Petar "Pero" Budmani was a writer, linguist, grammarian, and philologist from Dubrovnik and a renowned polyglot.
Biography
Budmani was born in Dubrovnik/Ragusa on October 27, 1835. He was a Serb-Catholic of Croatian origin. Budmani was one of the first persons to have used the combined termCroatian and Serbian into "Serbo-Croat ". It was first used by the German Jacob Grimm in 1824 and the Austrian-Slovenian Slavist Jernej Kopitar in 1836. He wrote a seminal book in Italian called Grammatica della lingua serbo-croata that described the Serbo-Croatian grammar, published in Vienna in 1867. Because it was written primarily as a manual for use in the gymnasia in Dalmatia, it was restricted in scope and space, but it soon received high praise from Đuro Daničić in Rad JAZU #2 in 1868. Budmani's description of the limited use of aorist and imperfect and the subtleties of perfect was consistent with Croatian vernacular at the time. Between 1868 and 1882, he taught in the Gymnasium of his hometown. In 1883 he reached Zagreb where he edited the Riječnik of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, based in Zagreb, Croatia, then part of Austria-Hungary. He was also a corresponding member of both the Serbian Learned Society and the Serbian Royal Academy. Pero Budmani was one of the prominent members of the Serb Catholic movement in Dubrovnik. He is credited for the emergence of the movement together with another professors of the secondary school in Dubrovnik, Stjepo Castrapelli. He was a member the Municipal Council of Dubrovnik. In their March 9, 1880 session, the Council adopted the proposition of the Dubrovnik Youth to raise a monument that would commemorate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Ivan Gundulić. Budmani was named in the committee that would oversee the construction of the monument, together with Medo Pucić, Antun Fabris, Nikša Gradi, Ivo Kaznačić, Natko Nodilo, Mato Vodopić and Luko Zore. The unveiling of the Gundulić monument in Dubrovnik took place on May 20, 1893, and it turned out to be a major political event that confronted the Croat and Serb political parties in Dubrovnik. In 1907 he returned to Italy to Castelferretti and lived there until 1913 years when he returned to his native Dubrovnik. But already the following year, seriously ill and embittered for the persecution suffered at the hands of the Austrian police, Pero Budmani fled from home, reached Ancona and died there on December 27, 1914. Budmani spoke most of the European languages, including Old Slavonic, Greek, Latin, and several Asiatic languages. Robert D Greenberg, Associate Professor Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, describes him as a Croat linguist.
