Nahtigal, Rajko

Born Apr. 14, 1877, in Novo Mesto; died Mar. 29, 1958, in Ljubljana. Yugoslav philologist and Slavist. Of Slovene nationality.

Nahtigal graduated from the University of Vienna (1900). He was a professor at the university in Graz (1913–19) and the University of Ljubljana (1919–53). He was the first president of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts (1938). His research was devoted to Old Church Slavonic and Russian, comparative grammar of the Slavic languages, the history of the Slavic written language, and paleography. He published the book The Slavic Languages (1938; Russian translation, 1963), in which he revealed several general phenomena and processes that determined the evolution of the structure of the Slavic languages and posed the question of the hierarchy of phonetic processes. He also published Slavic literary texts (The Sinaia Prayer Book, 1941–42; The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, 1954).