ESSAYS IN CZECH AND SLOVAK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE DAVID SHORT School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) https://archive.org/details/SSEES0011 ESSAYS IN CZECH AND SLOVAK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE DAVID SHORT School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London 1996 ESSAYS IN CZECH AND SLOVAK LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE David Short Essays in Czech and Slovak Language and Literature © School of Slavonic and East European Studies 1996 SSEES Occasional Papers No. 32 ISBN: 0 903425 43 2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any other form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Copies of this publication and others in the School’s refereed series of Occasional Papers can be obtained from the Publications and Conferences Office, SSEES, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU The cover picture shows the butterfly Zerynthia polyxena. Printed in Great Britain by Quom Selective Repro Limited Queens Road, Loughborough, Leics. LE11 1HH Contents Page Acknowledgements iv Foreword v V 1. Jan Hus as a general linguist, with special reference to Ceskd neddlnt postila.1 V 2. The language of Capek-Chod’s Turbina.17 V 3. Linguistic authenticity in Karel Capek’s Conversations with TGM.31 4. Dream-drama of the whetted knife: Alena Vostra’s Na ostfi noze.51 5. Czech with a sense of insecurity: Vft Stuchly’s Misic jde nahoru.61 6. Language, paralanguage and metalanguage in Karel Horak’s Supis dravcov.69 7. The treatment of the Czech ‘verbs of motion’ in Jungmann’s Czech-German dictionary.87 8. Frantisek Sebek’s Ceskd fraseologie: a study in nineteenth-century Czech philology.101 9. Developments in the inventory of third person plural forms of the Czech pre¬ sent tense as an example of categorization and change by analogy.Ill 10. Trends in the evolution of the past tense in Czech.123 11. A classification for certain aspect-derivational classes of Czech verbs.131 12. An algorithm for Czech imperative formation.137 13. The vocative case and its morphology in Czech and Slovak.145 14. The grammatical status of oba in Czech (and Slovak).157 15. The expression of ‘too’ and ‘very’ in Czech and Slovak.169 16. The distribution of /l/ in Czech — with special reference to butterflies (with contrastive notes on Slovak)....175 17. Speech therapy and phonetics as literary themes.187 18. The Westernization of Czech and Estonian in commerce and advertising since the ‘Velvet’ and ‘Singing’ Revolutions.193 Index of names.213 m Acknowledgements The author wishes to express his appreciation to the following for kindly agreeing to the republication herein of items for which they are the copyright-holders: The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London (Chapters 2, 3, 6) The Czech Union of Writers, Prague (Chapter 5) Zaklad narodowy im. Ossoliriskich, Wroclaw (Chapter 7) Slawistyczny Osrodek Wydawniczy, Warsaw (Chapter 8) Charles University, Prague (Chapters 11, 16) Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam (Chapter 13) The Editors of the Slavonic and East European Review (Chapter 14) The Slovak Speech Therapy Association, Kosice (Chapter 17) The Editors of Slovo (Chapter 18) I am also grateful to my colleagues Robert Pynsent and especially Radojka Miljevic for their encouragement and the care which they devoted to the editing of these ramblings, and to my co-author Ulle Mannart of Tartu for agreeing to the republication herein of Chapter 18. IV Foreword Two-thirds of these essays have appeared previously, but often in out-of-the-way places and in languages other than English; all have been to a greater or lesser extent amended or extended. They are brought together now (along with chapters 1, 4, 9, 10, 12 and 15, which appear here in print for the first time) to make them accessible to a more general English- speaking readership, at a time when interest in matters Czech and Slovak is once again growing. The essays fall broadly into two groups: those concerning aspects of the Czech and Slovak languages as such, with particular concentration on the verb (Chapters 7, 9-12), and those concerning many different aspects of the languages in use, chiefly through analysis and discussion of individual writers’ individual works (Chapters 1-8, 17). The focus may be on grammar, register or theme. Some of the chapters may by their nature interest a more general reader, for whom expressions quoted are provided with English translations; others, however, require beyond question that the reader have more than a passing familiarity with the language discussed, which then renders translation superfluous, even, in many cases, uninformative or intrusive. David Short Windsor, December 1995 1 JAN HUS AS A GENERAL LINGUIST, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CESKA NEDELNIPOSTILA The aim of the Hussite movement was to make available to all Czechs the truths and precepts of the Christian religion in a language they could understand. Robert Auty1 The above quotation, which applies as much to Hus in particular as to the Hussites in general, is perhaps all that is needed to justify discussion of Hus the linguist in the context of heresy.21 further take as axiomatic that no specific proof is required that Hus was indeed a linguist, any more than proof that he was a theologian; his theoretical works on language have been adequately discussed in all the standard histories. However, a closer look at the various linguistic utterances that appear in the Postila could be of some additional interest. While the Postila is ‘just’ a set of sermons based on individual interpretations of the best known parables and other NT readings, the author’s linguistic persona is never far away. Hus leaves us with the impression that ‘once a linguist, always a linguist’, and that his interest in language is more than merely subordinated to the needs of exegesis. That need must be the underlying and dominant impulse, but if we were to include semantics within linguistics, then the text is primarily linguistic; however, to do so would detract and distract from the theological content per se and so no such line is adopted here. Yet there are occasions where a momentarily dominant linguistic (not necessarily semantic) aspect can lead the author astray, though not necessarily any more so than his predecessors, so that — from the modem perspective — any contingent theological point becomes diluted if not spurious. The totality of relevant data (individual utterances) contained in the Postila reveals its author’s linguistic views, or behaviour patterns as a linguist, explicitly or implicitly, on a wide range of levels: above all, he comes across as a lexicologist, then as translation 1 ‘Czech’ in A.M. Schenker and E. Stankiewicz (eds): The Slavic Literary Languages: Formation and Development, New Haven, 1980, p.167. 2 This chapter is adapted from a paper given in 1994 at a conference on heresy, held as part of the research plan of the Department of East European Languages and Literature of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. 1 2 Jan Hus as Linguist theorist and/or linguistic comparativist, onomast, etymologist, linguistic encyclopedist, trans¬ formationalist sui generis, speech therapist and even an unconscious aspectologist. (He can also be found using forms which would today smack of sociolinguistic ‘political correctness’, although he uses them to avoid possible ambiguity.)I * 3 What barely comes through at all, though it is present in other works, is his self-appointed role as a linguistic purist given to ‘rectifying’ Czech or ridding it of Germanisms. Indeed there are even hints of an opposing trend, whereby a Germanism may figure as explicans to a less transparent explicandum. Metalinguistically the Postila is not very instructive, and the terminological apparatus used applies as much to theological as linguistic explication. Let it be merely pointed out that the devices used include the verb poloziti for ‘use’, ‘say’, ‘express as’; vyloziti ‘expound’, ‘define’; vznieti for ‘be expressed as’, ‘mean’; znamenati si ‘be meant’; died for ‘say , ‘call’, ‘mean’; sluti ‘be called’, ‘mean’; smysl or rozum for ‘meaning’; the imperative form to viz for ‘understand as’ or ‘NB’; slovce or slovo for ‘word’; and a wide variety of constructions to express ‘in such and such a language’: adverbs: latini and cesky ‘in Latin , ‘in Czech’, adverbialized prepositional phrases: po nimecku ‘in German’, v reci fecke ‘in Greek’, and adverbialized instrumental case: feii syrsku ‘in Syrian’. 1. Hus the lexicologist Hus’s knowledge of the contemporary Czech lexicon is put to effect in one much-used way, namely in the provision of synonyms, which may sometimes look like common-or-garden, (semi-)redundant synonym pairs, triples or even longer lists. Usually, however, he uses this device to expand on or explain words which are obsolescent, high-style (from the biblical text with which he is operating) or in one way or another alien, or simply ambiguous. In any event the overriding motive is to make the text being expounded easier of access to the hearer or reader. There are some thirty to forty synonym pairs based on nouns, half a dozen or so adjectival pairings, about fifteen verbal, five pronominal, five prepositional, over thirty syntactic of one kind and another, and two morphological. Some occur more than once. The devices used all indicate that the intention is to explain (use of neb ‘or’, t. or to jest ‘that is and similar, or inclusion of the would-be explanatory synonym in brackets after that which it explains, the method used almost exclusively in the pericopes).