Tomislav Maretić

Tomislav Maretić (13 October 1854 – 15 January 1938) was a Croatian linguist and lexicographer.

Biography He was born in Virovitica, where he attended primary school and the gymnasium in Varaždin, Požega and Zagreb. He graduated in 1878, receiving a diploma in classical and Slavic philology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.

He worked as a high school teacher in Požega from 1879 to 1881 and in Zagreb from 1881 to 1885. He received his doctorate in 1883, and from 1886 taught Slavic philology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. That same year, he went on a one-year study stay in Leipzig and Prague. He retired in 1914, but returned to the faculty to teach Indo-European Studies between 1919 and 1924.

In 1890 he became a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and served as its president from 1915 to 1918. He was a member of parliament of the Unionist Party twice for five years.

Maretić was a polyglot with a wide education, a prolific linguist, the main representative of the so-called Croatian Vukovars, responsible for the consistent codification of Novoštokavian as a literary language and for the introduction of phonological orthography, advocating for the linguistic unity of Croatian and Serbian.

Maretić's grammar was for most of the 20th century the foundation of the Croatian language norm and the main language manual for generations of pupils and students. Criticized immediately after its publication because it was not based on Croatian literature but mainly on folk songs and works by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Đura Daničić, this grammar was, for its time, the most comprehensive description of classical Novoštokavian language.

He died in Zagreb.

Selected works

Lekcionarij Bernarda Spljećanina, JAZU, 208 pp., Zagreb, 1885 Nov prilog za istoriju akcentuacije hrvatske ili srpske, JAZU, 225 pp., Zagreb, 1885 O narodnim imenima i prezimenima u Hrvata i Srba, JAZU, 150 pp., Zagreb, 1886 Veznici u slovenskijem jezicima, JAZU, 299 pp., Zagreb, 1887 Slaveni u davnini, Matica hrvatska, 256 pp., Zagreb, 1889 Kosovski junaci i događaji u narodnoj epici, JAZU, 115 pp., Zagreb, 1889 Istorija hrvatskoga pravopisa latinskijem slovima, JAZU, 406 pp., Zagreb, 1889 Slavenski nominalni akcenat s obzirom na litavski, grčki i staroindijski, JAZU, 64 pp., Zagreb,1890 Život i književni rad Franje Miklošića, JAZU, 113 pp., Zagreb, 1892 Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika za niže razrede srednjih škola, Kugli, 270 pp., Zagreb, 1899 Gramatika i stilistika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga književnog jezika, Kugli, 700 pp., Zagreb, 1899 I. S. Turgenjev u hrvatskim i srpskim prijevodima, JAZU, 113 pp., Zagreb, 1904 Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika: edited in multiple occasions more than 5 300 pages Metrika narodnih naših pjesama, JAZU, 200 pp., Zagreb, 1907 Naša narodna epika, JAZU, 263 pp., Zagreb, 1909 Jezik slavonskijeh pisaca, JAZU, 88 pp., 1910 Jezik dalmatinskijeh pisaca XVIII. vijeka, JAZU, 92 pp., Zagreb, 1916 Hrvatski ili srpski «jezični savjetnik», Jugoslavenska njiva, 509 pp., Zagreb, 1923 Metrika muslimanske narodne epike, JAZU, 138 pp., Zagreb, 1936