectively. This was because historians at the time hypothesised Illyrians had been Slavic and were the direct forefathers of the present-day South Slavs.

Beside the political ideologist, organizer and the leader of the reformation, Ljudevit Gaj was a writer too. The most popular poem of that time was Još Horvatska ni propala ("Croatia is not in ruin yet"), written in 1833.

The Latin alphabet used in the Bosnian

Bosnian language

Bosnian , sometimes referred as Bosniak/Bosniac language , is a South Slavic languages native to the Bosniaks and all other citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina who consider it to be their mother tongue....
, Croatian

Croatian language

Serbian language

name=Serbian|nativename=|pronunciation=['sr?pski?]|familycolor=Indo-European|map=|states=See below under "Official status", besides that in Croatia and as an immigrant's language spread over Central Europe and Western Europe, as well as Northern America...
languages is credited to Gaj's Kratka osnova. The Slovenian alphabet

Slovenian alphabet

The Slovene alphabet is an extension of the Latin alphabet and is used in the Slovene language. The standard language uses a modified Latin alphabet, which is a slight modification of Gaj's Latin alphabet, consisting of 25 lower- and uppercase letters:...
, introduced in the mid 1840s, is also a variation of Gaj's Latin alphabet (the only difference is the lack of the letters c and d). Gaj's Latin alphabet was also one of the two official scripts used to write Serbo-Croatian until the dissolution of Yugoslavia

Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and in Slovene language: Socialisticna Federativna Republika Jugoslavija The Slovene language name also uses this Gaj?s Latin alphabet version with a slight difference in spelling....
.

Ljudevit Gaj

See also