Those Serbians who could not endure the oppressive rule of the Ottoman, and who in the seventeenth century emigrated with their Patriarch Arsen Tcharnoyevitch to the level fields of Southern Hungary--there to adopt in the course of the two subsequent centuries the pseudo-classicism of the West--considered it infra dignitatem to write about such vulgar subjects as popular poetry and tradition. The gifted descendants of those lamentable slaves of the cunning Austrian and Pan-Russian influences wasted their talents in vain and empty imitation of pseudo-classic productions from Italy and France, and, by conjugating zealously the Serbian and Old-Slavonic verbs in the Russian fashion they created a monstrous literary jargon which they termed Slavyano-Serbski (i.e. Slavo-Serbian). And if any Serbian author should have presumed to write in the melodious and genuine Serbian as universally spoken throughout his fatherland, he would have been anathematized by those misguided Slavo-Serbian 'classicists' who fondly believed that by writing in a language hardly comprehensible even to themselves, because of its utter inconsequence and arbitrary changes, they would surely become distinguished in the history of their nation's literature.
The 'classicists' received their deserts in the first half of the nineteenth century, when they were overwhelmed by the irresistible torrent of the popular movement headed by the self-taught Serbian peasant, Vouk Stephanovitch-Karadgitch, whose name will remain for ever great in the history of Serbian literature. Karadgitch has been called justly "the father of Serbian modern literature." His numberless opponents, who began by heaping upon him every opprobrious epithet which their pens or tongues could command, ended, after more than fifty years of fruitless resistance, by opening wide their arms to him.
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." [5] 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.