Milan Rešetar


Milan Rešetar was a linguist, historian and literary critic from Dubrovnik.

Biography

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 also edited the Croatian edition of "List drevnih zakona" magazine. Rešetar was a student of Vatroslav Jagić. He was a notable member of the Serb Catholic movement in Dubrovnik. After retirement, he moved to Florence where he died 1942. He was of Serb origin.
The main areas of his works included dialectology and accentology of South Slavic languages, as well as philologically impeccable editions of 15th to 18th century writers for the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts.
He was one of founders of South Slavic dialectology, investigating features of Štokavian dialects and Čakavian dialects, and also wrote a monography about Molise Croatian dialect. Milan Rešetar was the most conscientious and diligent commentator on The Mountain Wreath. He was also engaged in the field of numismatics, inheriting the interest and coin collection from his father Pavle, the last commander in Kotor during Petar II Petrović-Njegoš's lifetime. The collection is kept at The National Museum in Prague.

Works

He wrote in Serbian, German and Italian.
His most important works include:
His works in this area are, with a few exceptions, superseded by later areal linguistics and historical dialectology research. On the other hand, Rešetar's editions of the Renaissance and Baroque poets and playwrights are still the standard printed issues; only modern computerized textology analyses, done in the Institute for Croatian language and linguistics, have begun to question some aspects of his transliteration choices on the graphemics level. The big part of his work in this area remains highly regarded and confirmed by contemporary textology.
His scientific attitudes towards the Ijekavian Štokavian dialect of Dubrovnik were driven by his own ethnic affiliation—like many other prominent members of the intelligentsia in Dubrovnik of his time.
Convinced that the Serbs and the Croats are one nation in two names, Rešetar held that Serbian and Croatian are one and the same language, and in that conviction he published two versions of its grammar - one with examples in Latin script and examples in Cyrillic script: Elementar-Grammatik der serbischen Sprache.
He also wrote in German a lengthy book entitled Die serbokroatischen Kolonien süditaliens which was published in Vienna in 1911.