Gavrilo Stefanović Venclović

It was there that he became a disciple of Kiprijan Račanin, who started a school for young monks, similar to the one in the municipality of Rača, near the river Drina, in Serbia.

In 1739, during a time of religious persecution, he became a renowned speaker (slavni propovednik) to live among the Serbian Šajkaši in Komárom.

Venclović appealed to the Šajkaši and soldiers alike to be devoted to the emperor, to refrain from abusing the weak, stealing, and betraying their comrades and fellow men-at-arms.

The sway of Old Church Slavonic as the medieval literary language of all the Eastern Orthodox Slavs lasted many centuries.

From then on, theology and church oratory and administration were carried on in Slavoserbian, a mixture of Old Slavic (Old Church Slavonic) in its Russian form with a popular Serbian rendering, until Vuk Karadžić, who was the first reformer to shake off the remnants of this ancient speech and to institute a phonetic orthography.

After the Vuk type of written language had won, lexical gaps were filled mainly with words and expressions already present in the vernacular.

Venclović's stylistic neologisms, possessing such qualities as picturesqueness and semantic transparency, served to draw the attention of the audience to the text of the sermon.