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The Language of the Old Czech Legenda "O Svaté Kateřinĕ"

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The Language of the Old Czech Legenda Slavistische Beiträge ∙ Band 87 (eBook - Digi20-Retro) George M. Cummins The Language of the Old Czech Legenda "O Svaté Kateřinĕ" Verlag Otto Sagner München ∙ Berlin ∙ Washington D.C. Digitalisiert im Rahmen der Kooperation mit dem DFG-Projekt „Digi20“ der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, München. OCR-Bearbeitung und Erstellung des eBooks durch den Verlag Otto Sagner: http://verlag.kubon-sagner.de © bei Verlag Otto Sagner. Eine Verwertung oder Weitergabe der Texte und Abbildungen, insbesondere durch Vervielfältigung, ist ohne vorherige schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages unzulässig. «Verlag Otto Sagner» ist ein Imprint der Kubon & Sagner GmbH. George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access S l a v is t ic h e B eiträge BEGRÜNDET VON ALOIS SCHMAUS HERAUSGEGEBEN VON JOHANNES HOLTHUSEN UND JOSEF SCHRENK REDAKTION: PETER REHDER Band 87 George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access 0004741Б GEORGE М. CUMMINS THE LANGUAGE OF THE OLD CZECH LEGENDA 0 SVATÉ KATERINÈ VERLAG OTTO SAGNER • MÜNCHEN 1975 George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access ן ôayensche bllothek׳6taat8b München J ISBN 3 87690 099 9 Copyright by Verlag Otto Sagner, München 1975 Abteilung der Firma Kubon und Sagner, München Druck: Alexander GroBmann 8 München 19, Ysenburgstraße 7* George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is the revised text of my Harvard Ph.D. disser- tation, directed by Horace G. Lunt, and presented to the Depart- ment of Slavic Languages and L iteratures in June, 1973• The following three essays and transcription of the Old Czech Legenda 0 syaté Katefinë do not make up a rigorous textual study in the familiar sense—this work was completed half a century and more ago by the philologists Spina and Gebauer. Chapter I seeks to identify multiple sets of spellings habits from close study of the single copy of this fourteenth century poetic masterpiece. Chapter II studies the literary stylization of tense and aspect. I am least satisfied with Chapter III ("Versification"), wherein I propose an intonational unit mid- way between the phonological word and the octosyllabic line, and on this foundation proceed to examine the interplay of poetic content and phrasal structure. Upon reading this frag- ment, Professor Roman Jakobson suggested that I had failed to account for the "essential periodicity" of the metrics of the Legenda. I now believe it is possible to extend my notion of the 1*generalized speech measure" as a parallel and rhythmically antithetical structure, posed against the line (verS). to describe just this periodicity. I would like to express special thanks to Professors Horace G. Lunt and Roman Jakobson, who read the hiS of my disses tation and supplied many helpful comments. I owe its appearance in published form to the very kind encouragement of Professor Henning Andersen, and to the friendly professional courtesy of Professor Henrik Birnbaum, who introduced my work to the editors at Otto Sagner Verlag. I wish also to thank Professors J. Holthusen and J. Schrenk and my editor Dr. Peter Rehder. I am indebted to ICarianne Whitmore and W. Slezak for many thoughtful suggestions, and also to my wife, Ыеіапіе Cummins. George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access TABLE OP JONTENTS CHAPTER Page I. Orthography 1 II. The Poetics of Past Tense in the KL 79 I I I . V ersification: Speech Measures and Intonation 163 APPENDIX I. Transcription of the KL 208 לI I . The KL and A 13 34 8 SUMMARY 36 3 BIBLIOGRAPHY 365 George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access CHAPTER I Orthography Ukolem pravopisu je zachytiti jazyk jasnë, j. t. nedvojznačnē— nic vice. To znamená, že nikdo nerauže pravopisu pfedpisovati, jak má této jasnosti dosici— jde jen o to, aby jí skuteöné dosaženo było. — Josef Vachek1 1.0 Preliminary Remarks An early statement of the internal logic of modern Czech orthography appears in Vachek's study "Ceskÿ pravopis a struk- tura CeStiny.11 Certain spelling rules—products of the gradual evolution of a standardized, standardizing writing code—had come under attack from the *1phoneticizers" and 11 phonemicizers" of the age, who saw no reason for maintaining a number of ab- errant concatenations of symbols, which, by historical accident or the personal taste of Hus or Dobrovskÿ continue to adhere to an otherwise transparently logical system. The one-to-one correspondence of sign to sound (or "significant" sound) used in philological transcriptions, and, to a large extent, fun- damental to Czech spelling, is perhaps violated by the mere ìà.t jll» Jlê 811(1 H r ;£״־presence of digraphs: Czech £h vs. j5-â di-ni vs. ty-dy^ny. Vachek defends the spelling of the velar 2 as devoid of ambiguity; in the dental sets he sees the writing system presenting information about the morphemic (or morpho- phonemic) structure of Czech. Thus, in w riting "prefix + George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access stem" the code distinguishes objednati from obfetovati. y.jezd from zvëst: in writing "adjectival stem morpheme" it distin- guiehee кіаггтб and soukromS: in writing "stem + desinence" i t outlines declensional types, as kosi. hołubi■ and kosy, holuby« or lexico—grammatical categories, as pani and рапу» or nom•- acc.-instr. duby. stromy, voly. lesy. In choosing symbols for preverbs it may ignore voicing neutralization rules in favor of limning the shape of morphemes as they appear without con- straints: s.iednotiti. slézti. svlažiti vs. z.iasniti. zlibati. zvrhnouti. These facts, however, adjoin a body of data which suggests that this 11 morphophonemic" principle does not apply, in many cases, where it ought: splafliti 'frighten' should read *zplaSiti if the preverb is /z/ factitive. Similarly, zfititi should read *sfititi if the preverb is /s/ "motion in space." These are historically formulated writing conventions, Vachek con^ eludes, synchronically unmotivated, and coexisting with other (h isto ric ally formulated) !rules which appear to give certain kinds of information about certain grammatical categories of the language. How does the orthography of the literary language choose which elements of the grammar to distinguish explicitly in its code, and which elements to omit? The language writes plotë. mftstS. radS. but not *drahë. *snachS, *dobrS. Vachek, writing in 1933» concludes that Czech orthography makes explicit a fusion of certain heterogeneous phonemic and morphophonemic information. George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access In fact, implicit in Vachek's article is much of what is known about the structure of standardized writing codes in lit- erary languages. Roman Jakobson has discussed the morphopho- nemic encoding function of the orthography of Contemporary Standard Russian.*^ It is clear that many kinds of lower-level phonological rules, not explicit in spellings, would be gratui- tous information for the reader-decoder. It is clear, further, that many kinds of lower-level rules are in fact explicitly conveyed, and, again, that many kinds of spelling !*ules convey no information whatsoever, or imply distinctions applicable only to previous stages of the language•^ Concerning English orthography, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle have w ritten: Once again, the postulated underlying forms are systematically related to conventional orthography.. .and are, as is well known, re- lated to the underlying forms of a much earlier historical stage of the language. There has, in other words, been l i t t l e change *- in lexical representation since Middle English. Chomsky and Halle are rejoicing in the "rightness1' of their own abstract formulas; but who can say what the orthography would do should the deeper abstraction be swept away? What rules do we know about the behavior of the encoder, the lit- erary language itself? Much the same has been revealed about CSR. But do we know that, say, a mythical eighth century Slavic encoder, working within a mythical literary language, would systematically relate his spelling rules to underlying uppe3>-level rules—that a predominance of his forms would George M. Cummins - 9783954793235 Downloaded from PubFactory at 01/10/2019 05:58:22AM via free access 0004741Б ־4 - resemble abstract underlying representations, with an unob- trusive admixture of superfluous or synchronically inaccurate information? The spelling rules of English, Czech and Russian are the products of fully coalesced, fully normalized systems. The rules of late fourteenth century Old Czech are, by contrast, nascent, nonstandardized, nonunified systems; they are, none- theless, the product of an intense, spectacularly fertile his- torical development—they are marked by many currents of cen- tralizing, standardizing tendencies—and they are, in fact, artifacts of a single culture, of a single, highly stylized literary language. The monuments of Old Czech literature re- fleet neither the unmotivated inventions of culturally isolated "encoders" nor the totally normalized writing conventions of literary languages produced by lengthy historical development. Authors of Old Czech literature writing down their works, and copyists, reproducing literary products, find themselves in exactly equivalent roles in relation to orthographic norm and style: the language, freshly coded by the author, and freshly recoded by the copyist from his text, will find in every case an eccentric and unique symbolic expression. The individual- ity of each monument is defined by the realized pattern of optional variant symbols spawned by aggregate layers of con- ventionalized habits. A copyist working in the year 1400 operates with spelling rules of the so-called "mladSi spfe&kov.f pravo pis11 (younger digraph orthography)• As with the earlier stages (11 primitivni George M.
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