Antun Dalmatin

Antun Aleksandrović Dalmatin was a 16th-century Croatian translator and publisher of Protestant liturgical books.

Name and early life

Antun's surname is an exonym which means "of Dalmatia". Dalmatin was probably from Senj.

The South Slavic Bible Institute was established in Urach in January 1561 by Baron Hans von Ungnad, who was its owner and patron. Within the institute, Ungnad set up a press, which he referred to as "the Slovene, Croatian and Cyrillic press". The manager and supervisor of the institute was Primož Trubar. They planned to use the books that they printed throughout the entire territory populated by South Slavs between the Soča River, the Black Sea, and Constantinople. For this task, Trubar engaged Stjepan Konzul Istranin and Antun Dalmatin as translators for Croatian and Serbian, and gave Antun Dalmatin the responsibility for the Cyrillic text.
The language used by Dalmatin and Istranin was based on northern-Chakavian dialect with elements of Shtokavian and Ikavian. Members of the institute, including Trubar, were not satisfied with the translations of Dalmatin and Istranin. Trubar and two of them exchanged heated correspondence about correctness of the language two of them used, even before the first edition translated by Dalmatin and Istranin was published and immediately after the publication. For a long time, they tried to engage certain Dimitrije Serb to help them, but without success. Eventually, they managed to engage two Serbian Orthodox priests, Jovan Maleševac from Ottoman Bosnia and Matija Popović from Ottoman Serbia.