Orð og tunga - 01.06.2016, Page 123
Marie Novotná: Adaptation of foreign words into Czech 113
Similar to many other continental languages, corpus planning has
traditionally been strongly developed at the governmental level, and
this feature keeps Czech at variance with English, where corpus plan-
ning has remained at the outskirts of public concern with language.
Contemporary Czech has been developing in contact with other Eu-
ropean languages, but although its vocabulary used to be infl uenced
by German, it has not been unilaterally dependent on German or any
other single language. Presently, Czech is not characterized by strong
purism (Neustupný & Nekvapil 2006:7).
2.2 An historical overview of the transcription and ren-
dering of foreign words in Czech
2.2.1 The Middle Ages
Meyerstein (1973:42) says that the “fi rst Slavic literary language was
the result of very careful planning. Orthodox missionary Methodius
(826–885) took the Macedonian dialect he knew, enriched its lexicon,
and endowed it with complicated sentence structure under the infl u-
ence of his native Greek. He also provided it with an orthography
which he devised on the basis of the small lett ers of the Greek alpha-
bet”. The second graphisation of Czech, which has prevailed until
now, was based on the Latin alphabet and was under Western infl u-
ence. As in other languages which were writt en down for the fi rst
time by Latin writing scholars, one of the fi rst problems to solve was
how to write Czech proper names in a Latin document.
The fi rst continuous texts in Czech date back to the 13th century
(Nestupný & Nekvapil 2006:61); their vocabulary contained both
words inherited from Old Church Slavic and loans from Latin, as
the switch to the Roman church and to Latin had not eliminated the
Old Church Slavic vocabulary, with religious terms prevailing in par-
ticular (cf. Meyerstein 1973:42). Towards the end of the 14th century,
“Czech was a stylistically highly elaborated language which had pen-
etrated to the domains of administration and ideology. Spelling was
relatively fi xed” (Nestupný & Nekvapil 2006:61).
The Czech tradition of language codifi cation goes back to the early
fi ft eenth-century tract De orthographia Bohemica, writt en by the reli-
gious reformer Jan Hus, who proposed replacing cluster spelling with
a diacritical system (Nestupný & Nekvapil 2006:62). This led subse-
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