Stjepan Ivšić (; 13 August 1884 – 14 January 1962) was a Croatian
linguist,
Slavicist, and
accentologist.
Biography
Ivšić was born on 13 August 1884 in
Orahovica. After finishing primary school in Orahovica, he attended
secondary school
A secondary school, high school, or senior school, is an institution that provides secondary education. Some secondary schools provide both ''lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper secondary education'' (ages 14 to 18), i.e., b ...
in
Osijek and
Požega. At the
Faculty of Philosophy at the
University of Zagreb he studied
Croatian and
classical philology, and later specialized at the universities in
Kraków
, officially the Royal Capital City of Kraków, is the List of cities and towns in Poland, second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city has a population of 804,237 ...
,
Prague
Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...
,
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...
,
Moscow
Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...
, and
Kyiv
Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...
. He received his Ph.D. in 1913 with the thesis ''Prilog za slavenski akcenat'' (A Contribution on the Slavic Accent). He served as a professor at the secondary school in
Gornji Grad in
Zagreb
Zagreb ( ) is the capital (political), capital and List of cities and towns in Croatia#List of cities and towns, largest city of Croatia. It is in the Northern Croatia, north of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the ...
from 1909 to 1915, and thenceforth as a professor of Slavic Studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.
The focal point of Ivšić's research was Croatian
Štokavian subdialects, on which he published several very important studies (''Šaptinovačko narječje'', 1907; ''Današnji posavski govor'', 1913). He was especially interested in the accentuation of Croatian subdialects and Old Slavic grammars. He was the first to determine the existence of the
neoacute in all three Croatian dialects.
In 1928, he participated in the efforts of state committee to create a common
orthography
An orthography is a set of convention (norm), conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, Word#Word boundaries, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and Emphasis (typography), emphasis.
Most national ...
for
Croatian and
Serbian. In the paper ''Jezik Hrvata kajkavaca'' (1936), he partitioned dialects of
Kajkavian language (not including the ''goranski'' subdialects ) into four major groups. He extensively studied Croatian
Glagolitic heritage, especially its special language features, on which he published several works. In 1934, he tracked the
Baška tablet from
Krk to Zagreb and wrote an enthusiastic article about it called ''Sveta Lucija u Jurandvoru i njezin dragi kamen'' (''
Jutarnji list
() is a Croatian daily newspaper based in Zagreb. It was published on 6 April 1998 by EPH (Europapress holding, owned by Ninoslav Pavić), which eventually changed its name in Hanza Media after being bought by Marijan Hanžeković. The newspap ...
'', 1934). In 1937, he became the vice president of the Croatian Language Society, and in 1938 the editor of the journal ''Hrvatski jezik'' (Croatian Language). He served as the chancellor of the University of Zagreb from 1939 to 1943. During the period of the fascist
Independent State of Croatia, he refused an offer to serve as the head of the Croatian State Office for Language and advocated a phonology-based orthography as opposed to the official etymological-morphological one (known as ''korienski'' 'root').
He died in Zagreb on 14 January 1962, at the age of 77.
Legacy
In the spring of 1945, due to alleged collaboration with the enemy, he was sentenced to exile from Zagreb and lost his membership in the
Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was the only one to sign the conclusion of
Novi Sad agreement, with the note "I give this signature with the remark that the statement in Act 4 of the conclusion cannot be used for promoting Ekavian pronunciation in the present-day Ijekavian area."
A high school in Ivšić's native
Orahovica bears his name.
Stjepan Ivšić High School
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Works
* ''Srpsko-hrvatski jezik. Izgovor i intonacija s recitacijama na pločama'' (with M. Kravar; Zagreb, 1955)
* ''Slavenska poredbena gramatika'' (prepared by R. Katičić and J. Vrana, Zagreb, 1970)
* ''Izabrana djela iz slavenske akcentuacije'' (prepared by B. Finka, Munich, 1971)
* ''Jezik Hrvata kajkavaca'' (prepared by J. Lisac, Zaprešić, 1996)
See also
* Ivšić's law
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ivsic, Stjepan
1884 births
1962 deaths
People from Orahovica
Linguists from Croatia
Linguists of Slavic languages
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb alumni
Rectors of the University of Zagreb
Members of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Burials at Mirogoj Cemetery
20th-century Croatian linguists