Sic etiam Croati: Bilješke o hrvatskome jeziku u humanističko-renesansnim jezičnim repertorijima
Sic etiam Croati – Notes on the Croatian Language in the Lingustic Repertories of Renaissance Humanists

Summary/Abstract: It is commonly believed that the appearance of the multilingual dictionaries of Vrančić and Mikalja as well as Kašić’s grammar ensured the legitimacy of the Croatian language among other European languages. However, some publications compiled by 16th century European linguists show that the Croatian language had already acquired this status within the scholarly and scientific network of learned men – the res publica litteraria. This paper presents several 16th century European scholars who shared information on the Croatian language and published it in their treatises: the French humanist Guillaume Postel (Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum, 1538, Paris), the Swiss linguist Theodor Bibliander (De ratione communi omnium linguarum et litterarum commentarius, 1548, Zurich), and the Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner (Mithridates sive de differentiis linguarum tum veterum tum quae hodie apud diversas nationes in toto orbe terrarum in usu sunt, 1555, Zurich). The eminent Croatian Latinist Bartol Đurđević also contributed to the beginnings of Renaissance linguistics with his book describing the suffering of Christians in Turkish captivity and in Turkish-occupied Europe – De afflictione tam captivorum quam etiam sub Turcae tributo viventium Christianorum (1544). Although his work was not essentially linguistically oriented, Đurđević provided some linguistic material to show how greatly the Croatian language (the so-called lingua Sclavonica) differed from Turkish. He supplemented his book with a Croatian-Latin glossary and the Croatian version of the Lord’s Prayer, which is also quoted in Bibliander’s and Gessner’s studies of different European languages as a sample text for the Illyrian language.

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