Orð og tunga - 01.06.2016, Blaðsíða 124

114 Orð og tunga
quently to a system of marking the length of vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú, ů, ý)
as well as the palatalization of vowels and consonants (č, ď, ě, ň, ř, š,
ť, ž), which has infl uenced the spelling of numerous other languages.
2.2.2 The Austrian period
As Meyerstein (1973:43) points out, the period of humanism “undid
much of Hus’ eff orts. Czech writers, most notably Comenius (1592–
1670), did not only fail to avoid but oft en welcomed foreign words”.
In 1620, the Czech nobility lost a major batt le to the Habsburgs, and
protestant scholars had to leave the country (Nestupný & Nekvapil
2006:62). “Czech was used only in the countryside and among the
lower class” (Meyerstein 1973: 43). “Literature was limited to works
with religious or practical content. In the end, the language found
itself largely removed from schools, the sciences, the humanities,
law and administration. Norms of language suff ered” (Nestupný &
Nekvapil 2006:62). Even if Czech was
used, to a certain extent, in writt en documents within the ad-
ministrative domain […] nearly two centuries of this develop-
ment meant that writt en Czech diverged widely from the lan-
guage of the previous period; it was underdeveloped in many
respects and could not easily serve either as a national symbol
or as the tool of communication in a society aspiring to enter
the age of modernisation. The language of the nobility and
of many cities and towns was German, without reference to
whether the people concerned were of German or of Czech
origin. (Nestupný & Nekvapil 2006:63)
2.2.3 The national movement and its impact on Modern
Czech
At the end of the 18th century, the national movement slowly com-
menced. In the beginning, scholars selected Renaissance Czech as the
“national symbol” (particularly the language of the humanist Jan Bla-
hoslav and his followers, who had translated the Old Testament into
the Kralice Bible in 1588 (Meyerstein 1973:43)), which was not identi-
cal with the common language.
This act has had consequences up until the present day that are
also of importance for our main topic here, i.e. for the rendering of
foreign words. Between the Renaissance period and the late 18th cen-
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