Linguistic Authority, Language Ideology, and Metaphor
≥
Language, Power and Social Process 17
Editors Monica Heller Richard J. Watts
Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York
Linguistic Authority, Language Ideology, and Metaphor The Czech Orthography Wars by Neil Bermel
Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bermel, Neil. Linguistic authority, language ideology, and metaphor : the Czech orthography wars / by Neil Bermel. p. cm. ⫺ (Language, power and social process ; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018596-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 3-11-018596-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018826-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 3-11-018826-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Czech language ⫺ Orthography and spelling ⫺ History. 2. Czech language ⫺ Reform ⫺ History. 3. Language planning ⫺ Czech Republic. I. Title. PG4141.B47 2006 491.816⫺dc22 2006029042
앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines 앪 of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
ISBN 978-3-11-018596-6 hb ISBN 978-3-11-018826-4 pb Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. 쑔 Copyright 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider. Printed in Germany.
I carried the purple book with me at all times; in the tram, in line at the store, sometimes even as I walked along the street, I would open it and study the unfamiliar symbols over and over again. I could already recognize individual letters, although I didn’t know what sounds they represented. I was impressed by the fact that there were seventy-six signs; the writing must either distinguish sounds that we find to be variants of one phoneme, or it indicated a multitude of sounds that are completely different from ours. (…) Why do those who use this unfamiliar writing feel such a need to distinguish all these sounds graphically? Is it joy at the sensory richness of the voice, wanting to make the text approximate a musical score that could capture the life forces pulsating in the language, or is the fecundity of letters instead an expression of fearfulness: that meanings too closely bound to individual shades of sound are constantly escaping us? To me at least, the tension radiating from the shapes of these letters testified that they grew from a world of fear. Michal Ajvaz, Druhé mČsto (‘The Other City’), 2005 [1993]: 32
Contents Foreword and acknowledgments
xi
Chapter 1 Orthographic reform and language planning 1. The language planning context 2. Terminology 3. Components of spelling reform 4. Motivations for language planning 5. Introducing ideology 6. Looking forward
1 2 3 8 24 26 33
Chapter 2 Standard Czech in its social and linguistic setting 1. The Czech Republic 2. The Czech language 3. Phonology and the orthographic system of Czech 4. Quasi-diglossia in Bohemia 5. Phonology and Czech language regulation 6. Morphology and Czech language regulation 7. The 1993 Rules of Czech Orthography 8. The Addendum to the 1993 Rules 9. Conclusions
34 34 44 46 51 55 60 64 78 81
Chapter 3 Spelling reform in Czech, 1400–1900 1. To 1620: Early Czech 2. 1620–1790: Baroque Czech 3. 1780–1900: The National Revival 4. Conclusions
82 83 88 92 105
Chapter 4 Spelling reform in Czech, 1900–1980 1. 1900–1945: Standardization and purism 2. 1918–1945: The beginnings of functionalism 3. 1945–1957: The first years of communism
107 107 117 122
viii
Contents
4. 5.
1957–1958: The first communist-era Rules Conclusions
129 143
Chapter 5 Czech orthographic reform, 1980–1994 1. The reforms from 1980–1989 2. The commission after 1989 3. The publication of the Rules and initial reactions 4. Official responses to the public reaction 5. The endgame of the 1993 Rules 6. Conclusions
151 151 159 163 166 172 177
Chapter 6 The actors in spelling reform: Issues and debates 1. Participants, beneficiaries, and victims of reform 2. The reformers 3. The press 4. Other actors 5. Conclusions
178 179 182 191 205 213
Chapter 7 Debating linguistics, authority, and legitimacy 1. Linguistic motives for spelling reform 2. Authority and the 1993 reforms 3. Obligation or recommendation? 4. Consultation, dissemination, and legitimacy 5. Conclusions
214 214 230 235 248 256
Chapter 8 Metaphors and the conceptualization of language 1. The place of metaphors 2. The metaphorical patterning of language 3. Data from the corpus 4. Metaphors for language 5. Metaphors for orthography 6. Metaphors for regulation 7. Metaphors for discussion 8. Metaphoric networks crossing domains 9. Conclusion
262 262 268 271 272 275 277 281 284 289
Contents
ix
Chapter 9 Conclusions 1. Participants, beneficiaries, and victims of reform 2. Conclusions on authority, legitimacy, and reform 3. Conclusions on language ideological debates
292 292 296 298
Notes References Index
301 340 365
Foreword and acknowledgments
I have taken a number of decisions in this book that I hope will aid readers from a variety of backgrounds. There are extensive quotations, the vast majority of which come from Czech-language sources. I have given these in English, with only a few exceptions. Unless noted otherwise, any English quotation corresponding to a foreign-language title in the references section is the result of my own translation. For the most part, I have not given the original Czech citations. There are two exceptions. If I thought the Czech-equipped reader might appreciate a particular turn of phrase or want to know a particular name or piece of terminology, I provide it in the text or in a note. I have also left the original texts in the footnotes of the chapter on metaphors, as the original is more likely to be of interest in a close linguistic analysis. Items in square brackets within citations indicate cuts I have made or my own explanations. Linguistic terms are discussed in chapter 1. Transcriptions, where necessary, have been given in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The research for this book was conducted over several years and in various libraries and offices. As it turned out, I was studying a period long enough ago that primary source materials were not available on the web, but distant enough that most libraries had by this point disposed of their old newspapers and magazines. I became well acquainted with the stacks and microfilms of the Library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, which holds an excellent collection of Czech newspapers, and I am grateful to the staff there for their assistance. For journals and books, the Taylor Institution Slavonic, East European and Greek Library at Oxford University and the Glasgow University Library were treasure troves, containing numerous relevant works and runs of periodicals stretching back to the early years of the twentieth century. The staff of the periodicals room at the Czech National Library in Prague uncomplainingly lugged package after package of old magazines and newspapers for me. I am also indebted to the staff of the Language Advice Service of the Czech Language Institute (CLI) for allowing me access to their clipping file, which contained a wealth of information on reaction to the spelling reforms of 1993–1994. To fill in some of the substantial gaps in the record, I turned to personal interviews with some of the main participants in the orthographic contro-
xii
Foreword and acknowledgments
versies of 1993–1994. Olga Martincová, one of the project leaders at the CLI, and JiĜí Kraus, then-head of the CLI, were kind enough to grant me interviews that provided a view from inside the reforms. Josef Šimandl (currently of the CLI, formerly of the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, Charles University), Petr Sgall (Mathematics and Physics Faculty, Charles University), and Antonín Kostlán (Institute for Contemporary History, Charles University, formerly of the Academy of Sciences Archive) provided a perspective from outside, having participated in many of the debates, discussions and other commissions that surrounded the reforms. In an attempt to ensure objectivity and avoid misinterpreting them, the interviewees were all sent partial drafts of the book for comment and correction. I am especially grateful to Professor Sgall and Mr. Šimandl for the extensive suggestions and many corrections that they made to the manuscript, the vast majority of which are reflected in the text. Dominik Lukeš offered commentary on sections on functionalism and metaphor. I am also grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers of this manuscript and the series editors, Richard Watts and Monica Heller, for their detailed and helpful comments, of which I have tried to address as many as possible. Some of the more global suggestions I was unable to make for lack of space and time, and I take the consequences of that upon myself. Andrew Swartz provided regular technical assistance, especially in the preparation of the manuscript, and seemingly endless amounts of moral support from the very beginning of this project. I’m also grateful to LudČk Knittl for transcribing hours of taped interviews in Czech, and to Paul Peace for the proofreading. The completion of this work was greatly facilitated by a semester’s leave from the University of Sheffield, plus a matching semester funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s Research Leave Scheme, and I acknowledge both institutions for their support. Finally, this book is dedicated to Nigel Gotteri, Bill Leatherbarrow and Bob Russell, the Sheffield Russian Department’s “Class of 1972”. Ten years of their advice, support and guidance helped to make this work possible.
Chapter 1 Orthographic reform and language planning On 17 July 1994, while his boss was on holiday, a junior minister in the Czech Ministry of Education announced that he was rescinding the approval certificate for the new Rules of Czech Orthography. At a stroke, all the textbooks that had been painstakingly re-edited, re-typeset, and reissued over the last year were rendered invalid. Publishers threatened legal action, and schools that had been purchasing them and retraining their teachers cried foul. The Minister cut short his holiday and rushed back to Prague. For several weeks it looked unclear whether pupils across the Czech Republic would have books to learn from that autumn, and newspapers carried daily updates on the crisis. With chaos looming across the education sector, a compromise was hastily hammered out between the supporters and detractors of the Rules, and a revision was rushed into print, arriving at schools only days before the beginning of term in September. How could things get to such an impasse, with an entire country finding it has no materials suitable for teaching its native language thanks merely to a few changes in spelling? What factors behind the scenes conspired to circumvent the usual planning process? Why, in fact, engage in orthographic reform at all, when the outcome is so drastically negative? This is a monograph about changes to spelling, the people who are involved in them, and their social context. It takes as its main subject the language of what British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain once called a “far-away country” populated by “people of whom we know nothing.” The Czechs are neither as far away nor as uninteresting as Chamberlain thought they were, but their example need not be fascinating to everyone for its own sake. Instead, it is an academic parable: a case study using unfamiliar material to illuminate the same disputes that go on every day, in every language community that uses a written form of communication. The first two sections of this chapter examine concepts and terms. Section 3 takes a close reading of Cooper’s accounting scheme for language planning and applies it to spelling reform. In sections 4 and 5, we consider sociolinguistic aspects more closely: internal motivations that drive spelling reform and critical evaluations of authority and ideology in language planning. Section 6 lays out the structure for the remainder of the book.
2
Orthographic reform and language planning
1. The language planning context The way we spell and the marks we make on a page are the most visible manifestation of our attempt to communicate, and it is therefore not surprising that there is substantial pressure to regulate them, just as there is pressure to regulate the rest of language. Spelling reform is a small but highly visible part of the field known as language planning. Language planning itself is a vast area, and it will help to survey it quickly in its entirety before proceeding to our corner of it. First, language planning covers written language and spoken language. Sometimes regulation of one goes hand in hand with the other, but many specific points refer only to one of the two. The Quebec language law of 1977 had a provision mandating that all signage be in French; this point of legislation applied only to the written domain. US state language laws privileging the use of English in the workplace attempted to legislate the code that employees used in everyday speech; they did not prohibit, for instance, the printing of brochures and informational material in foreign languages. Second, language planning encompasses both the creation of new systems (usually written, but sometimes spoken as well) and the regulation of existing systems. These days, the creation side is mostly limited to smaller minority languages, although as little as fifty years ago this was not the case. Attempts to formulate a standard can come from within the community or without. Some minority European languages, like Walloon, have native movements for standardization, and are still gaining consensus on a standard orthography.1 In the case of many small African languages, the creation of a standard is initiated by missionaries, whose goals are both linguistic and evangelical. Once those standards are in place, further efforts serve to regulate or guide the existing norm or language community.2 Third, language planning covers both corpus planning and status planning.3 Corpus planning constitutes “planned efforts to change the lexicon, grammar, phonology, orthography and/or writing system of a given language” (Fishman 2004: 79 following Kloss). For example, a corpus-planning study of Norwegian could look at the specific words or forms of words that are permitted or prescribed in the two standard varieties, Nynorsk and Bokmål. Status planning is concerned with activities that regulate use of the language or the spheres in which it is used. Herriman and Burnaby (1996: 4) define it as follows: “Status planning involves decisions which affect the relative status of one or more languages in respect of that of others”. A status-planning study of Norwegian might ask
Terminology
3
which variety is taught in which schools, what influence various official bodies that participate in regulating the language have on the choice of variety, and how the functionality of one or the other variety is expanding or contracting. It follows that corpus planning focuses on the characteristics of a single language or variety, while status planning implies the existence of competing languages or language varieties within a community. Let us now locate spelling reform in this framework. It operates in the written sphere of language, although it can be influenced by developments in the spoken language. It constitutes regulation, as opposed to creation, as the examples we will be interested in concern language communities that have well-established conventions. With respect to the third category, we can look at spelling reform from a corpus planning or a status planning perspective. For example, a study of the Dutch spelling reform of 1994 could examine it from a corpus planning angle, analysing the changes that were made and the principles that underlay them, or from a status planning angle, asking who was on the committee that proposed it, why they were there, how the results were disseminated, and what the reaction was. Fishman (2004: 80) points out two pitfalls that these concepts pose for the scholar. First, status planning has been portrayed as the stimulus to corpus planning; and second, corpus planning itself is painted as a purely intellectual exercise. In fact, there is an ideological dimension to the particulars of corpus planning (see section 4), and ample evidence that the interaction between these two types of planning is a two-way street: corpus planning can prompt changes in the status planning activities of a language. Our focus will thus be the intersection between corpus planning and status planning. Some digging in the particulars of Czech corpus planning will be necessary, but the specific reforms are merely markers for a debate that has been ongoing in Czech society for two hundred years about the nature and extent of regulation and its place in the language community. 2. Terminology Words like spelling, orthography, writing system, grammar, alphabet, script, norm, standard, reform are notoriously labile, as they have a place in both the scholarly and the lay vocabulary. It will be useful to have a few basic definitions, which we can modify and dissect later. I will use the term spelling for the sense it usually has in English – that is, which letters we choose and which order we put them in. I will allow
4
Orthographic reform and language planning
orthography the slightly broader meaning it has in many languages: spelling, plus punctuation and capitalization – in other words, the arrangement of graphic symbols and conventions that are necessary to render in writing an example of standard speech. Coulmas (2003: 35) distinguishes two distinct meanings for a writing system: the conventions for implementing a specific alphabet, and the general principles that underlie the creation of these conventions. Thus we can speak of the writing system of French, meaning the set of specific rules that govern the spelling of French words, as well as a phonetic writing system and an etymological writing system to denote two different principles on which e.g. Serbian and French are based: Serbian favours a principle that says “in most instances choose the letter that most closely approximates the sound”, whereas French spelling relies heavily on inherited (or reconstructed) etymologies to establish a standard spelling, with a large number of silent letters and homophones. The two meanings of writing system are easily disambiguated in context. Grammar we take to mean the set of recognized forms of a language or code, and the rules governing their arrangement to form comprehensible, “native” speech or writing. Language planners would probably argue that most activities directed at defining or standardizing these rules fall outside the scope of orthographic regulation. However, often the orthography encodes and promotes certain grammatical distinctions; for example, capitalization in German distinguishes Sie ‘you (formal)’ from sie ‘they’, and the placement of a dash between English words like well-meaning depends on the relationship between the two modifiers. As we will see in chapter 2, standard Czech orthography frequently makes reference to grammatical features in the language. Given this overlap, it is not surprising that the public often include all of grammar within the remit of orthography. Alphabet is a slippery term that has a variety of meanings. Coulmas (2003: 35) identifies one of them as “the inventory of basic signs of any writing system”, which is the sense in which I will use it here.4 Other senses in which it is often used are: the set of basic characters shared (with minor differences) by a number of languages; a set of characters in a particular order, descended from the Phoenician writings through Latin and Greek. Thus, we speak of the Macedonian alphabet (the inventory of letters used in writing Macedonian); the Cyrillic alphabet (the inventory of letters used in writing Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Uzbek, Kazakh and so forth); and simply the alphabet (the series of characters typically beginning A, B, C… as opposed to e.g. Chinese characters, Cyrillic, Armenian, and other systems). I will follow Coulmas in using
Terminology
5
script instead for the second meaning, and Latin script for the third meaning. Norm and standard are related but distinct terms. Both concern acceptability of spoken or written forms or utterances: of the two, norm is the superordinate term. A norm encapsulates a general consensus as to what constitutes acceptable communication in a language or any area of it. To define a feature as part of a norm, we look for evidence of its preferred standing within a language code or variety. This might take the form of explicit sanctioning in authoritative works, but it also might include surveys of opinion or usage. A standard entails approval, formal or otherwise, of a particular series of means of expression. To define a feature as part of a standard, we cite works or opinions considered authoritative by the language community; we need not make reference to its frequency or use. Language varieties can have norms without entailing the existence of a standard based on those norms. We can speak of norms within, for instance, a dialect, because every community recognizes speech that belongs to it and speech that does not – when the accent (pronunciation, intonation), choice of grammatical forms, syntactic structures or vocabulary are perceived as “not ours”. However, only some varieties form the basis of a standard throughout the language community. Standard and standardization are terms that apply to language varieties which are cultivated for particular purposes: either overall as a written code, or for use in a specific field. In all instances, language standards appeal to two beliefs: that for certain purposes, it is best to have agreed methods of expression; and that there are recognized authorities who can be depended on for guidance in setting these standards. The usual Czech term for standard Czech, spisovná þeština, prominently features this notion of authoritativeness; its closest relations are words like spisovatel ‘author’, spis ‘treatise, publication, file’, spisovat ‘compose, set down’. “Spelling” is a value-neutral term, but not all such terms lack evaluative content. The word orthography comes from a Greek compound meaning ‘correct writing’. This word is borrowed or calqued into a number of other languages. French has the loan orthographie, Italian ortografia. German and Russian have the calques Rechtschreibung and ɩɪɚɜɨɩɢɫɚɧɢɟ; Czech and Slovak use the calque pravopis. The meaning of ‘correctness’ intrudes here in a way missing from the term spelling.5 In English, “spelling” (or more rarely “orthography”) means strictly the arrangement of letters to form words. Noah Webster’s reforms – omitting
from colour, favour, using single consonant letters – traveling instead instead of <ɢ>, for instance, or instead of <ɡ>).14 Changes in society – for example, the tax on traditional Russian beards, the importation of Dutch and German specialists, and the building of a new “window on Europe” in the form of Peter’s new capital at St. Petersburg – were further expressions of Peter’s programme. We expect language planners to make their overt ends clear in the various papers, interviews and public discussions leading up to and following a reform. Certain latent ends, however, are more difficult to establish, because they are less widely discussed and less predictable.15 Cooper posits that decision makers, “if they are an elite, […] make policy in order to maintain or extend their privileges” (1989: 90). Certainly no language planning agency will admit to existing simply in order to reinforce its own standing in the society. However, the simple fact of continued reform bolsters the visibility of the planning institution. It is an opportunity for increased media coverage, in which the agency’s employees will be presented to the public as knowledgeable experts, and book sales, in which the agency’s publications will be seen as an, appear only in foreign names. The greater number of characters made available by the use of the standard Czech diacritics by and large obviates the need for digraphs (see section 3.2 below for exceptions) and lends support to the “one phoneme, one grapheme” claim. 3.1. The Czech vowel inventory and its realization in spelling Vowel length is phonemic in Czech, distinguishing minimal pairs such as rada /¥rada/ ‘advice’ vs. ráda /¥raÖda/ ‘happily (f.)’ byt /b+t/ ‘apartment’ vs. být /biÖt/ ‘to be’ domĤ /¥domuÖ/ ‘homewards’ vs. domu /¥domu/ ‘to/of the house’ they normally write to indicate the clusters /VU+ V5+ <+ 5+ T+/ and /VUKÖV5KÖ, while with an alveopalatal /c, Ì, Õ/ the cluster is written . A further difficulty is how to spell /+iÖ/ in so-called ‘ambiguous’ environments (i.e. after /l, s, z, v, b, f, m, p/, where the spelling makes no difference to the pronunciation; both syrup and sirup have the value /¥U+TWR/). Here there are no decisive rules to hang on to, and thus Czechs from an early age are made to memorize lists of so-called “specified words” (vyjmenovaná slova) where are written. If a word does not appear on the lists, then it is written with . With the help of these memorized lists, Czechs learn to distinguish the spelling of e.g.:, which appear only in a few borrowings, and have the same value as . The so-called “morphophonemic” principle of Czech spelling is most easily seen on examples involving voiced and voiceless consonants. In Czech, as in German, Russian and many other languages, for a given for the base form and for the remaining ones.71, representing the high short vowel /+/, often alternates with letter <ý>, representing the long high vowel /iÖ/, in the same stem. In CC the same short vowel +alternates instead with 'L in many of those contexts, e.g. SC vymluvit–výmluva ‘to excuse–an excuse’, pohybovat–hýbat ‘move’ vs. CC vymluvit–vejmluva, pohybovat–hejbat. By contrast, in SC the diphthong 'Lis more restricted. It occurs primarily as an imperative ending (hádej ‘guess!’) and in the nominative singular ending of some nouns (trofej ‘trophy’, kolej ‘dormitory/track’, etc.), contexts where it is also found in CC. The consonantal inventory of the two varieties is identical, except that CC has some constraints on consonant clusters that are missing in SC. For example, CC lacks initial consonant clusters like X can be realized as /u/ in native words, but /+/ in French borrowings), or multiple ways of representing a phoneme (e.g. /ks/ can be represented by or <x>, /kv/ by or , /v/ by or <w>, and so forth). Complicating the issue is the fact that foreign words undergo differing degrees of domestication once they are borrowed into Czech. Sometimes the degree of domestication is clear, in which case reformers argue that Czech has traditionally tended to adapt the spellings of fully domesticated foreign borrowings to their Czech pronunciation. Sometimes, however, the degree of domestication varies from speaker to speaker or is not easily measurable. In these instances, the acceptability of various pronunciations becomes a further sticking point. 5.2. Borrowed words with intervocalic <s> The most common divergence between inherited spelling and Czech pronunciation is the tendency to pronounce borrowed intervocalic <s> as /z/: original praesident, universita are inevitably pronounced with a /z/.75 In many places Czech simply reflects the state of affairs in the source language or the intermediary language (most frequently German or English). But this trend is pervasive in Czech, and for some speakers extends even to instances of original intervocalic <ss>: we often hear the pronunciation /¥F+UMW\'/ for the Czech borrowing of Latin discussio. Accepting the spelling diskuze implies acceptance of a hitherto non-standard pronunciation. 5.3. Borrowed words with , , Another clear example of domestication involves words adopted with consonant clusters in the spelling, e.g. , . Czech unambiguously renders such clusters as e.g. /V/, /H/. Foreign vowel clusters fare similarly; , for instance, is rendered as /'/. 5.4. Borrowed words with , The use of in borrowings poses several linked problems. In most words of foreign origin, the choice of letter depends on the spelling in the source language, regardless of the pronunciation. For example, the word is always pronounced /ciÖ/. The two remaining choices are to alter the etymological spelling and write lokomotýva, or to preserve the original borrowed by writing lokomotiva, but in doing so fail to indicate the vowel’s length. The latter has become the recognized solution in Czech. In all of these instances, reformers have argued for rigorously following the principles devised for native words, typically arguing that foreign items, which constitute such a small portion of the lexicon, should not present so many exceptions to the “one phoneme, one grapheme” principle. as /+/ or /KÖ/ is a clear approximation of French pronunciation, as is the zero value for <e> in bulletin. French ultimate stress is conveyed by lengthening the final vowel, while Czech word stress is still given to the first syllable. Because the grapheme-phoneme correspondence in these items is not predictable, calls for revision are made on a word-by-word basis. 5.6. Vowel length The length of vowels in borrowed words is a place where the pronunciation itself has been difficult to measure. There is a strong tendency in Czech to lengthen the final vowel of the stem of many borrowed words, and spelling reforms have tried to address how this lengthened vowel should be written. Originally, length was not marked, as these words partially retained the shape of their original spelling, and had been borrowed from languages that; and the letters <s, z>. 5.8. The letters <ú, Ĥ> The letters <ú, Ĥ> both represent the phoneme /WÖ/. The letter <ú> is the historical reflex of Old Czech /uÖ/ and now appears only at the beginnings of words or stems (e.g. úþet ‘account’, súþtovat ‘reckon up’ with the prefix s-). The letter <Ĥ> is the historical reflex of Old Czech /oÖ/ and occurs only word- or root-internally (e.g. sĤl ‘salt’). Reformers have repeatedly argued for the elimination of <Ĥ> in favour of <ú>. Other reformers have sought to rationalize how are used.77 There are many possible permutations for such a reform, including: – replacing in past participles with (i.e. doing away with instead of while leaving all other instances of alone; retaining in only a handful of very common “specified words”, and where it is phonologically meaningful; eliminating in both “specified words” and borrowings, but leaving it alone where it is phonologically meaningful; or abolishing altogether., the prepositions s, z and the prefixes s-, z- has been a perennial matter of discussion. If a voiced or voiceless paired consonant follows, the underlying phonemes /s/ and /z/ are realized identically, a fact which causes native speakers difficulty in deciding which should be written in any particular situation. Various “sweeping” proposals have come forth on this count. Most involve the wholesale replacement of the marginal preposition s ‘down from’ with z ‘out of’.78 The prefixes s- and z- can, under a sweeping interpretation, be replaced by either one, or spelled the way that pronunciation dictates (e.g. <s> before voiceless consonants, before voiced).. This contrasted with the situation in Czech dialects, where the infinitive ends in a consonant, usually /t/.81 The first change was made in the 1950s, and is attested in the 1957– 1958 Rules of Czech Orthography. It permitted infinitives ending in for all common verb types.82 For the vast majority of verbs, exemplified in Table 9 (p. 63) by dČlati ‘do’, it meant that the CC and SC infinitives were now identical, or at least (as in the case of jeti) the SC form now corresponded to one acceptable CC variant. For a smaller number of verbs, exemplified above by býti ‘be’ and nésti ‘carry’, the new form created was actually a neologism, as dialects had forms that could be transcribed bejt, byt, byĢ, bét, bet and nýst, nest, nesĢ but almost never být or nést. When a further revision was made in the 1980s affecting the much smaller group of infinitives ending in , a similar situation arose. Some infinitives, such as moci ‘be able’, now had a SC form moct that corresponded exactly to the CC form. Others, such as péci ‘bake’ now had a SC form péct that did not correspond to the forms found in most dialects (which if written would be spelled píct, pect). Jelínek, writing in the newspaper Lidové noviny on 10 June 1993, says of this trend: While admitting the success of forms in -ct… we must of course add that even forms like péct, téct, vléct are to a certain extent artificial. In Common Czech we hear variants with narrowing of the vowel -é- to -í-: píct, týct (the ý here is only an orthographic device), vlíct; in Moravian dialects forms with short -e- (pect…) dominate. In short, the doublets like péct that have been introduced are in fact the result of a compromise between the state of affairs in ordinary spoken Czech and the previous codifications of the standard language. But there is nothing wrong, after all, with making useful compromises in codifying the standard language. Ø; SCCC -i > Ø; SCCC -i > Ø; SCCC -i > t; SC> t; SCCC follows a stem in , and the clusters and are pronounced identically. The choice of whether to write one or the other is therefore made on the basis of grammatical information about the subject, . However, to date no such reforms have made it past the planning stage.84 7. The 1993 Rules of Czech Orthography The 1993 reforms, which form the main subject of this book, were published in two different editions, as had become the practice beginning with the 1957 Rules. Each edition was said to be aimed at a particular market – odborná a laická veĜejnost ‘the specialist and lay public’ – and consequently had different contents and information. Both editions contain: – a brief foreword; – a summary of the Czech writing system; – excurses on indicating vowel length and the phoneme /z/ in borrowings; – an explanation of how to write and punctuate abbreviations; – a summary of capitalization rules; – an explanation of punctuation marks; – an ‘orthographic dictionary’, which constitutes the bulk of the book; – a ‘list of geographic terms’; and – a ‘list of personal names’. The academic edition, published by Academia, the imprint of the Academy of Sciences, was aimed at the specialist public. It omitted grammatical information from the dictionary, but provided a larger number of specialized terms, especially foreign and more obscure words. These, it was felt, were of interest to those who use such terms in their profession, or who in the course of their work meet with such terms, such as journalists and editors. As such, it contains two sections not found in the school edition: – detailed instructions and tables for transcribing words and names from foreign languages, especially those using alphabets and. In both examples, the 1941 Rules gave the traditional spelling reflecting the word’s foreign origin. However, these spellings do not reflect the phonemic reality of Czech, which lacks geminate (double or long) consonants and always interprets as /t/. In the case of pudding, the 1957 Rules eliminated the double consonant , and offered a choice of final or .86 The 1993 Rules further simplify this to pudink, with [k] pronounced in all forms. In example 2, the 1957 Rules introduced the new spelling téma to reflect typical Czech pronunciation of the word, but continued to allow the older spelling thema. The older spelling survived the interim 1977 revision to appear again in the 1983 edition of the Rules, but was finally eliminated in the 1993 Rules., 1. 2. in loan words in the 1993 Rules The most controversial changes were in those numerous loan words in Czech where <s> is traditionally written, but pronunciation favours /z/. The evolving status of these words can be seen in Table 11 (p. 67). Words like bazén ‘pool’ in (3) have long been the subject of phoneticization, to the extent where the 1957 Rules, following the 1941 Rules, uncontroversially classify these words with only the spelling, and this is carried forward into the 1983 and 1993 Rules. The 1957 Rules introduced this spelling to a further class of words – those in (4), more learned borrowings like analysa ‘analysis’ – but left the older spelling alongside it. Where the standard pronunciation is not deducible from the spelling, the Rules traditionally give the standard pronunciation in square brackets: analysa [-ýza]. A small group of words in this category – those in (5), including filosofie, president, universita ‘philosophy, president, university’ – had been left with only the older <s> spelling. This was supposedly at the behest of Communist Party officials, who believed that the spelling with did not respect the dignity of these concepts.87 The 1983 Rules for the first time permit (but do not require) in (5). Not until the 1993 Rules does becomes the only recommended spelling for these words. Example (6) involves words such as kurs ‘course’, puls ‘pulse’, where the pronunciation situation is more complex. The citation form of these words is the nominative singular which, as with most masculine nouns, consists of the bare stem. All other forms are created by adding a grammatical ending that begins with a vowel. The citation form has always been realized with a voiceless consonant, just as it is spelled: [kurs]. However, the remaining forms have long been realized in standard pronunciation as [¥kurzu], [¥kurz+], etc. The traditional analysis is that the ‘underlying’ form is not /kurs/, but /kurz/. The [s] in the nominative singular form is simply an example of final-consonant devoicing, as is applied for all Czech words.. Table 11. Evolution of spelling: <s> vs. 3. 4.. and <s>, as well as both pronunciations. The final group in (8) consists of words ending in <smus>, always pronounced [zmus]. Intervention from the Communist Party had stopped the phoneticization of these words in 1957 and 1983, but the 1993 Rules codified the spelling with alongside the older <s> spelling. The 1993 Rules thus simplified the principles behind the spelling of <s> and in foreign words. As opposed to the 1957 Rules and the partial revisions in the 1977 and 1983 Rules, the 1993 Rules decreed that is always written where pronounced. The single exception is words in /zmus/, where the 1993 Rules leave the traditional spelling alongside the new one. 7.3. Vowel length in loan words in the 1993 Rules Another major area that has traditionally caused difficulties for the written – may be used to indicate respectively long and short vowels). Regardless of the etymological vowel length, Czech pronunciation displays a strong tendency to lengthen predesinential vowels in these words, a fact that was not reflected in official spelling handbooks until the 1957 Rules.88 Examples can be found in Table 12 (p. 69). The 1957 Rules introduced regular marking of length on these predesinential vowels, while leaving the etymological spelling as an alternative in some, but not all, instances. By 1988, however, the commission was less sure that it had been a wise decision to mark length consistently in these words. As Martincová explained in an interview with the journal Rozhlas, acoustical studies had shown that these vowels were often not in fact full long vowels. This may have been connected with the words’ status as “marked” for foreign origin, or in some instances with the fact that Czech has weak word-initial stress, and consequently an unstressed (i.e. noninitial) long vowel may not be as long one in the initial stressed syllable. In any event, the 1993 Rules reversed some of these shortenings, recommending balon, benzin, and archiv, while retaining length in margarín and analýza, and continuing to allow both chlor and chlór. The rationale for these changes was not entirely transparent. It had four major points: 1. Certain of the vowels that had been marked as long in the 1957 reforms were found in practice to vary in length from short to long, with a half-long being quite frequent. These were returned to their etymological spelling with a short vowel, as had been the practice before 1957. 2. For other words that had been spelled with a long vowel since 1957, it was decided that the vowel was in fact consistently long, and the spelling continued unaltered from the 1957 reforms. 3. For some words that had had two alternate spellings since 1957, the authors decided that the vowel was reliably long, and they therefore eliminated the etymological spelling with a short vowel.. Here, although the more closely reflects standard pronunciation, it introduces variation such as: socializmus ‘socialism’ but socialista, socialistický ‘socialist’ modernizmus ‘modernism’ but modernista, modernistický ‘modernist’ is one suffix, used for persons and adjectives, and is a separate one for nominalizations. More problematic are examples like analýza ‘analysis’ but analyzovat ‘to analyse’, or téma ‘theme’ but tematický/tématický ‘thematic’. Here the codification of written long vowels for nouns, in imitation of standard pronunciation, introduced variation in spelling between closely related words.89 and <í, ý> can represent respectively /+/ and /iÖ/, described in sections 3.1 and 5.9. The issue of “i vs. y” is the elephant in the room of Czech orthography. As opposed to tinkering with foreign words, which affects the graphic form of perhaps one in a hundred tokens at most, a radical revision of where and are written based on strict phonemic principles would affect the look of every one out of every 4–10 words.90 In 1993, as in 1957 and earlier, the committee decided that such a change would be far too radical for the population, and would represent too great a break with tradition. A second issue left out of the 1993 reform was the existence of two letters, <ú> and <Ĥ>, representing the vowel /WÖ/ (see section 5.8). This would have been a simpler reform than one involving and , as it involves lower-frequency letters and its visual impact is thus smaller. A further problem centres on the pronunciation of voiced and voiceless consonants, primarily <s> and but also occasionally and (see section 5.10). This issue affects far fewer words, but the commission decided to leave it alone and concentrate on other issues. The last major “evergreen” of Czech orthography is regularity of vowel length within word formation, especially for native words. This is determined by a combination of historical phonological rules, analogy, and subsequent regulatory activity. The 1993 Rules brought no major changes here. Although the 1993 edition was billed as the first new Rules in a generation, the absence of these far-reaching changes shows its fundamentally cautious approach to reform. 7.5. Capitalization in the 1993 Rules The rules of capitalization received an overhaul for the 1993 Rules. In Czech, as in many European languages, the general rule was and remains “capitalize the first word in a name, put all others in lower case.” As Czech does not have definite or indefinite articles to complicate this rule, this would seem to be a simple proposition. However, there were problematic areas. Street names constituted a particular problem. In Czech, many street names (and pub names as well) consist of a prepositional phrase that de- in the infinitive alternates with in the non-past tense, the Rules give no indication of whether or should be used. Most of these words are left out of the Rules altogether; they appear only if another feature that makes them problematic, such as an odd-looking spelling or pronunciation., non-past tense has ., non-past tense has , creating an unusual in conjugation. (basic) (basic) vízum *vizum, basic in the middle of a word, is disallowed in combination with predesinential basic , and likewise the use of <s>, marked in the middle of a word, is disallowed with predesinential marked <í>. Further, we might expect that, even if marked features could not be combined, there would be some neutral register in between them where basic vivi- basic -zum -zum basic vivi- basic or and the latter as , , or , or /T/ from /T/ by spelling the former as or and the latter as or . Digraphic writing systems thus distinguished between the phonemes of Czech more consistently than earlier orthographies had.104 1.2. Hussite Czech (1419–1436) The Hussite period at the beginning of the fifteenth century marked the development of a native, reformist brand of Christianity and saw a further flowering of Czech literature and culture. It also plunged the Czech lands into a lengthy, intermittent civil conflict that, historians say, weakened the governing class and led to its eventual defeat at the hands of the Habsburgs. In his spare time, when not spreading his proto-Protestant gospel, fighting the Catholic Church, or fulminating against Germanisms in the Czech language, Jan Hus also aimed to reform and improve the orthography of Czech. The idea of applying diacritics to Latin letters in order to represent Czech phonemes, instead of using combinations of letters, is traditionally said to have originated with Hus. If this is true, he was thus the first of a long line of Czechs to marry language purism with orthographic revisions, pursuing a conservative, in places reactionary agenda in the first instance and a radical, anti-traditionalist agenda in the second.105 Hus is said to have proposed using a dot (his term was nabodeníþko) over consonants to modify their quality and an acute accent over vowels to modify their length. The character was thus distinct from <Ī>, the first for /j/ and <w> for /v/, where the modern language uses <j> and (see 3.4 for why). It lacked a diacritic to distinguish /s/ and /5/, employing a digraph <ǕǕ> for the latter. It also included different letters for so-called ‘light’ and ‘dark’ /l/, a, <ý> after , , and <s>, inherited from the Moravian Brethren, was illogical, etymologically unfounded, and caused confusion for language learners, as it created extra classes of exceptions in written paradigms. He thus began to write , <í> after and sometimes after <s> and where he felt it for and <w> for . Virulent public debates followed, including a public split between Hanka and Palacký, but finally in 1850, the Matice accepted the proposed changes. The wangling over these reforms – colourfully described in Tešnar (2000) – was widely mocked and the reforms were said to have crowded out more pressing linguistic and cultural issues facing the Matice. In effect, they put a brake on any more substantial changes of this sort (Tieftrunk 1881).128 3.5. Modern purism II: The whetstones of Czech The national consciousness of the Czechs continued to rise through the course of the nineteenth century. Sayer notes that education was fundamental to this shift; on the brink of the National Revival in the 1770s, “perhaps four-fifths of Bohemia’s servile population could not read or write in any language. A century later, we are dealing with an almost wholly literate public…” The proportion literate in Czech was at first very low, but by the end of the 1800s far more pupils in the Czech lands were schooled in Czech than in German (see Newerkla 2003 for an example of one such shift). Publication in Czech rose inexorably throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, with a wealth of newspapers and periodicals appearing in various fields (Sayer 1998: 89–93). Back in the early days of the Revival, every Czech publication had to be cherished. Infelicities of style and grammar had been tolerated in a populace still unsure of their linguistic abilities.129 Gradually, however, the mood shifted. Simply getting Czechs to read and write in their native language was no longer enough. As the number of publications and competent language users grew, there were more and more attempts to correct and refine usage, providing people with models for cultivated language use while wagging a finger at their inadequate abilities. In 1845, the Matice entertained a motion from Jungmann, who was:, which was by that point inconsistent. The reform was justified as follows: The commission thus favours a principle that it is minded to keep constantly in its sights during reforms of Czech orthography: that Czech orthography is drawing closer to the orthography of other Slavs… and especially of Slovak… (Redakce Naší Ĝeþi 1921: 307) be written consistently where it was pronounced. This had already been implemented for a few words, but now they wanted to extend its remit to all foreign words where [z] was the standard realization of <s>.146 This suggestion, however, finally did not form part of the 1922 reform. The effect of the reform, then, was to resolve one major discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation while creating another. The 1922 Rules undertook to fix vowel length for native words where possible and to undertake a gradual nativization of foreign words. Linguists like Zubatý and Gebauer, who were noted for their conservative, cautious approach to language reform,147 were open to reform of spelling. In some instances they even invented new forms, allowing them to crystallize general tendencies into iron-clad rules that would be easier to learn. The functionalists (see section 2) were critical of the early editions of the Rules and the seemingly arbitrary way that the Rules seemed to favour consistency of form over actual usage. Mathesius (1932: 18–22), the guiding founder of the Prague School (see section 2), dissected what he termed the principles of historical purity of the language (historická þistota jazyka) and strict regularity of linguistic features (pĜísná pravidelnost jazykových jevĤ) that underlay much work in language regulation at the time. The first to ; <x> to; some instances of <s> to ; many, but not all places where long vowels had been introduced; and many, but not all, replacements of double consonants by single consonants (Šmilauer 1943: 28–30). There is a political subtext to this debate as well. There was speculation that this deliberate insertion in the 1941 Rules was designed specifically to bring Czech spelling closer to German, although in any event the number and frequency of words affected was not significant. The primary stated goal of the 1941 Rules was “to lessen the difference between the written and spoken language, especially in quantity (length of vowels)” (Šmilauer 1943: 5). This covered a multitude of changes, including numerous tweaks to the declension and conjugation patterns of native words. Šmilauer’s 1943 brochure describing these changes runs itself to 51 pages of closely set type. As opposed to its somewhat more conservative spelling, its morphological information is decidedly innovative. It incorporated many forms that had previously been considered “non-standard”, but were by the same token not characteristic of any one particular dialect area.158 3. 1945–1957: The first years of communism The resurrection of independent Czechoslovakia after the Second World War and the communist coup soon after brought significant changes to Czech linguistics and language planning. The Czech Language Institute was founded, and with the coalescing of an authoritarian government in Prague and the establishment of a totalitarian state, the stage was set for a period of tight control over the standard language.159 3.1. The Czech Language Institute The founding of the CLI in 1946 was a victory both for the vision of a single, central language authority and, more specifically, for the branch of functionalism favouring a top-down approach to language cultivation. The new institute was part of the Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences (ýeská akademie vČd a umČní),160 and incorporated the old Dictionary Office. The director of the old Dictionary Office, Alois Získal, was assigned to be “internal director”, while Havránek assumed the post of “academic coordinator”.161 instead of <s> like prezident, komunizmus, filozofie, univerzita, and gymnázium, it was Václav Kopeþný, the foremost communist ideologue and propagandist of the era, who blocked this development and insisted that these words were too noble to be spelled with .178 Paradoxically, then, the use of socialist rhetoric to push through orthographic change seems to have been an end-run around the Communist Party, rather than an attempt to appease it. By out-communisting the communists, the reformers were able to implement a set of changes that had only lukewarm reception within the Party itself. Æ <e, é> Æ still optional for a few words Æ everyday vocabulary: <s> Æ as pronounced abstract vocabulary: <s> Æ optional but recommended small no. of exceptions where <s> remains write long vowels where they are pronounced exception for [WÖ], still usually as prefixes and prepositions, and sporadic adjustments to vowel length in native Czech words. However, doublets for foreign words of the sort fyzika vs. fysika ‘physics’, organizace vs. organisace ‘organization’ took hold more slowly, with a large number of authors continuing to prefer the older optional forms with <s>. Marking vowel length in foreign words – which was not optional – was also controversial, not least because it affected a significant number of personal names of foreign origin (e.g. Ámos for original Amos, Emílie for original Emilie), and meant that the form people were now encouraged to use would not be the one on their birth certificates and identity documents (1960: 49–50). Most publishers switched over to using the new Rules in the course of 1958 and 1959, although the initial results reflected a certain confusion. KuchaĜ and Váhala also documented cases where the Rules were overzealously applied, with written for <s> in places where the Rules did not but synthese could be written with . The authors responded that these words were functionally different. One was in everyday use and the other was a highly specialized term. In other places, they said that as long as a word maintained a certain tinge of foreignness (nádech cizoty) it had to retain its foreign spelling. This is a functionalist perspective in that it focuses on actual usage in the here and now and the reasons behind it, regardless of whether or not that usage creates a system that seems consistent to learners and teachers. It is a reasonable point of view, but one that is hard to sell to the average person. The ordinary language user, after all, expects that if he gives up something familiar – his facility with systems he learned at school – he will be rewarded with something intrinsically better and easier, not just newer or more accurate in some abstract linguistic sense. We have seen that there is an aesthetic factor in spelling: the numerous cultural associations bound up in a word’s form, which influence the writer but also, and perhaps more importantly, the reader. To account for this aesthetic factor, functionalism developed lists of functions associated with different styles and varieties of the language. This was a reaction to the subjectivity of purism and its tendency to overstate the value of individual aesthetic responses. The reaction, however, came with its own dangers. The language varieties, and the functions assigned to these varieties, are not a priori categories, but functionalism often treated them as such, investing them with an objectivity that they lacked. The result was a prescription based on asserted objectivity. It often brought the functionalists into conflict with the country’s cultural elite, whose strong opinions about certain spellings often clashed with the functionalist interpretation. 5.5. Ideological debates Once regulation becomes a more consensual activity, we can look at the actors and affected as participants in an institutional negotiation or what Blommaert calls an ideological debate (see chapter 1, sections 5.1 and 5.5). We can identify at least one consistently prosperous ideology in the Czech context, which is the striving for the institutionalization of spelling in foreign words. This document places the authority of the CLI behind the Rules, and legitimizes the use of the Institute’s name in material relating to them.198 According to Tomáš NČmeþek (writing in Mladý svČt, 26 August 1994), the changes were first unleashed upon the wider public the week after the CLI’s council approved the draft. It mentions laconically that “the Institute informed scholars of the planned changes” on 6 April 1990. On 22 May 1990, the Writers’ Council (Obec spisovatelĤ)199 organized a meeting with the CLI to discuss possible reforms in orthography. In a “rather turbulent discussion” they took up the matter of capitalization. Orthography of foreign words was also discussed, as was subject-verb agreement in the past tense.200 The only resolution reached was that orthography should not be a “sword of Damocles” held over the less literate, but that continuity and tradition needed to be respected (Lidové noviny, 7 June 1990). This platitude hides a stalemate; the first part is from the CLI’s rationale for proposing a reform, while the second represents the conservative position that changes have by and large a negative effect. If the discussion could get no further than this, then it had not gotten very far at all. 2.1. Final dissemination and consultation, 1991–1992 The commission then undertook a further consultation, which was to be far more extensive than the 1988 white book. They drew up a booklet called Co pĜinášejí nová Pravidla? ‘What Do the New Rules Bring?’ Published by Teachers’ Union Press (Uþitelská unie), it had a press run of 2000, of which, according to Martincová (personal interview), about 1000 were eventually sent out. The booklet contained an outline of the proposed changes, as well as essays by Kraus, Hlavsa, and Martincová on the history and principles of orthographic reform in Czech. These essays attempted to set the reform in context and to help readers understand its fundamental principles and motivations. It also included a 5-page questionnaire focusing on orthography, which readers were requested to fill out and return to the CLI. The questionnaire begins with an encouraging statement: Dear Reader, The staff of the Czech Language Institute would like to request you to take part in a survey. We believe it is important to ascertain the public’s opin-. PlzeĖský deník coyly reported that ýTK had taken the same decision as them, while Hradecké noviny admitted a few days later on 16 August that ýTK’s decision had influenced theirs. Despite resolving the issue of the Addendum, the Ministry and the CLI continued to be at odds over the next steps. Reports varied from paper to paper. Veþerník Praha and Moravský demokratický deník reported that the Ministry was calling for the CLI to rewrite the dictionary section of future editions of the Rules to conform with the Addendum (12 August and 9 August 1994). ZN noviny reported that the CLI said they did not have the personnel to conduct a large-scale revision of this sort (13 August 1994). Rudé právo reported that the Ministry believed a thorough revision was advisable and intended to negotiate the terms of it, while the Institute said that it was impossible and that no agreement on it had been reached (12 August 1994). It is understandable why the Ministry wanted such a revision. It would have simplified use of the Rules and greatly reduced the possibility of misinterpretation or contradictions between the dictionary part of the Rules and the Addendum. It is also understandable why the Institute demurred. Multiple revisions were needed on every page of the Rules, meaning a complete overhaul of all the typeset versions. There were also philosophical objections to it, some of which were sketched by Kraus (personal interview): I had always shied away from lexicalizing the Addendum. I only wanted general rules with a few examples; I definitely didn’t want to stretch as far as having every word in the Addendum and showing whether it could be written this way or that. I really think that each word is different. Each communicative environment is different, each person is different. For a chemist it is probably more important than for computer specialists, for whom it’s all the same whether we write chip or þip; it would never occur to them [to ask]. had. For univerzita, the new spelling with was dominant, with only occasional examples of the old spelling with <s>. The situation is different with vowel length, where the new spellings with short vowels took root much more quickly. These spellings are, of course, not really new; they represent a return to the pre-1957 status quo, and are thus less politically tainted than the new spellings with . Interestingly enough, these papers seem to have failed to impose a uniform spelling guide for these words. Even in places where the Rules discourage the pre-1993 variant, we still find it in a substantial minority of examples. Newspapers clearly are not enforcing consistently the use of a uniform style. The Czech press makes use of various sources (such as the Czech Press Agency ýeská tisková kanceláĜ), each of which have their own style guides. Sometimes the press neglects to adapt the texts to their own instead of ]. Concurrently I propose that Standard Czech immediately include the [Cyrillic letters] hard and soft jer, this so as to honour the language of [Czech national patron] St. Wenceslas.259 and ) that he hoped would one day come. 4.2. Public views of educational effectiveness While descriptions of the public tended to be used in the service of arguments against reform, other actors actively promoted reform. A strangely practical defence of orthographic reform came from several teachers and educational experts. Citing the continual erosion of the number of classroom hours devoted to Czech and the ever-growing deficit of qualified Czech teachers, they said that it was necessary to reduce the number of replacing <s> The replacement of <s> with in foreign words drew the most barbed criticism. Some critics used it as an example of how change simply alienates people from the roots and origins of words, and professed a global dislike for the change. Others were more selective in their criticism. The reforms affected a variety of words of differing styles, familiarity and pronunciation, and it was easy to fixate on a single decision to criticize. The ideology behind these criticisms was one of degeneracy and decline in were often emotional ones: We opened our new edition of the Rules of Czech Orthography and immediately our hearts began to race. But no longer did our old familiar puls quicken; in its place was a repulsive, buzzing pulz.270, the new Rules effectively codified a pronunciation explicitly discouraged in previous editions of the Rules. This was the case with words like diskuse/diskuze, režisér/režizér. Objectors often saw this as the thin end of the wedge: once this is permitted, they said, the next step will be demogracie for demokracie (the former representing what is still a stigmatized pronunciation) and so forth. This in their eyes discredited the entire effort, even although a majority of changes concerned words where /z/ had long been the only acceptable pronunciation.272 The words president/prezident, filosofie/filozofie, and universita/ univerzita were mentioned frequently. The spellings with had actually been sneaked in under the previous edition in 1983, but it was only with the 1993 edition that the <s> spelling disappeared from the Rules entirely (it was reinstated in the Addendum in 1994). The fact that these words represent exalted concepts made them a lightning rod for criticism. Writers often contrasted the loftiness of the concepts with the vulgarity of the spelling, and cited this discrepancy between form and meaning as a reason for retaining the old orthography. 1.2. Worries about Easternization vs. Westernisation Many correspondents said the use of represented a break with Western European languages, and followed a Russian or Slovak model. Russian does use the Cyrillic letter <ɡ> (pronounced /z/) in some borrowings in place of original <s>,273 thus ɦɚɪɤɫɢɡɦ ‘Marxism’, ɩɪɟɡɢɞɟɧɬ ‘president’. However, Russian has often borrowed the same words that Czech has, and in many of them Russian retains or reinstates the original <s> or <ss>, written in Cyrillic <ɫ> or and pronounced [s] or [ss] in all varieties of the language. Examples are: ɭɧɢɜɟɪɫɢɬɟɬ ‘university’, ɤɭɪɫ ‘course’, ɞɢɫɤɭɫɫɢɹ ‘discussion’, ɮɢɥɨɫɨɮɢɹ ‘philosophy’.274 The principle of consistently rendering Latin and Greek words according to their pronunciation is more firmly established in Russian than in Czech, but the Czechs cannot be accused of slavishly imitating Russian spelling. In many specific examples, the new Czech spelling with actually distanced it from the Russian one.275 Those who argued that was being imported from Slovak had more ground to stand on. Slovak has long used in exactly the places where it was introduced in 1993 in Czech.276 The idea that the Czechs had copied this idea from their neighbours was not simply a paranoid fantasy. During the communist era, linguists consistently attempted to bring the Czechoslovak state’s two official written codes closer together in their written forms. Šmilauer wrote in 1950: …we must make an effort to see that Czech and Slovak orthography do not distance themselves needlessly from each other through the reform process. For every reform of Slovak orthography we should ask ourselves whether we could and should do something similar in Czech. (1950b: 37) with were found in Czech in the 1920s; it was not originally a communist-era invention.277 Once again, linguists had successfully adapted totalitarian ideology to serve what they believed was a greater non-political linguistic good. Even in the communist era, the idea that Czech should take its lead from Slovak was bound to raise hackles among the Czech intelligentsia. The Czechs have often defined themselves in contrast to their Slovak neighbours. In their own view, they have a longer cultural tradition, whereas Slovakia was a poorer, agrarian nation whose achievements in high culture were recent and limited (see Holy 1996 for a dissection of this view). It was easy for opponents of spelling reform to equate the more modest achievements of Slovak literature and written culture with its spelling system. In their view, the primary excuse for harmonizing Czech and Slovak spelling had been the existence of a common state, which was now defunct. Slovak and Russian were only two of the most obvious symbols for Eastern Europe that many Czechs strenuously rejected in the early postcommunist years. While the idea of making commonalities with the East bothered some Czechs, others were more worried by the implications of giving up commonalities with the West, even if they were as apparently insignificant as a shared (or, in most cases, an only partially shared) spelling. In the minds of many, the traditional spelling with <s> was associated with Western European languages: German, French, English, and Latin. Retaining the spelling with <s> symbolized the Czechs’ affinity for the humanistic tradition of the West, and affirmed their traditional affiliation to Western education, society, and ways of thought. It showed that they respect (the Czech word is a borrowing, with the same double meaning as in English: obey and value) the source word.278 in borrowed words with the crude, politicized, utilitarian perspective of communism. Was a society’s belief in democracy and justice embodied in whether it used <s> or in a handful of words? The idea was on the face of it ridiculous, but, as we have seen, it had a historical kernel of truth. 1.3. Linguistics vs. common sense Many members of the public refused to deal with the linguistic issues of orthography on any level other than “simple common sense”. Common sense meant, in most instances, an individual’s particular language “instinct” – which was what the functionalists had originally been trying to get away from. These correspondents contrasted their own “common sense” points with the intricacies of the linguists’ arguments. Their refusal to engage with the tools and terms of the linguistic trade testified to their skepticism at the validity of a linguistic approach. Many Czechs did not distinguish between the spelling system of a language and the language itself – its grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. One correspondent, for example, began as follows: My letter will concern your battle against the new rules of the Czech language.283 on the basis that we hear [s] in the citation form is, on linguistic grounds at least, spurious.286 However, it was also possible to overstate the importance of linguistic function. Chemistry and mathematics teacher JiĜí VídeĖský wrote to ýeský deník (25 June 1993) to complain is that the homographs created by spelling reform lead to serious and inevitable misunderstandings. He cited ex- and : Amoniak je zdravý škodlivý. ‘Ammoniac is healthy harmful.’ PĜi vulkanizaci kauþuku se používá sýra. ‘In the vulcanization of India rubber, some cheese is used.’ when the final consonant of the prefix is voiced; otherwise write . The anonymous letter-writer wanted a single, consistent spelling of the prefix , as happens with native prefixes, regardless of pronunciation. A similar argument was made regarding the root /sof/ ~ /zof/ ‘wisdom’. Critics said it should always be spelled <sof> to reveal the common origin of the words derived from it (filosofie ‘philosophy’, sofistika ‘sophistry’). The linguist Petr Sgall objected to this, saying that at the basis of the Czech spelling system was a phonological principle that you spell it as you hear it. In native words, Czechs frequently spell the same root different ways; he brings to bear examples like dĤm ‘house (nom. sg.)’ vs. domu ‘house (gen. sg.)’, and pĜítel ‘friend (nom. sg.)’ vs. pĜátelé ‘friends (nom. pl.)’.290 There are valid language-planning arguments for both approaches. A consistent morphophonemic principle has its attractions. Against that one could argue that non-native prefixes and suffixes are less readily analysable to speakers, who tend to treat foreign borrowings as indivisible units. This belief argues for a more strictly phonetic approach. Other objectors contented themselves with listing individual words, as Bohumil Pick in Lidové noviny, 28 August 1993: It won’t just be a matter of correcting errors (anoxþní ‘anoxidant [for anoxidní]’, beta radiation repeatedly with the German letter ß instead of Greek ȕ, graphically incorrect highlighting of the entries nahlížet ‘take a view’, odedávna ‘since long ago’, zášĢ (and záští) ‘spite’, [sic]) so much as it will a thorough lexicological correction of the Orthographic Dictionary section: (1) If the forms [with CC phonology] polívka ‘soup’, polívat ‘pour’ (see the entry under polé-), opíkat ‘bake’ (see under opé-), símČ ‘seed’ (see sémČ), kvodlibet ‘academic dispute’ (see quodlibet) etc. are permitted, then it is necessary to list these forms consistently in the appropriate place in the Orthographic Dictionary (alphabetically), which has not happened. (2) The format of doublets (e.g. (e.g. dvaapĤl and dva a pĤl ‘two and a half’, beztvárný and beztvarý ‘shapeless’, francouzština and franština ‘French’, garance and garancie ‘guarantee’) must be uniform, so therefore e.g. the pairs rezavý and rezivý ‘rusty’, farizej and farizeus ‘Pharisee’, jeþmenný and jeþný ‘barley’, orchidea and orchidej ‘orchid’, osvobozenecký and osvobozenský ‘liberation’, vegetariánský and vegetáĜský ‘vegetarian’ etc. should likewise always form a single entry, only when necessary with an. For example, Šajtar, writing in Reflex, provided a list of issues thrown up by the way the Rules implement capitalization of street names, institutional names, and the transcription of East Asian and Slavonic languages. The oft-reviled <s> and did not rate a mention from him. Moving with the times, the new Rules listed words like orgazmus ‘orgasm’, pyj ‘penis’, prezervativ ‘condom’, vagina, sperma ‘sperm’ that had not appeared in previous versions. Several articles mention protests about the inclusion of these words in the school edition – were people not ashamed to admit that they looked for the naughty words first? – although others (such as Jaromír Slomek, writing on 11 May 1993 in Lidové noviny) had no problem with the “sexual (r)evolution conquering new territory”. Evidently, for some the exalted character of the “great Czech nation” and its language was profaned by the appearance of these words in norm-creating manuals. A special subcategory involving consistency concerns the Addendum. The Addendum made optional most of the systematic spelling changes found in the Rules and established a complex hierarchy of differences (see chapter 2, section 8). However, it was only a few pages long and had at best a partial list of examples; the changes it wrought were not instantiated in the dictionary section of the Rules, which remained unchanged from the original version. Some people simply threw up their hands at this latest Uturn: The Rules of 1958 permitted certain forms and alternates; the Rules of 1993 permitted other forms and doublets. The Addendum permits (in the part on words borrowed from other languages) basically both groups. The Addendum is a compromise of compromises. […] In Czech teachers’ slang you can sometimes hear instead of “doublet” the phrase “both are possible (obČ možné).” I think a new term might now come into use: “anything’s possible (všechno možné).”292 in foreign words: Dnes nastala rene…ance jízdních kol. ‘Today a renaissance of bicycles has come about.’ vs. or <s> vs. in native words: Plaval jsem s vypČtím sil, aby mČ vítr nestáhl do hlubin. ‘I swam with all my strength, so that the wind would not pull me into the depths.’331, even though at the time the only acceptable spelling was with <s>. Still, it is notable that the CLI bothered to conduct such an extensive test when so much of it fell outside the realm of the planned reform. What was the effect of using tests of this sort to direct spelling reform? Once again, the linguists made pure linguistic results the focus of their attention. There was no opportunity for students to reflect consciously on their own attitudes. As with the street vendors and unedited authors, conclusions leading to orthographic reform were drawn from the students’ actions rather than their beliefs. From a linguistic point of view, this is a valid way to achieve an objective analysis of the situation. From a language culture standpoint, however, it ignores the non-linguistic dimension of reform. Of the dissemination activities, Antonín Kostlán (personal interview) said the following: They took the teachers with them to those discussions, so that they’d make passionate speeches about how they’d wanted it to be just as the Czech Language Institute planned it. But that’s just showing off your own position. in -izmus words was given as one of two variants. This is not a definitive-looking resolution. It is more of a temporary compromise, an expedient way station on a longer journey of linguistic change and evolution. In a sense, then, the first edition of the new Rules was a society-wide “beta test”, a large-scale consultation ex post facto. The commission underestimated the public’s belief in the old Czech saying Co je psáno, to je dáno ‘What is written is a given’. Many members of the public had evidently expected the new manuals to resolve old problems without creating new ones. They dismissed excuses to the effect that no reform will satisfactorily eliminate all inconsistency and unclarity, and that the financial resources needed to achieve even incremental improvements on the solutions recorded in the 1993 Rules would have been immense. This fundamental clash of views led many members of the public to reject the new Rules as imperfect, and in part explains why the reaction to them was so hostile. for /ou/ were replaced respectively by and , Tomek refused to accept them, and until his death in 1905 he continued to use the old spellings, signing himself W. W. Tomek. In doing so, he became a famous symbol of refusal to “move with the times”. 4.3. Putting matters in historical context More than one correspondent took opponents of the reform to task for their short historical perspective. Orthographic rules had been under constant revision, they reminded the critics, and what people were objecting to was more often than not simply the fact that something was new. The “European cultural tradition” argument outlined in section 1.2 came under the most sustained attack. As many pointed out, these same writers objected only to the latest changes; they almost never called for a return to forms dropped in the 1957 or 1941 Rules: On the day when I planned to send this note off to the editors of TVAR, I read in Respekt no. 29 that the daily Telegraf “was ceasing to observe the rules of Czech orthography.” In for a penny, in for a pound – I advise Telegraf to have its editors write šplýchat, aesthetika, okeán and Žaponsko [instead of the modern forms šplíchat ‘splatter’, estetika ‘aesthetics’, oceán ‘ocean’, and Japonsko ‘Japan’].338, <j> and <ey> to <j>, <í> and <ej> (see chapter 3, sections 1.2 and 3.4): Where did the fall begin? With the use of diacritic accents instead of letter, , <í>, <ý> had represented four different phonemes, but by the nineteenth century these had converged to two based on the original vowel length: short /+and long /iÖ/. See Horálek (1992) on the historical phonology of Czech, or Townsend (1990) for a summary of its impact on contemporary phonology. [×] and [x] are said to be paired consonants, and in most respects they behave as such, except that they are respectively a laryngeal and a velar. Also, voiceless consonants do not assimilate to a following [v]. The alternative explanation – that the underlying consonant is voiceless, and it becomes voiced in intervocalic environments – is not very satisfactory, because there are also words like [N'V] ‘years, summers (gen. pl.)’ which alternate with forms with intervocalic [V]: [N'V'Z,N'V+,N'VWÖO]‘years, summers (loc., instr., dat. pl.)’. This would mean that there were two consonants /t/, identical in sound, one of which was realized as [d] outside final position, and one of which was realized as [t] outside final position. There are other examples of the regular correspondences between voiced and voiceless consonants, such as regressive assimilation within clusters, making this a regular feature of Czech. Some scholars (Grygar-Rechziegel 1990; Micklesen 1978) have declared Czech to be a canonical case of diglossia, but it falls short in having far less differentiation between high and low varieties than do Ferguson’s test cases. Šonková’s corpus contains a relatively high occurrence of particles (14.6%) and conjunctions (11.9%), both of which tend to be lexically marked as belonging to the spoken sphere. Written texts have far fewer of these and so give less evidence of their status. The relationship between standard and non-standard forms of Czech has been a lively topic for centuries, and shows no sign of going away. Anyone wishing to read further in these areas could start with these basic articles: for a progressive perspective, ýermák and Sgall (1997), Chloupek (1969), Daneš (1979 or 1987), O. Hausenblaus (1993), or Kraus et al. (1981), while Palková (1989–1990) represents a more conservative view. For an outside perspective, Gammelgaard (1999) is a concise and intelligent summary. To see how Czechs viewed the issue in years gone by, readers can turn to Haller (1933) for a purist perspective, or Jakobson (1932) for the Prague School version. Some native speakers will insist that they pronounce /s/ in these words. In most instances, they do not in fact do so. This self-deception is an interesting phenomenon, and we will return to it in later chapters. German also tends to lengthen these vowels in borrowed words (Sgall, personal communication). A comprehensive look at the debates surrounding and in the 1960s reflects a frequent tendency in Czech for borrowings in <–ing>, which according to standard Czech pronunciation rules have final devoicing in the nominative singular, to extend this devoicing to all other positions. A similar development can be found with words like trening (1941), now trénink ‘training’. There is some evidence that this trend is now reversing thanks to the influence of English (see Blatná [2000]). This was reported by both Alexandr Stich and ZdenČk Hlavsa in newspaper interviews (16 December 1993 in Lidové noviny and 30. January in ýeský deník). By “predesinential” I mean the syllable preceding the grammatical ending. In the citation form, this will often be the final syllable for masculine nouns (balon ‘balloon’), but will be the penultimate (sezona ‘season’) or antepenultimate (galerie) syllable for other nouns. Under the old spelling, which had remained possible under the 1957 and 1983 Rules, these would have been spelled: analysa, analysovat(i), thema, thematický. Czechs would have had to learn that the final vowel in the stem was often pronounced long for the basic noun and short for derived words. This is based on a survey of a short newspaper article of 311 words. A radical change where all were replaced by demanded 89 changes. A less radical change where were left after demanded only 32 changes. (In the same article, the 1993 reforms would not have required any and be simplified in favour of except after dental consonants, where the distinction is meaningful, and for a few individual words such as bít ‘hit’ vs. být ‘be’. 185. At http://www.cibulka.net/77/1987/INFORM7/03.htm, last accessed 19 June 2006, numerous typos corrected. 186. Further evidence is brought forward by teacher and textbook author Jarmila Ryšánková in a letter to Telegraf on 28 July 1993, in which she says that a document called “Rationalization of Czech Orthography” was brought to the Ministry of Education under the patronage of the head of the orthography commission and the director of the CLI. This reform, planned for 1990, would supposedly have addressed all those found eventually in the 1993 reform, but would also have included the abolition of the letter <Ĥ> and sweeping simplifications to the problem of and . She does not list any sources for her information. 187. For here it will suffice to say that the academic edition was the “gold standard”; it had a larger dictionary and fuller information on unusual words. The school edition contained morphological information and was more widely used by the public. See section 7 below for a detailed explanation of the differences between the two editions. 188. The Czech name translates more informatively as “language advice office”, but the term “language service” is preferred by, for example, UhlíĜová (1997) in conformity with other similar bodies and is therefore used here. 189. At the sub-institutional level, the CLI’s grouping of departments has changed over the years, although the basic working groups have remained the same. For example, Petr (1981) divides the Institute as follows: Department of Grammar; Department of Lexicology and Lexicography; Department of Mathematical Linguistics and Phonetics; Department of Language Culture, Stylistics and Terminology; Department of Dialectology; Department of Onomastics; Department for the History of the Czech Language. 190. In an interview for this study, Kraus remarked that “some people were on the commission because it interested them; others were there as punishment.” and in verb endings, a matter of perennial debate. See chapter 2, section 5 for a discussion of this controversy. 201. These all came from the CLI’s clipping file. Had I been able to extend my newspaper survey back to 1990, others would undoubtedly have been found. 202. In at least one case, she reports, a group of particularly entrepreneurial teachers asked for a copy of her talk, and then printed and sold it for 10Kþ, or about US 30¢. When she learned of this and asked them why they had done it,, pronounced /s/, possibly under the influence of the German spelling, or the Latin spelling universitas. 275. A point made in Stich, “AĢ žije þeský furor orthographicus”, Literární noviny, 13 September 1990. 276. For a review of developments in the early 1990s in Slovak orthography, see Chloupek (1993) and Blanár (1999). 277. Interview with Ivana Svobodová in Lidové noviny, 1 July 1993. 278. See, for example, Petr Topiarz, writing in Literární noviny on 27 June 1994: “By this I merely mean to show that many European languages respect (respektují) this orthography.” 279. This article appeared in Lidové noviny on 13 August 1990, but it was by no means the last appearance of the Churchillian image: it crops up in a far more ingenious version three years later in JiĜí Marvan’s Literární noviny article of 21 January 1993: “…as if from Aš [in the west of the Czech Republic] to 
