Ivan Broz
Ivan Broz was a Croatian linguist and literary historian. He is best known for his book Croatian Orthography.
Biography
Broz was born in Klanjec, where he attended primary school, before continuing his education in Varaždin. He completed his pre-university education at the Karlovac Gymnasium. In Innsbruck, he began studying theology, but eventually switched to Croatian language, history, and geography at the newly established Croatian university in Zagreb. He worked as a substitute teacher in Zagreb and later as a regular teacher in gymnasiums in Osijek, Požega, and Zagreb. He earned his doctorate in 1888. Later, he attended Vatroslav Jagić’s Slavic studies lectures in Vienna and conducted field research across Bosnia and Herzegovina and southern Croatia. During his fieldwork, Broz became ill and died in Zagreb.Work
In 1885, in Matica hrvatska, he was appointed the editor of Hrvatske narodne pjesme. In his Crtice iz hrvatske književnosti, a two-volume work, he gave an extensive overview of the oldest Croatian literary monuments. He authored a study on the Croatian imperative and numerous puristic articles. In 1889, he was appointed to make a normative guide for Croatians.In 1892, he published his most recognized work, Hrvatski pravopis, which was reprinted under the editorship of Dragutin Boranić until 1916. That normative guide, which was strictly based on Karadžić-Daničić's normative conception but formed chiefly upon the normative role model of the Croatian philologist Marcel Kušar, established the Croatian standard. In fact, many of the later Croatian normative manuals are stylizations of Broz's work.
Broz left a deep mark in the final standardization of Croatian: thanks to him, there was no normative duality, which had been threatened by the introduction of phonologically based spelling in Dalmatia and Bosnia, and by the introduction of some rules from the normative standard of the Zagreb school. He established firm ground for continuity with the older normative tradition and secured a transition to the final normative form, avoiding controversies like those that closely followed the linguistic interventions of his contemporary Tomislav Maretić.