The directory «Plots»

Gaj Ljudevit
(1809—1872)

Ljudevit Gaj was a Croatian linguist, politician, journalist and writer. He was the central person of the Croatian national reformation or the Illyrian Movement. He was of French descent. In 1830 in Buda he printed the book Kratka osnova horvatsko-slavenskog pravopisanja ("Brief Basics of the Croatian-Slavonic Orthography"), which was the first common Croatian orthography book (after the works of Ignjat Đurđević and Pavao Ritter Vitezović). The book was printed bilingually, in Croatian and German. The Croatians used the Latin alphabet, but some of the specific sounds were not uniformly represented. Gaj followed the example of Pavao Ritter Vitezović and the Czech orthography, using one letter of the Latin script for each sound in the language. He used diacritics and the digraphs lj and nj.

In early 1836 the publications' names were changed to Ilirske narodne novine ("The Illyrian People's News") and Danica ilirska ("The Illyrian Morning Star") respectively. This was a step further in realising Gaj's idea that the people of the southern parts of Habsburg Monarchy are Illyrians, like the present-day Albanians; in reality, and contrary to Gaj's theory, they were ethnically Slavic. Beside the political ideologist, organizer and the leader of the reformation, Ljudevit Gaj was a writer too. The most popular poem of that time was Još Horvatska ni propala ("Croatia isn't ruined yet"), written in 1833. The Latin alphabet used to write Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian and Serbo-Croat languages today is credited to Gaj's Kratka osnova. The alphabet was also named gajica or Croatian gajica after him.

Croatia, 1993, Monument of Gaj, Krapina

Croatia, 1995, The Croatian Reformation

Croatia, 2009, Ljudevit Gaj

Yugoslavia, 1943, Ljudevit Gaj

Yugoslavia, 1963, Ljudevit Gaj