Note 3 — Introduction

Karadgitch framed a grammar of the popular Serbian language, banishing all unnecessary graphic signs and adapting his thirty-lettered alphabet to the thirty sounds (five vowels and twenty-five consonants) of his mother tongue—thus giving it an ideal phonetic orthography, and establishing the golden rule, “Spell as you speak and speak as you spell.”3 He also travelled from one village to another throughout Serbia, zealously collecting and inscribing the epic and lyric poems, legends, and traditions as he heard them from the lips of bards and story-tellers, professional and amateur.