SOURCE: Naylor, Kenneth E. “Kopitar as Slavicist: An Appreciation.” Papers in Slavic Philology 2 (1982): 65-70.

In the following essay, Naylor praises Kopitar as a promoter of the Slavic literary language rather than as a scientific scholar in the modern sense.

It is inevitable that we judge the work of scholars of earlier generations by the standards of today rather than looking at their work in the context of their time. When we examine the work of nineteenth-century Slavicists, we see it through the eyes of the twentieth century and our expectations for this work are the same which we apply to the work of our contemporaries. We expect nineteenth-century scholars to behave in the ways we were trained to behave and we try to fit them into the mold from which we have come. All too often, we forget that the handbooks and reference works which we use regularly...