Josef Dobrovský

Josef Dobrovský (1753–1829) was a Czech philologist and historian, born at Balassagyarmat in Hungary, and a founder of the Czech National Revival. Once a Jesuit novice, he studied theology in Prague after the order was dissolved in 1773.

In 1792 he travelled to Scandinavia and Russia in search of manuscripts scattered during the Thirty Years' War, and he helped found the Royal Czech Society of Sciences in Prague in 1784.

His History of the Czech Language and Literature (1792) and Czech grammar (1809) put the language on a scholarly footing, and his 1822 Old Church Slavonic grammar made him a founder of Slavic studies. He died at Brno in January 1829.