Karadžić was born in the village of Tršić, near Loznica in Serbia; his first name "Vuk" means "wolf". Apart from learning to read and write in the Tronoša monastery he educated himself. He took part in Serbian uprisings against Ottoman occupation and left us detailed accounts of them.
Karadžić reformed the Serb language and standardized the Serb Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles, though in everyday usage but less accurately his alphabet is often termed a phonetic alphabet. This made it one of the most usable in the world.
Kardžić's reforms of Serbian modernized the language and distanced it from Church Slavonic, instead bringing it closer to its close neighbour Croatian. Austrian authorities encouraged the merging of the two languages, and together with Đuro Daničić, Karadžić was the main Serbian signer of the Vienna Agreement of 1850 which laid the foundation for the later Serbo-Croatian language.
He collected several tomes of folk prose and poetry and created all the works listed below. For his work he received little financial aid, at times living in poverty. He died in Vienna.
His first name "Vuk" means "wolf", which he was given because all his brothers and sisters died of Tuberculosis, leaving him the sole survivor.
Although the above quotation is usually attributed to Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, it is in fact an orthographic principle devised by the German grammarian and philologist Johann Christoph Adelung.
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (Вук Стефановић Караџић) (October 26, 1787 - January 26, 1864) was a Serb linguist, reformer of what today is most commonly known as the Serbo-Croatian language, though he himself called it Serbian language.
He was born in the village of Tršić[?], near Loznica[?] in Serbia; his first name "Vuk" means "wolf".
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