RADOSLAV KATIČIĆ – A GREAT PHILOLOGIST

Radoslav Katičić (3rd July 1930 – 10th August 2019) was a philologist, general and comparative linguist, classical philologist, Byzantologist, Paleo-balkanologist, Indo-Iranian philologist and Indologist, Balto-Slavic and Croatian philologist, as well as a historian of Indian, Greek, Slavic and, in particular, Croatian literatures. He made great contributions to the humanities and culture in general in Croatia with his scholarly, educational and public work from the middle of the 20th century until the first two decades of the 21st century. This paper presents Katičić's work in the fields of linguistics and literary history. His approach to these fields was very comprehensive and multidisciplinary, and therefore he achieved outstanding results in many areas: in the structuralist theory of comparative linguistics, in the survey and classification of the languages of Ancient Balkans, in his all-encompassing transformationalist description of Croatian syntax, in his comprehensive reconstruction of the Balto-Slavic pre-Christian sacred texts, in his research of the reports and mythic stories about the Adriatic and South-East European regions in ancient Greek authors, in his research of the literature and culture in Croatia in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, or in his synthetic survey of the history of the Croatian language, where he demonstrated, in accordance with his structuralist thesis on comparative linguistics, that the structure of history of a language, in this case Croatian, determines its current structure. This is what equally determines and differentiates the Bosniak/Bosnian, the Montenegrin or the Serbian language among the genetically and typologically closest literary or standard languages. He used to call all the fields of his multidisciplinary scho-larship simply: true philology.