Šulek was a Slovak by birth. He was born in Sobotište, in the Nyitra County of the Kingdom of Hungary where he attended primary school. He studied at the evangelicallyceum in Bratislava. He decided not to become a pastor, but was unable to continue his studies in Jena, so he came to his brother in the Croatian town of Brod na Savi in November 1838. Soon he made contact with Ljudevit Gaj, the central figure of the Croatian Illyrian movement, and in autumn 1839 started working as a printer for Franjo Župan in Zagreb. He started writing for Gaj's papers in 1841 and was the editor-in-chief of the illegal paper Branislav, printed in Belgrade, in 1844-45. He was the editor of Gaj's Novine Horvatske, Slavonske i Dalmatinske from 1846 to 1849, Slavenski jug in 1849, and Jugoslavenske novine in 1850. During the 1850s he wrote many textbooks. At the same time, he was writing a German-Croatian dictionary. He also wrote against the linguistic policy of the linguist and folklorist Vuk Karadžić. Šulek held pro-Yugoslav views. He died in Zagreb. Ancestors of Bogoslav Šulek: :hu: Schulek család
Work
From 1858 till 1865, Šulek was the editor of Gospodarski list. He was one of the initiators of Pozor magazine. He was an exceptionally prolific journalist and scientific propagator. In 1868 he issued his most famous political work, Naše pravice. Izbor zakonah, poveljah i spisah, znamenitih za državno pravo kraljevine dalmatinsko-hrvatsko-slavonske od god. 1202 - 1868. He was a member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts and its secretary from 1871 till his death. He was promoted into a doctor of sciences in 1867 on the basis of his study of Ruđer Bošković.
Influence on Croatian terminology
Šulek supported linguistic principles of the Zagreb Philological School and promoted Croatian linguistic purism. For his work he has been described as the "father of Croatian scientific terminology". He liberally coined neologisms and borrowed words from other Slavic languages to serve as replacements for non-Slavic loanwords. When a Shtokavian word for a loanword was not available, he drew upon Chakavian and Kajkavian lexical stock, and when those were insufficient he borrowed words from other Slavic languages such as Czech, Slovak, Russian and Slovene, or proposed his own neologisms. His activities often drew him to conflict with Croatian Vukovians who advocated pure folk language and derisively called his neologisms and borrowings šulekizmi. Despite their initial unpopularity, most of Šulek's new vocabulary slowly entered into common parlance of Croatian upper classes throughout the 20th century; many of these words are nowadays considered standard Croatian expressions for various concepts. Most of his coinages used in modern Croatian include words in chemistry and other technical fields.
Works
"Deutsch-kroatisches Worterbuch - Njemačko-ilirski rječnik", I. - II. - German-Croatian Dictionary
"Hrvatsko-njemačko-talijanski rječnik znanstvenoga nazivlja", I. - II. - Croatian-German-Italian Dictionary of Scientific Terms
