Dobrovský, Josef (dô`brôfskē), 1753–1829, Hungarian philologist, of Bohemian parentage. In 1792 the Royal Bohemian Academy of Sciences commissioned Dobrovský to recover Bohemian manuscripts lost in the Thirty Years War. He is the founder of modern Slavonic studies and the father of modern Czech philology and literature. Dobrovský was criticized by scholars when he questioned the authenticity of The Judgment of Libusha, the oldest Czech writing, discovered by Hanka in 1817. He wrote much on early Slavic materials.

Dobrovský, Josef

(born Aug. 17, 1753, Gyarmat, Hung.—died Jan. 6, 1829, Brno, Moravia, Austrian Empire) Czech linguist. He was ordained a priest in 1786, but after 1791 noble patronage allowed him to devote himself to scholarship in Prague. His textual criticism of the Bible led him to study Old Church Slavonic and then the Slavic languages as a group. An influential scholar of the Czech language and its literature, he published such works as History of the Bohemian Language and Literature (1792). His grammar of Czech, Learning System of the Bohemian Language (1809), helped standardize literary Czech, and his grammar of Old Church Slavonic (1822) laid the foundation of comparative Slavic linguistics.