Antanas Juška

Who was Antanas Juška?

Antanas Juška was a Roman Catholic pastor, lexicographer, folklorist, and musicologist.

Born in the village of Daujotai, near Kaunas, Lithuania, he graduated from the Vilnius Theological Seminary and was ordained in 1843. He compiled about 70,000 Lithuanian language words in a dictionary, using his personal experience in the districts of Veliuona and Vilkija. These works were published in part by the Russian Academy of Science in St. Petersburg. The dictionary remains valuable for its inclusion of the language as it existed at the time, often in the form of entire phrases. He also wrote three unpublished dictionaries: Polish–Lithuanian, Latvian–Lithuanian–Polish, and Lithuanian–Polish.

Juška recorded about 7,000 Lithuanian folk songs. He circumvented the Lithuanian press ban in effect at the time, forbidding the printed use of the Lithuanian language using the Latin alphabet, by appealing to Professor Baudouin de Courtenay. Notably, he wrote song lyrics in their original dialect and included the singers' names and the songs' contexts.