Linguistic Authority, Language Ideology, and Metaphor: The Czech Orthography Wars 9783110197662, 9783110185966, 9783110188264

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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

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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

6

Orthographic reform and language planning

of travelling, and so forth – fall under spelling. Hyphenation at line breaks and writing words together or separately (timescale vs. time scale vs. timescale) also constitute part of spelling, broadly conceived. English capitalization is only considered a part of “spelling” for the names of months, cities, nationalities, languages, and so forth, which are invariably capitalized. Finer points, such as the capitalization of names of institutions vs. common nouns (e.g. the University vs. the university), tend not to be considered part of English “spelling”. Where to place commas and how to use a semi-colon almost certainly would not fall under the heading of spelling; English speakers typically call this punctuation. There are other questions that almost no English speaker would describe as “spelling” issues. Do we write octopuses or octopi, he dived or he dove, passers-by or passer-bys, and ain’t or isn’t? In some languages, however, the scope of spelling or orthography is greater than in English. The Czechs have traditionally considered comma placement and capitalization in all its aspects to be integral parts of what they call pravopis ‘orthography’; this is true for linguists and non-linguists alike. Orthography, then, covers both spelling and punctuation in this community; it concerns the use and display of the entire set of symbols approved for the standard language, even when many of those symbols have primarily a grammatical, rather than a purely lexical function. The public may go even further in this direction than the linguists. The most popular Czech spelling manuals contain grammatical information (plurals, case forms, conjugations), and the public labels this sort of information “orthography” as well. In Norway, the public generally considers questions of which words belong to which standard as an “orthographic” matter, although a language planner might see it primarily as an issue of language norms.6 In the mind of the average citizen, then, orthography often comes to represent the entire sphere of “correctness in writing” – for example, everything they need to know to write a minimally literate letter (see Figure 1). This definition is goal-oriented rather than taxonomical, but there is no reason to regard it as less valid for that reason alone. Typically we think of a reform as consisting of a series of proposed changes, often linked by one or more consistent rationales and principles; instances where, for example, a few words unobtrusively gain an alternative spelling in a dictionary might not qualify as a reform. Inherent in the concept is a substantial effort to justify the changes based on linguistic or social principles and to convince the public of their utility or necessity.

Terminology

7

Even with these parameters, the label of “reform” is partially in the eye of the beholder. For example, the script reforms carried out in Azeri three times in the last century involved replacing the Arabic script with a Latin one, then Latin by Cyrillic, and finally re-Latinization in the 1990s (Bayatly 1997). Compare this to the Russian reforms proposed in the 1960s and the late 1990s, where the major questions involved the spelling of compound words – relatively infrequent in Russian compared to, say, German – and rules for writing doubled consonants (see, e.g., Avanesov 1974). “correctness” grammar lexicon

punctuation

public perception

spelling capitalization orthography

Figure 1. Spelling and its place in a scheme of “correctness”

What is gained by giving these disparate efforts the same label? First, we can see commonalities in the pronouncements of the responsible parties, who in the case of the Russian situation harked explicitly back to more major reforms and portrayed their work as a necessary exercise in standardization. By placing themselves in that tradition, they appropriated the label of reformers. Second, the public reaction to these proposals in Russia shows that they were not perceived as minor corrections, but as a programmatic interference in the look and feel of standard Russian. Reform, of course, implies that what is being carried out is a change or improvement to an existing norm, which is itself an ideological position. Issues that come to the fore in reforms are, naturally, not only the adequacy of the proposed changes, but also the adequacy of the current system. The

8

Orthographic reform and language planning

push for reform implies that the current state of affairs is inadequate to the needs of language users. Spelling reform thus has an extra set of tasks beyond simply mapping the extent of proposed changes and justifying them. Despite their potential ideological content, I will nonetheless continue to use the terms reform, reformer for language planners in this book. 3. Components of spelling reform What should a study of spelling reform encompass? Cooper (1989: 88) proposes the following “accounting scheme for the study of language planning”, based on models of innovation management, marketing, and power maintenance: What actors attempt to influence what behaviours of which people: for what ends, under what conditions, by what means, through what decisionmaking process, with what effect?7

This scheme is useful in outlining the different contributors to the process of spelling reform, although we will need to look elsewhere for more detailed descriptions of the particular areas it takes in. The actors in spelling reform represent various individuals and institutions; returning to a language planning perspective, Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 6) classify them as government agencies, education agencies, nonor quasi-government organizations and other organizations. In practice, the rationale behind these groupings is not always evident for a given language, nor is it always possible to assign an actor to one or another group.8 There is no single way to define the term “quasi-governmental”, which covers a variety of approaches and structures. For example, the Norwegian Language Council is composed of representatives of various interest groups (schools, universities, the press, other media, private interest groups), but has tasks defined under Norwegian law (Bull 1993: 26).9 France has at least three bodies charged under law with the maintenance and regulation of various (overlapping) aspects of the language: the Académie française, the Conseil supérieur de la langue française, and the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France. The Academy is the body legally responsible for the defence and preservation of the French language and specifically its spelling, and its members are nominated by the head of state; yet they do not constitute a state agency as such, and are chosen from the ranks of writers and other leading cultural figures. This pattern is

Components of spelling reform

9

replicated in the other bodies as well.10 The term “quasi-governmental” does not really help us to understand which aspects of it seem more like a government agency, and which aspects make it more like a nongovernment organization. In Europe, the number of such hybrids is quite high; governments seem anxious to regulate language policy, but are happiest to have outside specialists in charge of the details of corpus planning, and cope with this through a variety of legislative strategies. Terminological commissions are a covert source of spelling regulation. Typically composed of members of a particular profession and representatives of an official language body or commission, their primary mission is to standardize the set of words used in a particular field. However, when this consists largely of foreign borrowings and derivatives of them, the issue becomes one of spelling. These commissions sometimes have a political or ideological origin. An excellent example of this is the recent dramatic increase in activity on the part of Estonia’s Place Names Board, which has been charged under law in the newly independent republic with establishing Estonian-language place names.11 Its primary rationale is to widen the functionality of Estonian vis-à-vis Russian, as the former had in many instances lacked standardized terms and names for foreign and even occasional domestic place names. 3.1. Behaviours In the most basic view of spelling reform, “behaviour” refers to the act of writing. In practice, most orthographic reforms do not strive to change all writing at once. Typically, they are limited to a particular sphere of endeavour. The Uzbek script reform of the 1990s was applied first to certain obvious symbols, such as street names and government documents, and then extended to the earliest grades of primary school, with the intention of eventually rolling it out through the entire educational system (Schlyter 1998: 161–166). Reforms in Norway and other Scandinavian countries have traditionally been made binding on civil servants as well as schools.12 The primary work of language regulation in Estonia in recent years has been the standardization of Estonian-style place names for locales that previously only had names in Russian. This again has an impact primarily on those who write these names in official or public contexts, but also on those who repeat them in the broadcast media; fines are to be levied for the use of non-Estonian names (see http://www.eki.ee).

10

Orthographic reform and language planning

Not all participants in a reform agree on what behaviours are to be reformed. There may be attempts to give the reforms legal status, which may, as in the German case, be quite explicit. However, this does not mean that the right to do so is cut and dried. As Sally Johnson shows, the attempt to enshrine the reforms in law can founder either through challenges to their overall legal basis or to their applicability. In the German orthography debates of the 1990s, opponents brought suits on a variety of counts. Some challenged the laws that gave the federal government the right to conduct such business at all. Others attempted to limit the obligations of various parties to introduce and enforce use of the reformed spellings. Court cases revolved around the rights of physical and corporate persons to learn and conduct transactions using the older, now unsanctioned norms (see Sally Johnson 2002, 2005: 87–148). The German reforms were meant to be rolled out to all forms of public written discourse. In other cases, reforms have had more of a force of recommendation. But even there, members of the public frequently take a more drastic view of these reforms, behaving as if the state is going to start monitoring their personal correspondence to ensure compliance with new spelling rules. Words like “required” have a range of meanings that frequently leaves the public scratching its collective head as to what responsibilities and sanctions apply to the ordinary citizen writing in one of his various capacities – for instance, as employee, petitioner, and private individual. We will have ample opportunity to observe this clash in the debate on Czech orthography.

3.2. People affected Spelling reform affects the members of a language community in a variety of ways. Any reform will offer certain benefits and impose certain costs. Certain segments of society stand to reap more benefits than they incur costs; for others, the balance tips in the opposite direction. Reforms thus have a target audience and other affected audiences. Paradoxically, those who are not yet literate are most easily seen as the beneficiaries. They will reap the proposed benefits without the costs of having to re-learn, re-orient, or re-do. The reform may carry positive benefits for others, although their opportunity costs will be higher. If planners could somehow use this information to predict response to a

Components of spelling reform

11

proposed reform, then it would be useful indeed. The problem is that anticipated benefits and costs may not be good predictors of whether or not people want a spelling reform. Those for whom it should not be a matter of much concern because they only write in a private capacity (e.g. personal letters or e-mails), or only consume written material passively, may nonetheless have very strong opinions. Conversely, those who will suffer major upheaval in their working practices (copy editors, for example) may favour the reforms. Group allegiance does thus contribute to how people respond to spelling reform, although its results are not necessarily predictable using a cost–benefit analysis. The discussion in chapters 6 through 8 aims to further our understanding of this conundrum. As Cooper points out, planning can be targeted at individuals or organizations. We will see later that the decision-making process can treat organizations as perfect representatives of the individuals who comprise them, but just because a union, trade journal or professional association is involved and approves a reform does not mean its rank and file will fall into line. The assent of major journalistic and educational associations is no guarantee that individual people and enterprises will accept a spelling reform, and as we will see below in the case studies, people’s reactions seem to be largely determined by cultural-specific, non-linguistic factors.13 Later in this study, we will provide a scheme for classifying both actors and those affected based on the Czech context (see chapter 6, section 1). 3.3. Ends Cooper (1989: 90–91,98) asks us to consider overt and latent ends. Overt ends are those closely tied to linguistic behaviour; latent ends are those non-linguistic behaviours influenced by the reform. This facet of language planning has been worked out in greater detail by Ager and Fishman, and is treated below in section 4. The most overt ends in a spelling reform are simply the set of alterations that planners want people to take on board, but we cannot learn much by looking at these alone. By and large, any spelling reform seeks to alter attitudes and overall practices, rather than merely gaining acceptance for a set of arbitrary rules divorced from a system or social context. A series of detailed changes to spelling could in fact represent an etymologizing reform, which reinforces the continuity of the language with an earlier variety or language, possibly also adding prestige associated with these older

12

Orthographic reform and language planning

varieties; the failed proposals of the early 1990s to return Central Asian languages to the Arabic script are a case in point. A phoneticizing reform might aim to make the language more accessible to a wider variety of users, both in its ease of production and ease of reception. Many reforms will not shove a writing system radically in either direction, but reflect a gradual but perceptible shift towards one or the other attitude. The reform of the Russian script in the early eighteenth century shows how reforming the visual identity of a language can form part of a larger social programme. When Peter the Great ascended the throne, the fonts used in printing were for the most part a stylized representation of Russian handwriting. Peter commissioned a new printed style of letter that was more similar to French and English models, which came to be called the civil font (ɝɪɚɠɞɚɧɫɤɢɣ ɲɪɢɮɬ). Along with a change in the look of the letters came spelling changes, prompted by the proposed elimination of more than a dozen letters. Some of the letters slated for elimination were already moribund by the beginning of the eighteenth century (for example, those marking nasal vowels) but others were very much in use. Peter also decreed that the profusion of accent marks being used over words in imitation of Greek should cease completely. Nearly all of these changes reflected Peter’s strong bias towards things western and Latin. Wherever there were two letters, one with more of a Greek look and one more Latin, Peter’s proposed reform favoured the more western-looking variant ( instead of , for instance, or instead of ).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

Components of spelling reform

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authoritative source of information. In essence, spelling reform can reinforce a societal trend in which the public looks to the agency for expert guidance and direction.16 Undertaking spelling reform also ties a linguistics institute more closely into channels of power at whatever level of government is involved in the reforms. In a democratic society, this may entail a commitment to mild nationalist ends, as in France, or to more extreme ones, as in Latvia, where language laws are actually enforced and a “language police” operates to assess people’s competence and the purity of their language use.17 3.4. Conditions: A case study Conditions represent the background to a reform. Cooper (1989: 93–96), basing his classification on that of the political scientists, Leichter and Alford, distinguishes environmental conditions, structural conditions, cultural conditions, situational conditions, and informational conditions. Environmental conditions are influences from outside the system. Structural conditions consider the type of political system and economic model, as well as demographic data. Clearly distinguished from this are cultural conditions, which explore the “openness” of the regime and the populace to language manipulation. Situational conditions are essentially current events: what is happening at the time. Informational conditions are concerned with the data available in the service of informed policy-making. The Azeri language presents a wealth of data on which we can exemplify these conditions. Along with other Central Asian languages of the former Soviet Union, Azeri has undergone frequent and radical changes to its orthography over the last hundred years, involving moves between the Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic scripts. The environmental conditions of Azeri partially explain the pressures for script reform. It is the majority language of Azerbaijan, which lies south of the Caucasus Mountains, bordering Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Turkey, and the Caspian Sea. A former republic of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan became an independent state in 1991. Its population of seven million is predominantly ethnic Azeris (six million), who speak a language closely related to Turkish. Significant minority populations include Armenians and Dagestani, as well as half a million Russians. While the first two groups are concentrated in the rural areas that they have historically populated, the Russians are predominantly urbanized and descend from

14

Orthographic reform and language planning

those who migrated to Azerbaijan during Russia and the Soviet Union’s 200-year rule of the area. The Azeri language is spoken more widely outside Azerbaijan than inside it. Dialectologists recognize two major dialect groups of Azeri: North and South, which are divided by the old Soviet/Iranian border. About 23 million speakers of South Azeri live in Iran. Despite southerners constituting an overwhelming majority of Azeri speakers, Standard Azeri is based on the language of the six million northerners, and very few southerners use it.18 This complex set of environmental conditions means that relations with Azerbaijan’s more powerful neighbours – Russia, Turkey, and Iran – have made their contributions to the country’s rich alphabet soup. With Azeri, reforms have thus been tied explicitly to nationalist, political goals that run alongside and sometimes intersect with practical concerns such as ease of learning, ease of technical production of texts, and ease for bilinguals. Russia is the pre-eminent power in the region and Russian the language of the former colonial power. The establishment of an Azeri Cyrillic writing system was, as we will see, a political decision taken primarily in Moscow, and Azerbaijan’s ties to other Soviet republics made knowledge of Russian a prerequisite for advancement. Even today, Russia is one of the country’s largest trading partners and Azerbaijan remains part of the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States, a successor organization composed of 12 of the former 15 Soviet republics. Turkish scholars and the Turkish government have been active in selling the benefits of Latin orthographies. In the 1990s, they provided experts and convened congresses and seminars to promote the use of Latin script across Central Asia. Latin script identifies Azeri conveniently with a closely related language that belongs to one of the Islamic world’s only democratic states. In practical terms, the Latin script is favoured for its internationality, and the fact that it eases the learning of both Turkish and West European languages. Ease of computer communication is also sometimes linked to the Latin script, although the Azeri alphabet contains enough special characters to make the display of Azeri texts problematic regardless.19 The fact that a majority of Azeri speakers live in Iran should have played a significant role in the choice of scripts for North Azeri, but Iranian language policies rendered it virtually a moot issue. Between 1925 and 1979 the Iranian regime suppressed the use of South Azeri as a standard language. Although traditionally South Azeri employed the Arabic script, it was by the end of the twentieth century so little used in writing that there was hardly any Azeri language culture there to take account of (Bahadori

Components of spelling reform

15

1993). In essence, the Iranian policy of promoting Farsi as the only national written language actually weakened calls for the North Azeris to return to the Arabic script. As far as structural conditions go, state intervention in Azeri, which was mirrored across Soviet Central Asia, shows how a language policy favouring reform arose at government level, with language commissions directly appointed by governing bodies.20 The first major script change came after Azerbaijani independence in 1920; a 1921 New Alphabet Committee, set up by the Soviet of Azerbaijani People’s Commissars, developed a new alphabet based on the Latin script to replace the previous Arabic script (Bahadori 1993). The new Latin script was adopted in 1923, but was not made mandatory until an order from Moscow in 1929.21 In 1939, the Latinization of writing systems that was occurring across Central Asia began to raise concerns in the Soviet government. Orders came down from Moscow to force the adoption of Cyrillic. Azeri texts on the subject repeatedly attribute the decision to Stalin himself.22 In the years leading up to Azerbaijani independence in 1991, Azeri intellectuals began to advocate a return to either the Arabic or Latin alphabets (Bahadori 1993). In May 1990, a commission was established by the Supreme Soviet of Azerbaijan to work out a plan for (re-)Latinization. Only three months after independence in 1991, the National Council of the Republic of Azerbaijan approved the plan and decreed a gradual process of Latinization to be in effect, a process to be completed over the next two years. It is telling that, even after the parliament passed a law bringing the new Latin orthography into force, a commission was still tinkering with it and adjusting it (Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2001: 131–132).23 In 2001, matters moved a step further, when Azerbaijani president Haidar Aliev issued a decree entitled “On Improving the Usage of the State Language”.24 The decree declares that the “current positive conditions allow for the removal of the consequences of unjust relations, persecution and falsifications perpetrated at various points in history with regard to our national language.”25 It sets out a number of orders to various ministries to ensure that Azeri is used in more official contexts and that the replacement of Cyrillic with Latin script is speeded up. Among these measures were “securing the transfer of all Azeri-language publication to the Latin orthography” within ten weeks,26 an order which has not yet been realized.27 Structural conditions need not only be political in nature. In favour of Cyrillic is the fact that the preponderance of books produced in Azeri use

16

Orthographic reform and language planning

that script. Vastly improved literacy rates during Soviet times meant that books published in Cyrillic greatly outnumbered those that predated the script’s introduction. With the implosion of Azerbaijan’s economy in the early 1990s, from which it is only now starting to recover, there was absolutely no possibility of retooling presses, let alone of republishing what already existed in Cyrillic. The way the reforms have been implemented was chaotic and squandered public good will. The journal Azerbaijan International conducted interviews in 2001 with Azerbaijanis from every walk of life, and found widespread disenchantment. A television presenter resented having to read in Latin script off a teleprompter, saying it slowed him down; a librarian worried that over time everything published and catalogued in the Soviet era would be inaccessible to younger readers. Several people complained about the poor quality of the first-generation textbooks published in the Latin orthography; a student bemoaned the fact that Azeri Latin books were scarce, colourless, and boring compared to those available in Turkish, and an older computer scientist made the same claim with regard to Russian. The government’s failure to quickly establish computer standards for the new alphabet was castigated, as it made for chaos on the Internet.28 Among the less-educated, there was worry that they would be unable to adapt themselves, or to help their children with schoolwork. A BBC report of August 2001 gave much the same picture.29 As far as cultural conditions for reform go, these subsume some of what we will later consider under ideology: the existence of “attitudes and values held by groups within the community or by the community as a whole” (Cooper 1989: 94). The North Azeri language community has seemed receptive to the notion of script reform over the last 15 years. In this respect, Azerbaijan bucks the trend seen elsewhere in Europe against radical changes. Support for the process of Latinization overall seems to be high, while opposition focuses on the desultory way it has been implemented. Scholars and journalists alike have documented the public’s enthusiasm for the concept of script reform (see Landau and KellnerHeinkele 2001: 130–131; Khalilova 2001), much of which is connected with Azeris’ feeling that Latinization marks out their language as special, worthy, or dignified. Other cultural conditions in modern Azeri society have favoured the reintroduction of the Latin and Arabic scripts and disadvantaged the Cyrillic script. The close genetic relationship between Azeri and Turkish has traditionally been a significant component of Azeri identity. Indeed Azeri

Components of spelling reform

17

was first identified as a separate language in the mid-1930s in one of Stalin’s decrees; up until then, it had simply been described as a variety of Turkish. A similar line was stressed in 1992–1993 in the first flush of postindependence enthusiasm for the Latin script (Landau and KellnerHeinkele 2001: 151–152).30 Latin script identifies Azeri conveniently with a closely related language of the Islamic world’s only democratic states. The Arabic script is linked to Islam, and this historic tie has seen some in the Azeri literati call for its restoration. For this very reason, however, the state’s powerful ex-communist political leaders have been leery of it, seeing the resurgence of Islam and the allied possibility of a politically and socially powerful clergy as a threat to their rule. The Latin script provides a compromise: it breaks with the Soviet past, and hints at a more Turkish (Westernizing, secular, democratic) model of behaviour. The secular governments of Haidar Aliev and his son and successor used the alphabet controversies to steer a politically prudent course amid the obstacles of post-Soviet times. Rejecting calls for a return to the Arabic script, they belatedly embraced Latinization as an affirmation of Azerbaijan’s distinct culture and identity. The Cyrillic script is associated with communism and the Soviet Union’s pseudo-internationalism, in which some nations were more equal than others. Despite the many situational, environmental and structural conditions favouring the retention of Cyrillic script, the way it was imposed on the Azeri language has become emblematic of Azeri’s second-class stature vis-à-vis Russian, and thereby of Azerbaijan’s position as a Russian client state. Informational conditions seem not to have played a large part in the Azeri script reform. Documents on the reform make no reference to studies of the financial costs and practical implications of the reform. Instead, policy seems to have been made on the basis of emotional, cultural and political appeals. The lack of such studies is not surprising; Cooper notes that “although modern governments and other large organizations devote considerable resources to the gathering and evaluation of information, serious questions are often decided on the basis of relatively little good data” (1989: 95). 3.5. Notes on conditions The previous discussion might lead us to conclude that certain structural conditions entail other cultural ones, but this is patently not the case. A

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tightly controlled, totalitarian society may place a high value on national culture and yet reject spelling reform entirely, while a democratic society prizing the right to free speech may be quite accepting of repeated changes to its orthographic standards. Lithuanian had, under Soviet rule, an official language commission with wide-ranging powers beginning in 1970, but it never managed to officially sanction any spelling reforms at all; every proposed revision eventually foundered. It was not until independence and the establishment of a civil society that a flow of edicts standardizing spelling and other aspects of the language began to be implemented.31 French, the language of a country whose motto begins with “liberty”, provides for the regular manipulation of its orthography by law (amply documented in Ager 1999). The Czechs conducted one major reform of spelling in the communist era, as well as several minor revisions to it, while attempts at implementing spelling reform in Russian foundered several times in the same period. Simply because a totalitarian system offers the potential for easy manipulation of spelling does not mean it will be culturally acceptable, and “democratic values” can encompass the content of expression without rejecting regulation of the manner of expression. One environmental condition hinted at in the previous discussion was the ebb and flow of local and international languages. However, the dominant influence of English, which has such a considerable role in other language regulation debates, seems to have been sidelined in Azeri script reform. In other languages, the pace of borrowings from English has accelerated in recent years, outstripping previously prominent source languages like French and German. For languages in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in the former eastern bloc, the influx of English words has been accompanied by the sudden collapse in power and prestige of Russian, which was the dominant language of commerce, education, and industry in the region for much of the last century. The source of the loan words affects how they are rendered in a language; matters like whether the languages share a script, how closely the languages are related, and how numerous the loan words are can influence the spellings proposed. But other aesthetic factors can intervene as well, such as the esteem a particular environmental language commands among the population at large and among linguists. Further environmental conditions affecting language regulation, and spelling reform in particular, might involve particular educational or scholarly trends coming from outside the country and how they are received. For

Components of spelling reform

19

example, language planning in communist Czechoslovakia was influenced by the need to react to and rebut new views of the Czech language situation that were developed in the outside world, particularly in the United States, in order to show the adequacy and versatility of the domestic model. Informational conditions seem straightforward, but there is no easy way to gain consensus on what constitutes enough data to make a language planning decision. Typical methods would be undertaking a corpus planning study to outline “problematic” areas, and a status planning study, determining values and attitudes towards spelling change in society. One stumbling block is that sometimes the results of these studies conflict with public reaction after the fact, indicating that perhaps the informational conditions for reform were not as complete or reliable as the planners had supposed. We will see, for example, that when the Czechs undertook consultations to assist in the drafting of reforms, they framed them to include only certain key groups of actors, and asked for very limited sorts of feedback on particular words and phenomena. Informational conditions are thus easily constructed and manipulated, possibly unconsciously, to serve various ideological goals underlying a reform. 3.6. Means: Authority, legitimacy, and force Cooper lists authority and force as the two relevant means of disseminating language planning. In the former, the authority has an a priori acknowledgement of his right to rule, while in the latter, the privilege of decisionmaking is enforced through sanction and punishment. Authority rests on the legitimacy of the arbiter, which Cooper, following Weber, classifies as either rational (based on law), charismatic (based on a valued personal characteristic of the arbiter) or traditional (based on the worth of the tradition the arbiter upholds) (1989: 85). Writing as an act occurs with a variety of purposes and contexts that cannot easily be covered by a single means of dissemination. In order to create and embed themselves across the range of written endeavours, spelling reforms thus rely on a combination of force and authority based on various sorts of legitimacy. Even in countries like Germany and Norway, where adherence to spelling reforms becomes legally binding in the public sphere after a certain amount of time, there is still the murky area of private use of language. A civil servant or journalist may be obliged to observe a

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Orthographic reform and language planning

particular standard at work, but the language he uses in a personal letter or e-mail is not subject to these strictures. The personal sphere tends to be the subject of persuasion and promotion on the grounds of legitimacy. Russian spelling reforms in the modern era have used a variety of means to institute orthographic reform. Typically, traditional legitimacy has dictated the institutional basis for reform commissions, while charismatic legitimacy has dictated who is appointed to them. Force and authority deriving from rational legitimacy have then accompanied their implementation. Traditional legitimacy has come from the use of established institutions in Russia to constitute the reforms. The Academy of Sciences (first Imperial, then Soviet, now Russian) has traditionally been seen as the home for these reforms. It houses the Russian Language Institute, with which many of the nation’s most respected scholars are associated, and its imprimatur implies that the reforms have been vetted by the Russian scholarly establishment. The Russian commissions have tended to select scholars with the clout to win over other linguists. The first commission, established in 1904, was headed by noted linguist Filipp Fortunatov, and among its members counted such linguistic heavyweights as Aleksandr Shakhmatov and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. The second, established in 1929, included many of the leading lights of Russian linguistics, including Aleksandr Peshkovskii, Nikolai Durnovo, Sergei Obnorskii, and later on Sergei Ozhegov. The third, chaired by distinguished linguist Viktor Vinogradov, convened in 1963, a fourth under the chairmanship of Viktor Borkovskii, continued this work beginning in the early 1970s, and the fifth, under the chairmanship of Vladimir Lopatin, was formed in 1988 (Lopatin 2000). The Russian reforms acquire rational legitimacy when adopted by lawand policy-making bodies. The Academy of Sciences takes a view on them, as does the Ministry of Education. In the case of the 1917–1918 and 1956 reforms, the Council of People’s Commissars (ɋɨɜɧɚɪɤɨɦ), which was responsible for the implementation of policy and legislation through the commissariats, also approved the reforms, after scaling them back from the version recommended by the commissions.32 Force has accompanied authority in Russia as a means of implementing reform. In 1917, when the reforms eliminated the redundant letters , the commissars ordered the offending sorts to be seized from printers, thus forcing them to use the letters respectively (Shmelev 2002).

Components of spelling reform

21

Curiously enough, examples of force outside these clear examples are few and far between. A student writing an essay who fails to obey rules of orthography set down by his school may be marked down or fail. In general, though, as Shmelev (2002) notes, there is an assumption that occasional inadvertent infractions are not punished. Nonetheless, if a teacher refuses to teach the new orthography, or if an author refuses to implement it consciously, a different situation obtains. Normally it is resolved through the application of authority based on rational legitimacy: the teacher is overruled by a superior or the author by an editor. If this does not happen, there should clearly be sanctions, but the precise penalties are unclear. In a totalitarian system like that of Soviet Russia, though, they need not be spelled out explicitly. Outside the boundaries of the totalitarian state, the reforms remain unenforced and optional. In the Czech context, we will have occasion to see how tangled the various sources of authority can be. Language planning bodies tend not to have a free hand to implement whatever reforms strike them as appropriate. Instead, a system of approval operates, in which more prestigious and powerful bodies with clearer legal authority are asked to approve reforms, adding to the authority of the issuing body and increasing their legitimacy. 3.7. Decision-making process Hand in hand with the means used, we can look at the processes that an agency develops to formulate the problems it is trying to address, enumerate the goals of its reform, and arrive at the means it will employ to attain them. This is explicitly a rational decision-making model (Cooper 1989: 87–91) and does not account for non-rational incursions into language planning. Spelling reform commissions can be remarkably tight-mouthed about their decision-making process. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly the process of authority creation discussed above; excessive openness simply provides more entry points for critics to deconstruct their legitimacy. In all the cases discussed so far, the first product of a commission is an assessment of the current situation. The formation of the commission in and of itself presumes the existence of deficiencies, so it is rarely surprising when they are found. While an assessment of this sort is thus part of the rational model, its source may be the ideological belief that deficiencies are

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harmful to writing, literacy, culture, etc. and must be eliminated. Cooper notes that “the way one defines the problem influences the policy set out to deal with the problem” (1989: 92), and certainly in spelling reform, much is laid at the doorstep of complex writing systems: poor self-esteem, low literacy, excessive focus on form to the detriment of content, and so forth. The next step of drafting a programme is what Cooper terms the “production of possible solutions” and “choice of one solution” (1989: 91). The authors have to decide which of the criticisms can actually be dealt with in a spelling reform and how to treat them. Spelling reform often involves some element of public consultation, although interestingly enough, this often occurs towards the end of the process rather than towards the beginning. Consultation may thus be part of implementation and prediction of consequences, rather than part and parcel of establishing what the reform will consist of. As we will see in the Czech example, the decision-making process can be manipulated to achieve what reformers hope will be the most favourable outcome. Indeed, it would be strange if reformers did not approach their task strategically, attempting to gain consensus among themselves and in the political and educational power structures to maximize the chance that their reform will succeed. 3.8. Effect The big question mark at the end of this analysis is, of course, what actually happened in any given reform, as opposed to what was predicted. Sometimes spelling reforms take root quickly; others go off in directions completely unanticipated, like the Dutch reform of 1994, which was unexpectedly rejected by the Parliament (for a detailed discussion see Jacobs 1997), or the German reform, which ran into substantial opposition at the state level, in the courts, and in the press. An interesting example of an unexpected effect comes from Portuguese, which is regulated by separate commissions in Portugal and Brazil. These commissions at various points have attempted to negotiate accords that would standardize Portuguese across the Lusophone world, but have not succeeded in implementing these accords in any consistent fashion. Given the conflicting interests and priorities of its major players, Garcez (1995: 174) concludes that:

Components of spelling reform

23

…the case of corpus renovation discussed here is indicative of the extent to which language planning is a political and ideological practice rather than a purely (socio)linguistic enterprise. The Luso-Brazilian Orthographic Accord for the Lusophone Community and the debate around it exemplify both the complexity of the forces that operate in language planning and the lack of clarity among language experts and users regarding what the activity they are involved in is all about.

In the Russian case described in section 3.6, the reforms dragged out over many years. The 1904 commission did not issue its recommendations until 1912, and these were then first curtailed and then adopted only in 1917–1918 after the Soviets seized power. The 1929 commission’s brief to pro duce a single normative handbook was finally realized in 1956, with the publication of the Rules of Russian Orthography and Punctuation, also after some of its more radical proposals were rejected. The 1963 Russian commission was the first to see its recommendations rejected wholesale. Its brief was to introduce some changes affecting small numbers of words; probably the most substantial alterations concerned which vowel letters are written after particular consonants, and the reduction of geminate consonants in borrowed words. A further letter, the so-called “hard sign”, was to be eliminated completely.33 However, when the recommendations were published in 1964 in full in the national newspaper Izvestiia with an invitation for the public to discuss them, the populace duly filled the newspapers with invective, and the reform was quietly shelved.34 Lopatin (2000) assessed the entire affair as follows: It seems that despite all the purely scientific, linguistic validity of many of their proposals, the authors of this project lost sight of the inevitable sociocultural shock caused by the reaction to the breaking of a series of traditionally (historically) formed rules and writing principles, and the ingrained orthographic habits based on them. This extralinguistic socio-cultural factor looms far too large in matters of orthography.

Cooper’s guidelines do give a comprehensive picture of the factors that contribute to the creation of reforms. The reception of these reforms – if this is indeed what he means by effect – is another matter, and for this we will need to look outside the planning process.

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4. Motivations for language planning In recent years, focus has moved from the planning process to the assumptions underlying it. Ager (2001: 7–12) deconstructs Cooper’s “ends” (which he presents as motivation) into motives for language use and planning, attitudes to language and planning, and goals of language planning. It is a particularly useful scheme for studying spelling reform and the reactions to it. 4.1. Motives Ager’s motives fall into the categories of identity, ideology, image, insecurity, inequality, integration, and instrumentality. Identity subsumes positive constructs that tie a language to a culture or nation. Ideology represents the fusion of language policy with political or social philosophy; Ager’s definition thus differs from that used elsewhere in this book (see section 5). Image concerns how the rest of the world perceives the language and its community of speakers. Insecurity (in some ways the flip side of identity) focuses on the threats to a language community or to distinctive features of it. Inequality comes to the fore in attempts to redress perceived or actual imbalances between different groups (ethnic, economic, regional) within a language community. Instrumentality and integration primarily have to do with the ability of a language to satisfy communicative functions desired by its speakers and their desire or need to engage with a language community. Virtually all these points are raised in discussions of spelling reform. In modifying a spelling system, identity and insecurity can emerge in decisions taken by planners or by those reacting to plans, as we will see below. Ideology, as we will see in chapter 4, is a powerful force under totalitarian regimes, where most forms of publicly available cultural activity have to pass some sort of ideological litmus test at least pro forma; posttotalitarian societies suffer from a tendency to react to the previous ideology in unpredictable ways. On the one hand, previous association with a totalitarian government or ideology can serve as a blanket pretext for the public to reject any sort of language planning. On the other hand, reflexive subservience to authority can be an ingrained habit, allowing reform bodies to undertake an unprecedented degree of regulatory work without public complaint.

Motivations for language planning

25

Inequality is a powerful impetus for spelling reforms done under the banner of simplification. Attempts to reconcile the two varieties of Norwegian are rooted in the egalitarian wish to prevent users of the minority variety, Nynorsk, from being disadvantaged.35 In Russian, German and Czech, illogicalities and inconsistencies in the existing rules were linked (usually with no particular evidence thereof) to the goal of increasing literacy and inclusion into modern society. Ager discusses instrumentality and integration primarily with respect to non-native speakers in a community, but they also have resonance for smaller languages, whose functionality and usefulness are receding in certain areas (tourism, science, technology, commerce). There may be pressure to adapt the spelling systems of these languages because their speakers must function in global languages alongside their native ones. Examples are nearly all the national languages of Central and Eastern Europe.36 4.2. Attitudes Attitude includes knowledge about language (e.g. its structure, history, relationship with society, etc.), knowledge of the vitality of a language (its usefulness across various domains), and emotions towards language (whether particular varieties are liked or disliked). As an example of the latter, we can cite the example of André Bjerke, who in his 1959 Norwegian translation of My Fair Lady, added the following to the programme notes: “In Norway, we have the paradoxical situation that professor Higgins is being instructed by Eliza Doolittle on how he is supposed to write and speak his mother tongue correctly. In this country Eliza Doolittle is not in the gutter, selling wild blossoms; she is in the Language Commission, circulating language blemishes… [T]he most important written source I have used to establish the language form of Eliza’s speeches is ‘Proposal for a Textbook Norm 1957’” (Haugen 1966: 265). Attitudes, Ager says, do not in and of themselves indicate whether language planning will be successful. We also need to factor in the desire (or lack thereof) to take action regarding language. In other words, strong feelings and justifications may not be enough to overcome public apathy; it is one thing to feel a particular way, and another to actually take action over it. Attitudes about language in general contribute to spelling reform in particular because spelling is easily construed as the “appearance” or outward

26

Orthographic reform and language planning

manifestation of a standard code. The existence of an etymological principle in a spelling system, or any other frequently propounded principle for that matter, links the language’s history, or the relationship between its forms, to contemporary spelling conventions. Spelling is held to be a key component in rendering a standard more or less useful to the reading and writing public, a point that can manifest itself in the public’s reaction to spelling reform.

4.3. Goals Goals, according to Ager, can be precise, short-term targets, realizable and immediate objectives, and long-term ideals. A target of increasing a minority group’s literacy in its native standard might match an objective to affirm that group’s identity as a distinct community. However, Ager notes that targets, objectives and ideals may conflict with each other (2001: 142–143). For example, in the 1995 German reform, we can identify certain targets of simplifying complex rules or removing extraneous exceptions (see Augst 1999, 1997 and Augst and Schaeder 1998). However, in certain instances this conflicted with the objective of minimizing disruption to the visual form of the language as current language users know it.37

5. Introducing ideology To this point, we have concentrated on enumerating the components and processes that make up language planning. These models have sought to explain the workings of planning activities, or how they can proceed in optimal fashion. As was pointed out at several junctures, though, these schemes can assume a largely neutral backdrop to language planning, as if it occurred in a societal and philosophical void where proposals are developed and then judged on their merits for the system. In reality, proposals for spelling reform rest on a bed of prior assumptions and value judgements. Their reception by other members of the language elite and by the public at large does not seem to be predictable from the linguistic merits of the proposals.

Introducing ideology

27

5.1. Ideologies of language One school of thought sees the roots of language planning in non-linguistic socially-based views about language. These can best be described as constituting an ideology of language. In discussing the interaction between ideology and planning, Blommaert (1999a: 30) notes that most models of language planning begin from a particular presumption about how it works: The study of language planning (and policy) has been plagued by a number of theoretical defects (discussed by Williams 1992; see also Blommaert 1996), and one of them is certainly an idealization of the effectiveness of political decisions on social change. A linear model is often used, in which societal changes appear to be triggered by expert-backed (and expert institution-mediated) government decisions. Too little space is left for cultural and social resistance against such decisions, and the change-inducing effect of language is strongly overrated. Similarly, in the literature, developments in one country are rarely connected to larger-scale developments: issues of global capitalism and imperialism and the way in which language ideologies in peripheral countries get aligned with or subversive to dominant ideologies from central countries are rare in the literature…

Blommaert proposes the study of language ideology as a necessary corrective to “idealized” approaches. He recommends focusing on: the process of language planning itself; the role of language in nation-building; the use of language and symbolic power; the significance of language change; and the investigation of politics as a discursive/textual process (1999a: 30–31). Running through these discussions are issues of the quality of language: what its status is, how standardized it is, who owns it, and what the expert voices say about it (1999b: 431–434). This view treats ideology as both a static concept and a process. An ideology can be simply a “complex of ideas”, an “ism”, if you like. However, it is also “the political and social semiotic process of instilling ideas about society in the minds of members of that society”, and its diffusion strives to create hegemony for that ideology (Blommaert 1999c: 33). Although Blommaert specifically highlights the post-colonial dimension of ideology, with the emphasis on capitalism and imperialism, the notion of an ideological debate is not tied to any specific political outlook. Woolard (1998: 5–9), for example, offers four definitions of ideology as it is commonly used, in order of increasing specificity. Ideology can simply mean a position with respect to the nature of ideas. However, it can also mean a set of interests representative of the experience of a particular social

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Orthographic reform and language planning

position that are presented as universally true. Linking these interests specifically to positions of power gives her a third definition of ideology, and focusing on “distortion, illusion, error, mystification, or rationalization” provides the final definition. The first definition is not common in linguistic studies, while the other three are quite frequent. An example of the second definition is Watts’s discussion of the Swiss German “ideology of dialect”, which he identifies with the tendency to promote or value non-standard oral dialects over the written standard for certain forms of communication (1999: 69). This fits his broad definition of language ideology, which is a set of beliefs about the structure of language and/or the functional uses to which a language is put which are shared by the members of a community (cf. also Milroy and Milroy 1985). The beliefs have formed part of that community’s overall set of beliefs and the life-styles that have evolved on the basis of those beliefs for so long that their origins seem to have been obscured or forgotten (1999: 68).

This definition of language ideology seems most useful, as it avoids the temptation to oversimplify definitions of social and political positions. As Gal (1998: 320) points out, there is an inherent problem in defining ideology solely in terms of power relations: …if we understand dominant ideology, for the moment, to be the ideology of dominant groups, there is ample evidence that, like the social makeup of dominant groups themselves, their ideologies are rarely monolithic, nor always stable.

In post-communist societies, a mixture of Woolard’s third and fourth definitions often pertains. “Ideology” becomes synonymous with the halftruths and misguided pronouncements of the Communist Party and its various factions. It is connected with the exercise of power in the pursuit of a fallacious goal. This is the sense in which polemicists and commentators use it, and readers will come across it in further chapters in citations from newspapers and elsewhere. Elsewhere, I have referred to political arguments instead of ideological ones when their use is a matter of strategy rather than belief, and to creeds, doctrines, and dogmas rather than ideologies when it is a matter of adhering to a particular formulation rather than to an idea or way of thinking. When I use ideology, then I have in mind Woolard’s second definition of a language ideology. I will posit that such an ideology or ideologies both underlie any specific debates or language planning exercises and can aid in

Introducing ideology

29

the explanation of their success or failure.

5.2. Nationalism: Non-linguistic ideology Language ideologies can derive from ideologies functioning in other parts of society. If an ideology is pervasive enough in society, it may be used in the service of divergent linguistic ideologies. Wright (2004: 57–61) pinpoints nationalism as a potent ideology that paradoxically underpins both purism (the focus on that which is original, unique, and “pure” in the native language) and universalism or cosmopolitanism (focusing on the equal functionality of, or the equal place the language holds in, the international linguistic community). For example, Estonian shows the influence of nationalism and “imperilment” on state-based language planning. With under a million Estonian speakers within Estonia, the explicit purpose of language regulation has been to defend Estonian against encroaching foreign polities by promoting its functionality and uniformity in a variety of spheres. In the Estonian Language Council’s Development Strategy of the Estonian Language 2004-2010 (www.eki.ee), whose recommendations were approved by the Estonian government, the language is labelled “the bearer of Estonian identity” (12) and the primary purpose of the Estonian state is “to preserve the Estonian nationality and culture through time” (15). While it is not singled out in this document, other sources, including Raag (1999), Laitin (1996) and articles by the Language Inspectorate’s head, Ilmar Tomusk, point to Russian as the primary threat (see http://www.keeleinsp.ee/). Indeed, the general loss of functionality for Estonian detailed during the Soviet period in the Development Strategy (19-20) is thus implicitly opposed to the way the state must proceed now, in independent Estonia. The strategy recommends a series of measures to revive Estonian, including more actively promoting use of “good” Estonian and re-establishing mandatory linguistic oversight over government documents and other published texts (27-28). In other words, increased monitoring and control of text production are necessary to “protect” the threatened Estonian language.38 Newly independent states like Estonia offer striking examples of nonlinguistic nationalism contributing to linguistic debates, but they are by no means the only situation where this cross-over occurs. We will see in chapter 2 how Czech stereotypes of their own behaviors and values affected

30

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the course of language planning. 5.3. Standardization: Linguistic ideology Milroy and Milroy (1999: 18–20) are concerned with the phenomenon of standardization, which they say rests in intolerance of intralinguistic variability, especially as regards the written language.39 This linguistic ideology springs from extralinguistic factors: social, political and economic needs. Furthermore, standardization as a general “striving” for linguistic uniformity calls on and interacts with other linguistic ideologies. The Milroys link it closely to functional efficiency of language: the belief that “everyone should use and understand the language in the same way with the minimum of misunderstanding and the maximum of efficiency” (1999: 19). Functional efficiency they link, in turn, to prescriptivism and the complaint tradition, which are respectively a further ideology concerning the efficacy of implementing top-down regulation, and a method for maintaining prescriptive norms (1999: 29–31). Prescriptivism and a tendency to complain about people’s ignorance of the prescriptions do seem to be connected in most linguistic cultures. However, the link between them and an ideology of functional efficiency is not inevitable. In cultures where standardization is in the hands of the reformers, a different landscape prevails. There, functional efficiency is often hitched instead to movements espousing spelling and grammar reform. Fishman (2004) gives an account of motivations in corpus planning that constitute its “hidden status agenda”. He identifies four axes defining this agenda, which he labels purity vs. vernacularism; uniqueness vs. internationalization; classicization vs. Sprachbund; and Ausbau vs. Einbau. These ideological dimensions of language planning are deeply established beliefs about how language planning should be conducted. Purity – the rejection of influences associated with the outside world – is balanced by vernacularism, which Fishman defines as the belief that a “natural” language variety, warts and all, is the best guide for language planners (2004: 83–85). Uniqueness “emphasizes specificity”, stressing the need to differentiate a regulated variety from all similar varieties, while internationalization sees value and prestige in allying the language with a transnational community through the adoption of common words. Classicization utilizes a prestigious cognate classical language to “advance local modernization goals” (2004: 87), as opposed to Sprachbund, which looks to a shared political heritage as opposed to a linguistic one in drawing

Introducing ideology

31

on other regional languages as a form of enrichment. Finally, Fishman exploits the well-known distinction between Ausbau and Einbau development of standard languages to explain how planners can either attempt to maximize contrasts between a standard variety and its closely related neighbor, or to capitalize on a neighbour’s greater prestige by drawing on its resources. We will see in the course of this monograph how these dimensions have changed over time for Czech: purity and vernacularism have more or less continually occupied a central conflict point, and internationalization has increasingly grown as a concern in language planning, while classicization has waned. Although their presence is hard at times to detect, Ausbau and Einbau dimensions have played roles at various points, with Russian and Slovak featuring prominently. 5.4. Ideology and culture An ideology does not spring full-blown ex nihilo; we should be able to find traces of it elsewhere in the culture. Watts labels the sorts of stories and beliefs that contribute to an ideology myths; in Heller’s discussion of language politics in Canada (1999: 144, 147, 167) images and power relations come to the fore as contributing to the establishment of one or another ideology. We will examine some of these myths, images and power relations later in this work, where we will look both at explicit deconstructions of them, as well as implicit references to them in the form of cultural scripts and metaphors. For example, the Russian spelling reforms of 1917–1918 were based on proposals drawn up by an imperial commission thirteen years earlier, slightly watered-down. However, because they were implemented at a time of great social upheaval, these reforms divided Russian literati into two camps. Adherence to the old orthography became a mark of adherence to pre-revolutionary values, and some émigré presses continued to employ the pre-Soviet conventions until the 1970s.40 The famous émigré short story writer, Ivan Bunin, exemplified this line of thinking: An ignoramus and a ham proclaimed this vulgar orthography willy-nilly: kneel down again, write this way! I answer: I cannot, I do not wish to – if only because in these ten years [since the Russian Revolution] everything low, base, evil, mendacious that exists on this earth has been written in it.41

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An orthography only tenuously connected to the communist regime thus came to symbolize the suppression of free thought and of pluralism that was by then characteristic of the Soviet Union. This association in Russian culture became strong enough that, in the post-communist period, certain of the “lost letters” abandoned in the revolutionary reforms have made a stealthy comeback in proper names and advertisements, harking back to an age of greater probity and better quality (Priadko 2001).

5.5. Language ideology debates One of the most fruitful ways to examine language ideologies is through the study of the debates that surround them. Blommaert (1999a: 8–11) characterizes them as “the point of entrance for civil society into policy making”, and says they usually develop over “definitions of social realities: various representations of reality which are pitted against each other – discursively – with the aim of gaining authority for one particular representation.” He suggests studying the social actors involved in these debates, with an emphasis on the roles of what he calls power brokers: “categories of actors, who, for reasons we set out to investigate, claim authority in the field of debate.” According to Blommaert, a comprehensive model of a language ideology debate does not just identify competing ideologies and propose a winning side. Instead, it traces the production and reproduction of ideologies in various texts, and the way they are picked up, referenced, reused and altered in the course of the debate. By studying these patterns of reproduction, we can identify instances of what he terms normalization, “a hegemonic pattern in which the ideological claims are perceived as ‘normal’ ways of thinking and acting…” We thus study any particular debate with reference to what he calls the stasis (i.e. the perceived “status quo” that existed or comes into existence) prior to the debate or after its conclusion. This study will thus approach debates as processes that develop ideology, rather than simply as clashes of opposing views. It will pay as much attention to the context and dissemination of ideological points of view as it does to explaining and elaborating the points of view themselves.

Looking forward

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6. Looking forward We now turn to the Czech language situation. Chapter 2 examines the social and linguistic background to it, while chapters 3 and 4 give the historical background; these three chapters taken together provide a picture of both the contemporary distribution of the varieties of Czech and how they developed over time, setting the stage for understanding how this strictly regulated language community came to be, and what its maintenance has created in the way of a national mindset about language. Chapter 5 sketches the history of a recent spelling controversy in Czech. The roles of various actors are then picked apart and described more fully in chapter 6. The following two chapters are largely taxonomic, tracing the existence and structures of certain debates, myths and beliefs about language that arose in this debate. Chapter 7 considers debates over authority, legitimacy and linguistics. Chapter 8 operates on the level of language, and proposes an examination of metaphor as a crucial component of understanding how the various ideologies and arguments operated. Finally, in chapter 9, I offer some conclusions about how we examine and evaluate spelling reform.

Chapter 2 Standard Czech in its social and linguistic setting

They guarded and tended the border, for it divided their homeland from the outside world, their native lore from foreign customs. This was where they defended their rights and their law, their rituals and their language, which stored the wisdom of ages and was their first law. He who could speak the language learned from their mothers was heard in the council of elders. He who had not mastered it was excluded from their deliberations; he was as if mute, and had no right to interfere in the laws with which they ruled the land inherited from their fathers. Petr PiĢha42

This chapter begins with an overview of the Czech language situation in a geographical and social perspective, followed by a summary of standard Czech spelling. The third section explores the effect of the quasi-diglossic language situation on language planning issues, and the chapter concludes with a summary of issues in Czech language planning. Readers interested primarily in the sociolinguistic aspect of spelling reform can read the first section and then move on to the next chapter, if they are content not to delve into the specific issues surrounding Czech spelling.

1. The Czech Republic The Czech Republic often markets itself as the “heart of Europe”.43 To the northwest and southwest it borders Germany. Its southern border faces Austria. To the north is Poland, and east lies Slovakia. “Heart” makes good marketing-speak, but from a social and political perspective the Czech Republic and its predecessor states have for much of the last few hundred years lain at the edges of large political and social blocs. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the Czech lands constituted the northwestern limit of the Austrian empire. After World War II, Czechoslovakia’s southern and south-western border came to mark the outer limits of the Soviet bloc; in the 1990s, the state’s borders with Austria and a newly reunited Germany became a new crossing point between the European Union and the post-Soviet states.

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35

Culturally, geographically, and linguistically, the Czech-speaking lands divide into three unequal slices. Silesia (Slezsko), the smallest region, is in the northeast corner of the republic; its largest city is Ostrava (pop. 316,744), and the area’s population is 1,269,467 or around 12.5 percent of the entire republic (population 10,230,060 in 2001). Moravia (Morava) covers most of the eastern third of the country and centres on Brno, the republic’s second-largest city (pop. 376,172). There were 2,881,308 residents of Moravia, or around 28 percent of the population. Another 6,079,825 Czechs, almost 60 percent of the population, live in the western half of the country, called Bohemia (ýechy). Bohemia is the culturally dominant area; the capital, Prague (pop. 1,169,106) is here, making the central Bohemian region the economic powerhouse of the nation and a source of in-migration from the remainder of the Czech lands.44

Figure 2. Schematic map of the Czech Republic

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Standard Czech in its social and linguistic setting

There is debate as to whether Bohemians, Moravians, and Silesians constitute distinct ethnicities. The regions share a history and use the same standard language. Ordinary spoken Czech differs from place to place, but is mutually intelligible, with dialects part of a single continuum.45 While the Czech census now offers the option of a “Moravian” and “Silesian” ethnicity (národnost), in 2001 very few ticked these boxes. An overwhelming majority of Moravians and Silesians described themselves as “ethnically” Czech. If we accept this description, then the Czech Republic is an ethnically homogeneous state. The 2001 census data show over 94 percent of the population describing themselves as Czech/Bohemian,46 Moravian or Silesian. The only substantial declared minorities are Slovaks (just under 2 percent), Poles, and Germans (under half a percent each). These results apparently substantially underreport the number of Romany, who may show up as Slovak, Czech or “none of the above”, and the minuscule populations of Vietnamese and Ukrainians attested are probably also far short of the real figures.47 Even allowing for this, the picture is of a state where certainly over 85 percent of the population identifies with a dominant culture linked to a single national standard language.48 1.1. Economic, social, and cultural state of the nation Forty years of the particular form of social engineering practiced by the communist state left the Czechs with a social and industrial profile common to many countries in the region. At the fall of communism in 1989, employment in Czechoslovakia was heavily dominated by manufacturing and mining, with unskilled and semiskilled workers in state-run enterprises receiving higher wages than those in highly skilled professions. Income distribution was flat compared to those in western societies, with the difference between the highest- and lowestpaid workers being far less than in the West (Veþerník 1999: 407–411; Whitefield and Evans 1999: 134; Wolchik 1991: 171–175). In a society gripped by chronic shortages of consumer goods and services, it was access that determined one’s purchasing power, rather than income. Persistent housing shortages restrained the population’s mobility, as did the importance of long-standing, informal social networks in ensuring a good standard of living. Under communism, full employment was an accepted fact of life, as were comprehensive, although not generous, retirement, education, and

The Czech Republic

37

leisure opportunities.49 Advancement at work in any large organization tends to come fastest with some acquiescence to the priorities of its leaders, and in the pervasive state apparatus of communist Czechoslovakia, this usually took the form of Party membership or willingness to perform tasks that advanced the Party’s aims. The heavy-handedness of this system and its apparent lack of reference to qualifications offended many, and the feeling was widespread that those “at the top” of most organizations had purchased their way there with a Party membership card or a willingness to mouth official platitudes – or both. A cliché of Czech life became the doctors, professors and other members of the intelligentsia who worked as street cleaners, coat-check attendants, brewery labourers, and stokers, while politicians and factory directors seemed unable to put together a coherent sentence.50 Czech schools were traditional in their methods and views. A patina of communist rhetoric had been heavily overlaid on a conservative syllabus. It would be wrong to say that methods were preserved in aspic from before the communist takeover, but nonetheless, the system favoured rote learning and a “rightíwrong” approach to knowledge. The educational experiments of the 1970s and 1980s in British and American education passed the Czechs by. Native-language instruction continued to be dominated by a focus on correct spelling and a taxonomic approach to the study of grammar.51 Foreign language education became a particularly neglected area. Russian was required at all levels of education, but the almost universal revulsion for it among the populace effectively countered its ubiquity, meaning that few achieved more than a passive competence. True specialists in world languages other than Russian were comparatively few; instruction in schools and non-specialist university courses often suffered from a lack of decent pedagogical materials and the instructors often had only a passing acquaintance with the relevant cultures.52 Lack of opportunities for travel, for meeting foreigners, and even for finding reading material in most languages gave language learning a somewhat theoretical cast. The Czechs thus entered the 1990s a small nation with a severe foreign language deficit. At the end of the communist interregnum, then, Czech society presented an economic profile substantially different from those of Western European countries, entrenched in a conservative institutional culture and protected by its isolation. Society was oriented around the private rather than the public sphere, and had grown unused to public debates or open discussion. A deep, ingrained distrust of leaders at the top prevailed, although this did not affect people’s reverence for some cultural institutions.

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Standard Czech in its social and linguistic setting

Anthropologist Ladislav Holy, in a largely anecdotal account of Czech society in the late twentieth century, found in this dichotomy between the personal and the institutional two stereotypes: the “little Czech and the great Czech nation.” Czechs, he claimed, are highly suspicious of their fellow countrymen as individuals. Although skilful, hard-working, and possessed of a sense of humour, the Czech is also seen as envious, cunning, conformist, lazy, and egotistical – characteristics which are attested in surveys of public opinion and dominate the national discourse on character. At the same time, Czechs profess admiration for more abstract qualities of “Czechness”. These, in turn, are embodied in the institutions and monuments of Czech culture, which are seen as superior to those of other nations (Holy 1996: 72–78, 80–90). While Holy traces the roots of this paradox back through the National Revival of the nineteenth century, there is no doubt that the mix of isolation, endemic wariness and enforced public conformity that was typical of communist society contributed to the maintenance and further development of these stereotypes. The end of 1989 brought a few dramatic changes to this state of affairs. Freedom of information and freedom of travel meant that what Czech dissident author Zuzana Brabcová had called “my hermetically sealed homeland” was suddenly open to non-Soviet ideas and people to a degree unheard of for two generations. Liberalization of property laws brought a resurgence of private shops and a trade in property. But the economic and social fundamentals of the nation changed much more slowly.

1.2. The transition of the 1990s The 1990s saw a gradual dismantling of the structures of state capitalism and their replacement by quasi-free-market principles. This had a tremendous effect on the living conditions of the Czechs and on the sort of world they saw around them. The press, television and radio were freed from state censorship and numerous new publications sprang up. While many “fellow travelers” who had held responsible posts under the former regime continued to play important public roles, they were joined by dissidents and ordinary citizens who had been kept from these jobs before by their lack of “socially useful activity”. A broad-based coalition of anti-communist groups took control after the first free elections, which quickly gave way to a government led by the

The Czech Republic

39

nominally hard-line free-market Civic Democratic Party (Obþanská demokratická strana). Among the numerous problems it confronted in the first half of the 1990s were how to: restitute property seized by the communists to its rightful owners; return publicly-run enterprises and companies to the private sector; reduce to a manageable level the costly system of benefits and subsidies; resolve tensions with the increasingly strident Slovak Council and the Slovak representatives in Parliament; stem endemic corruption and graft; and restore public trust in institutions. The early 1990s thus saw the launch of five major initiatives that would reshape Czech society: restitution, privatization, lustration, integration, and the division of the common Czechoslovak state.

1.3. Restitution Restitution meant the return of properties confiscated by the state after 1948. Individuals were given the right to reclaim the homes and business premises that they or their forebears had owned before communism.53 While restitution was generally acknowledged as a necessary step, it brought considerable upheaval without necessarily entrusting property to those with the funds or competence to maintain and manage it. Crucially, restitution was initially linked to residency in the Czech Republic, a condition only removed at the end of the 1990s (see paragraph 3 of the Law). Many émigrés protested bitterly at this condition, insisting that the state had first stripped them of their property, then created the intolerable conditions that led to their emigration, and was now punishing them a third time. In instances where émigrés did return to claim their properties, tensions inevitably arose between those who had “left” and those who had “stayed behind”. Those dispossessed by returning émigrés opined that the government was simply dumping a further reward on those who had left and done well in the West, to the detriment of those who had stayed. 1.4. Privatization Many firms and properties were not restituted. Either there was no descendant of the pre-1948 owner, or the enterprise had been substantially developed under communism, meaning there was effectively no original owner

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Standard Czech in its social and linguistic setting

to turn to. These enterprises began to be privatized in the early 1990s. This privatization had three strands that need concern us: small-scale domestic investment, large-scale direct outside investment, and collective distribution of assets (see Kotrba 1994: 3–4). Many small businesses – especially shops and services – were sold directly to domestic investors. Individuals and small groups of this sort typically lacked the capital for larger investments, but this nonetheless quickly created an entrepreneurial class. Outside investment was seen as necessary because decades of underinvestment in technology, machinery, and management had left Czech industry with no realistic prospects of catching up to competitors in the West. The cash-strapped state decided to flog the most commercially viable of these properties to foreign firms that would be able to raise the capital for needed upgrading. Majority stakes in Czech firms like Škoda and Pilsner Urquell were sold to foreign car manufacturers and brewers, punching a hole in the Czechs’ already dented national pride. Collective distribution of assets proceeded in a fashion similar to that used elsewhere in the post-communist world. The population were offered vouchers for a reasonable sum, entitling them to bid for shares in any of a group of companies. The share price was determined by demand, i.e. the total number of voucher points that were bid. The plan aimed to acknowledge the populace’s share in the creation of this wealth, and to give them a stake in newly privatized companies, helping thereby to determine the companies’ worth. The entire process was called coupon privatization, and it ran in successive rounds throughout the 1990s.54 Already in the early 1990s, though, there were accusations that wealthy émigrés like Viktor Kožený and his misleadingly named Harvard Investment Fund were manipulating the process to their own ends. Furthermore, corruption scandals raised public suspicion that privatization was simply a front operation to put as much capital into the hands of the wealthy, powerful and well-connected as possible.55 Coupon privatization proved to be less than a stellar success, but the scale of its problems did not become apparent until the second half of the decade.56 1.5. Lustration Lustration (lustrace), or the “shedding of light”, referred to the investigation of all highly-placed company and government officials with regard to their conduct during the communist era. Its goal was to restore public trust

The Czech Republic

41

in institutions by removing those who were held to be most responsible for the excesses of the previous regime. The lustration laws, passed by the Czechoslovak parliament in 1991, decreed that certain posts were henceforth incompatible with: prior service in the State Security; some highlyplaced police posts; certain communist-era government and administrative positions; positions of responsibility within the Communist Party hierarchy; and co-operation with the repressive apparatus of the state as an informer.57 It is unclear whether the lustration laws had their desired effect.58 They did prevent many a former apparatchik from transitioning smoothly into the new system, but there were numerous well-publicized cases, the best known of which involved Josef Škvorecký’s wife Zdena Salivarová and Jan Kavan, eventually foreign minister under the Zeman government, where prominent dissidents claimed that the State Security had listed them as informants simply to split the dissident movement and put feathers in the agents’ own caps. Lustration did shine a bright spotlight on the extent to which the post-communist government and bureaucracy were permeated by those who had co-operated willingly with the previous regime and profited by it. In this sense, it probably only heightened the mistrust of the average citizen.

1.6. Integration In the first post-communist elections, the Civic Forum party ran under the slogan “Back to Europe!” From the very first, then, post-communist Czechoslovakia and later the Czech Republic had as its goal to re-integrate into the community of Western European nations, and this meant membership in common organizations, and eventually in NATO and the EU. Negotiations started early and were protracted. A constant theme in the Czech press of the 1990s was what constituted Europe, and where the Czechs stood in relation to it (Sanders 2003). This attempt to define their nation with respect to Europe, its standards, and its values, was to find an echo in the language debate. 1.7. The division of Czechoslovakia In retrospect the division of Czechoslovakia was a long time in the making, and may have been on the cards ever since the state was formed in 1918. In

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the late communist era, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic consisted formally of two self-governing territories, the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic, each with its own National Council (národní rada). The national councils were charged with matters of education, culture, and local development, although the federal government in Prague had certain powers in these areas as well. The federal government of Czechoslovakia retained exclusive responsibility for defence, international relations, and overall economic planning. In a “federation” of nations where one is twice the size of the other, more economically prosperous than the other, and is home to the seat of central government, tensions will inevitably arise. The Slovak list of grievances came to the fore shortly after the Velvet Revolution and stayed in the public eye for the next few years. Slovak leaders in the Federal Assembly pushed their case resolutely and repeatedly, sometimes to the detriment of more substantial issues. In 1992, two years after the end of communist rule, the country still had not been able to agree on a new constitution. The Slovak parliamentarians had demanded the devolution of all powers to the national councils, including defence and foreign policy, while retaining a vague “union” characterized primarily by common tax collection and financial subsidies to Slovakia. The Czech parliamentarians found this unacceptable, and the two leading parties decided on a radical solution, dissolving the federal state altogether effective 1 January 1993. The split was not a clean one. Issues of property division dragged on through the coming years, leading to often nasty spats between Czech and Slovak leaders. The establishment of border checkpoints between the two countries was a painful process.59 There were seemingly endless discussions of citizenship and residency. The division of the country made headlines regularly throughout 1992 and 1993. It continually provoked Czechs to re-evaluate the nature of “their” Czechoslovak state in the previous period, and to pose new questions about the nature of Czech identity. What was this new, rump nation of ten million souls that now stopped at the Morava River?60 It is not surprising that one way they chose to define themselves would have been as users of a particular standard language. 1.8. Public attitudes The 1990s saw an explosion of studies detailing the social and political attitudes of the Czech nation.

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Whitefield and Evans (1999), for example, observed significant differences between Czechs and Slovaks as to their belief in democracy and its ability to solve their country’s pressing problems. Their study, conducted in the spring of 1994, coincides exactly with the period that will concern us in most detail. According to their survey, Czechs showed an affinity for democracy, free speech, democratic processes, and greater limitations on the scope of government. However, Czechs also expressed strong reservations about the power of representative democracy, and were sceptical that their wishes and needs were respected in the process of governing.61 Their findings on the Czech Republic paint a picture of a country with a belief in social and political liberalism. The Czechs held government responsible for creating a strong economy and a functioning safety net, but otherwise did not put much store by it. As Whitefield and Evans point out, the Czech experience in the early 1990s differed from those in other postcommunist countries, in that the sudden collapse in employment found elsewhere did not materialize, leaving people relatively optimistic about the prospects of their new democracy.62 A clear warning sign, however, is the discrepancy between the belief in liberal ideas and the lack of trust in the institutions meant to uphold them. Veþerník’s 1998 survey of attitudes among the middle class provides an interesting counterpoint to Whitefield and Evans. Veþerník hows that the traditional division of the middle classes into “new” (intellectual, professional) and “old” (entrepreneurial) was, by the late 1990s, firmly entrenched as an attitudinal difference as well. The so-called “old” middle classes had essentially been liquidated by the communist interregnum, and their representatives in the 1990s were a completely different group of people. The so-called “new” middle classes had been economically demoted during that period, but remained intact. He notes a marked difference between the hard-line liberal views and economic optimism of the “old” middle classes, and the softer liberalism of the “new” middle classes, who favoured more state intervention in the economic sphere and were notably more pessimistic and suspicious about economic reform (Veþerník 1999: 412). 1.9. Summary The disparate processes affecting Czech society in the 1990s were not, of

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course, primarily about language. Nonetheless, there were important themes that ran through them which affected people’s view of language. Distrust of authority, of government, and of individuals in positions of power was intense in this period. Holy claims that the communist era decisively decoupled the concept of Czechness from the existing Czech state. This linkage, he says, had previously been integral in the Czech mind. During the First Republic (1918–1948) Czechs had seen the Czechoslovak state as embodying their culture and values, and during the preceding three centuries of Austrian rule, they had looked nostalgically back to the medieval and renaissance Czech kingdom for this purpose (Holy 1996: 49– 54). We can posit that in the communist era, the Czech state came to be seen as a collection of venal individuals, and thus assumed characteristics of the “little Czech” rather than of the “great Czech nation”. In the 1990s, faults in the privatization, restitution, and lustration processes reinforced this distrust of the state and allowed Czechs to continue labeling it as something “other”, unworthy of their respect. A search for national values, for a new place for the Czech nation, was a logical outcome of the 1993 division of the country and the need for Czechs to position themselves with respect to their European neighbours. The Czech language was the nation’s badge of uniqueness, but it was also what divided them from the rest of Europe. It thus became both a source of pride and frustration. In this way, the political and social situation in the early 1990s influenced a debate in the seemingly peripheral area of Czech orthography. 2. The Czech language Czech belongs to the Slavonic branch of the Indo-European family of languages.63 Within Slavonic, it is traditionally classified as part of the West Slavonic group, which includes the 38 million speakers of Polish, and the microlanguages Kashubian (3,000 to 100,000 speakers, depending on the definition), Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian (30,000 to 75,000 speakers for both, according to the Ethnologue database). Its closest relative is Slovak, a language of approximately 4.5 million speakers. Czech and Slovak together constitute a subgroup of West Slavonic, and have at periods in history been considered varieties of a single language (called variously Czech or Czechoslovak), although this view is no longer widely held. The two languages are mutually intelligible with a minimum of effort.64 The traditional Czech-speaking language area shares a long, continuous border

The Czech language

45

with Slovak and a relatively short one with Polish.65 Czech has no border in common with any further Slavonic languages. One way to visualize the modern Czech language situation is as a standard variety, a series of super-regional spoken varieties applied in different areas and situations, and a constellation of regional dialects. In Moravia and Silesia, regional dialects still have a strong base, and find application in many everyday communicative situations. Here, however, there are also interdialects in larger towns and cities, which can also be used by dialect speakers as a convenient way to “deregionalize” their speech in conversation with speakers of other dialects. At least two and possibly three or more interdialects can be identified on Moravian and Silesian territory. Regional dialects are said to be nearly moribund in Bohemia, having given way to the expansive variety called Common Czech (CC), which originates in Prague and the Central Bohemian region. Nowadays in Bohemia, CC prevails as the primary mode of spoken communication, with minor regional variations (isolated morphophonemic features and lexical items).66 In comparison with the Moravian dialects, CC is used more widely and appears more frequently in the media, being the dialect of the capital. Whether more prestige and acceptability accrue to it as a result is a matter of debate. These non-standard varieties of Czech are not used in formal writing. They exist more or less purely as spoken codes. Some dialects can be represented using standard orthography, and there are even widely used conventions for doing so (this is the case for CC, for instance), but Czechs do not usually accept these texts as normative written language. Written non-standard Czech is acceptable in a limited number of contexts, among them informal e-mails, phone text messages, and representations of direct discourse in fiction.67 A few dialects have phonological features not adequately represented using the usual symbols of Czech orthography (Silesian dialects are a case in point); without additional characters, the closest one can get is a rough approximation that omits some of the more distinctive features. Standard Czech (SC) derives from a written tradition, and is predominantly used in written form. SC can be spoken, but the spoken version of the standard contains numerous grammatical, phonological, lexical, and syntactic differences from all the interdialects and regional dialects. These differences cannot be explained away by common cross-linguistic differences between speech and writing. Crudely put, SC does not derive from or

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Standard Czech in its social and linguistic setting

correspond to any of the current varieties of the language spoken as native dialects, and in its spoken form is easily distinguishable from the purely spoken varieties of Czech. No Czechs grow up speaking SC; they learn a dialect or interdialect in their families and language communities, and their acquaintance with SC comes only later. They are exposed to it at least passively in books and the media at first, and then learn it actively at school. In Bohemia, the use of spoken SC is largely confined to certain formal settings and situations. It is used in schools and public addresses, and will often be heard on television and radio broadcasts (although not always). Bohemian speakers often mix features of the standard with those of CC. Previously it had been suggested that this mixture was predictable and stable, and it was given the aspirational name hovorová þeština, whose infelicitous translation ‘colloquial Czech’ is as deceptive in English as is its Czech original. In competition with this is the concept bČžnČ mluvená þeština ‘ordinary spoken Czech’, which construes the use of both SC and non-standard (usually CC) elements as a form of code switching or code mixing. In any event, educated Bohemian Czechs will employ CC, SC or a combination of the two in their speech, depending on the circumstance. The situation differs in Moravia, where there is a greater variety of dialects to begin with. There, different sorts of “spoken standards” that mix interdialectal and spoken standard features enjoy popularity in conversation, especially when participants represent different dialects or sociolects (Davidová et al. 1997). There is also anecdotal evidence that Moravians have more ordinary speech contexts in which they use SC, especially when interacting with people outside their dialect area. Some differences between SC and the major spoken varieties derive from developments in the dialects at the time many of the features of SC became fixed in the written code, or from subsequent developments. Other differences come from the purists introducing pseudo-archaic forms into SC and from the particular standardizing decisions taken over the past 200 years. For more details on the history of the standard language, see chapters 3 and 4.

3. Phonology and the orthographic system of Czech Czech orthography is traditionally said to observe the principle “one phoneme (significant sound unit), one grapheme (letter).” In practice, it is frequently morphophonemic; that is, it has a phonemic basis, but also makes

Phonology and the orthographic system of Czech

47

relationships between related forms and words apparent by maintaining a single shape for each morpheme (see section 3.2 below). There are exceptions to this rule, which I discuss below, but this link between spelling and pronunciation forms the cornerstone of a reformist ideology among linguists and educators, and it is worth exploring in more detail. Czech uses the Latin letter set plus a combination of diacritics. The three diacritics in common use are the háþek ( or ), þárka (), and kroužek . Other diacritics, such as the umlaut or the diagonal bar used on , 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’

Czech has a system of five short and five long vowels. On average, a long vowel is 1.5 to 2 times the length of a short vowel. The quality of short vowels is very similar to that of long vowels; there can be a slight height/closeness difference between short /+/ and long /iÖ/ (Dankoviþová 1999).68 In many languages, vowel length is strongly affected by the position of word stress; Czech, however, has a relatively weak stress that invariably occurs on the first syllable of the phonemic word, and this stress has in most instances only a minimal impact on the length of the vowel. In writing, the difference in vowel length is shown by the presence (long) or absence (short) of an acute accent or circle over the vowel, with long /[uÖ/, short /+/ and long /iÖ/ being represented by two different graphemes each:69 Table 1. Short and long vowel letters in SC Short vowels:

Long vowels:

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Standard Czech in its social and linguistic setting

In many morphemes the vowel can be either short or long, depending on the word or form. As seen in Table 2, within a root, short vowels often alternate with a long vowel of the same quality, although certain ones can alternate with a different long vowel or a diphthong. Furthermore, vowel length is not always reliable or stable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, much of the debate around codification involved determining which variants to codify in such situations. Gradually, this issue has receded and been replaced by the issue of vowel length in borrowed words, which are less stable (see section 5.1 below). Table 2. Common vowel alternations in SC morphemes a – aÖ

pracovat ‘to work’ vs. práce ‘work (nom. sg.)’

' – 'Ö

jméno ‘name (nom. sg.)’ vs. jmen ‘names (gen. pl.)’

' – iÖ

lenost ‘laziness (nom. sg.)’ vs. líný ‘lazy (masc. nom. sg.)’

+ – iÖ

bil ‘he hit’ vs. bít ‘to hit’

+ – iÖ

pyšný ‘proud (masc. nom. sg.)’ vs. pýcha ‘pride (nom. sg.)’

o – uÖ

doma ‘at home’ vs. dĤm ‘house, building (nom. sg.)’

u – uÖ

uctít ‘to honour’ vs. úcta ‘honour (nom. sg.)’

u – ou

kupovat ‘buy (imperfective)’ vs. koupit ‘buy (perfective)’

Spelling rules tell Czechs that, for example, after they normally write to indicate the clusters /VU+ V5+ /ŽÖ/ and, outside of initial position, /WÖ/ > /ou/. Other changes, such as /o/ > /vo/ at the

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beginning of a word or word root, the conflation of /l/ and /á/, and /ŽÖ/ > /'j/, appear in some texts but not in others. The changing morphology of the spoken language, on the other hand, appears more regularly in Humanist texts. While these texts make use of archaic categories and forms no longer found in the spoken language, there are also innovative forms, apparently from contemporary spoken Czech. Table 20. Dialect change and orthographic evolution – I early 15 c. feature QÖ WÖ #WÖ +L' ŽÖ 'Ö #Q á (l?)

Hussite spelling ó ú ú ie ý é o l, á

16 c. dialects uo, then uÖ ou #ou iÖ 'j ŽÖ #vo l

16 c. spelling uo, then Ĥ au ú í ý, ej é, ý o, vo l, á

modern spelling Ĥ ou ú í ý é o l

For over two hundred years now, Czech scholars have asserted that the Humanist period represented the golden age of Czech letters. Humanist Czech was a language employed across a wide range of functions. It drew on a centuries-old tradition and displayed wide variations in style, vocabulary, and syntax to reflect its spectrum of uses. As we will see, the heights of Czech Humanism provided an exquisite backdrop against which to highlight the supposed inadequacies of the subsequent Baroque period. 2. 1620–1790: Baroque Czech The year 1620 is a fateful one, known to every Czech and firmly linked with one of the nation’s great national catastrophes, the Battle of White Mountain (Bitva na Bílé hoĜe). Here on a hill outside Prague, the remnants of the Czech Protestant aristocracy were decisively crushed, delivering the country once and for all into the grip of an increasingly centralized Habsburg monarchy whose seat was in Vienna. Auty (1980: 172) writes: The execution or exile of the leading Protestant noblemen meant the effective abolition of the social class that was the chief bearer of the cultivate

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standard language; and the Unitas fratrum, which had played the chief part in cultivating the Czech vernacular in its written form, was proscribed and many of its members forced into exile.

In the cultural script of the National Revival, the Humanist period had been a Czech Arcadia; the Baroque was to be its despoliation. 2.1. History of the Baroque In the years after 1620, the Habsburgs took steps to weld the disparate kingdoms of their realm into a single, centralized entity. The Czech language saw its range of official functions narrowed, and was subject to unofficial social pressures. Havránek (1979b: 72) paints a gloomy picture of Baroque Czech: Czech ceased to be an instrument of contemporary scientific development: science’s language, if at the time it did intrude into our land, was Latin, German, or later French as well. Czech was gradually squeezed out of government offices and public life; it stopped being the conversational language of the noble class and the ministry; it even declined in the merchant classes […]. The standard Czech language was limited to evangelical religious literature intended for simple folk […]. After a good start in the middle of the seventeenth century, the language of poetry was also with the passage of time limited to educational and popularized poems and dramas.

State-encouraged Germanization was part of the reason for its decline in usage, but as the Czechs were gradually absorbed into a German-run state, the natural ascendance of German may have been inevitable. In 1627 German became the language of transaction across the Empire, and as a consequence, Czech, although it retained its official status alongside German, gradually vanished from the major urban registers (desky) between 1730 and 1774 (Havránek 1979b: 72). Early on in the Habsburg period, Czech ceased to be used in higher education, and there were moves to restrict primary-school language teaching to German as well, although this was never fully implemented (Gammelgaard 1996: 23; Auty 1956: 243). Literary activity in Czech never ceased entirely, but it was pushed to the margins of what was increasingly a Germanophone society, in which native speakers of Czech would use German in most written transactions. 2.2. The language of the Baroque Language writing at the time was filled with injunctions against the Ger-

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manization of Czech, especially decrying the invasion of German lexical items. The efforts of grammarians like Rosa show that Czech nonetheless continued to be used in some contexts even during the Habsburg era. Rosa attempted to introduce a plethora of neologisms into Czech to show its full functionality across fields such as linguistics (Jelínek 1971: 18–20 and Rosa 1991: 304–337).110 Features of spoken Bohemian dialects continued to penetrate written texts. The features of spoken Czech described in 1.3 became more prominent in the writing of the Baroque era: Table 21. Dialect change and orthographic evolution – II early 15 c. feature QÖ WÖ #WÖ +L' ŽÖ 'Ö #o á (l?)

Hussite spelling (15 c.) ó ú ú ie ý é o á

16 c. dialects uo, then uÖ ou #ou iÖ 'j ŽÖ #vo l

Humanist spelling (16 c.) uo, then Ĥ au ú í ý, ej é, ý o, vo l, á

Baroque spelling (17–18 c.) Ĥ au au i ej, ý ý, é o, vo l, á

19–20 c. spelling Ĥ ou ú í ý é o l

As seen in Table 21 (based on Havránek 1979b: 73–74), in the Baroque, the phonemic representation of written Czech drew closer to the actual sounds of spoken Bohemian dialects. Non-traditional spellings such as for etymological /ŽÖ/, spelled by Hus, grew in popularity, in some instances overtaking the etymological spelling. When root-initial /WÖ/ developed into /ou/ in speech, Humanist writers maintained a more conservative spelling, while Baroque authors preferred the newer form. At the same time, the morphology of written Czech came to reflect more closely the spoken language of the time; conservative grammatical endings were replaced by those from the contemporary spoken language. 2.3. The “Baroque decline” Did Czech fall into disuse and out of favour in the Baroque period? The dominant ideology since the early nineteenth century has seen the Baroque in terms of loss: of spheres of functionality, of connection to a native

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religious tradition, of numerous features that set different written codes apart from each other and from the spoken language. It views the Czech Baroque as a “rump language”, functional only for routine and unimportant administrative tasks (for which it was duplicated in German anyway), with little social structure to support it, and whose craftsmen lacked the linguistic refinement to distinguish features appropriate to one or another type of discourse.111 In recent years, philologist Alexandr Stich led the way in reclaiming a distinct place for the Baroque in the history of Czech. He and his colleagues focused on its achievements, rather than its lacunae. They reexamined the narrowing of cultural functions and found that in certain fields, Czech actually seemed to expand its sphere of dominance. They also reassessed the Baroque tendency to replace high-style written features with items from the common spoken language. Stich saw this as a move to eliminate the excessive stylization of the Humanist era and initiate a rapprochement between the spoken and written codes. In his view, the Baroque was not just a time of decline, but also one of linguistic and cultural innovation (Stich 1987: 121). Whether or not Baroque decline is a misinterpretation, the myth of Baroque decay is a fact visible in many a textbook on Czech language and literature. ZdenČk Starý, in a study of the Czech standard language, outlines what he terms a “national destiny syndrome” (syndrom národního údČlu),112 in which linguists see the Baroque as a time of sharp decline (úpadek) that undermines the position of Czech as a modern standard language. According to Starý, the national destiny syndrome is characterized by the belief that during the Baroque, the movement begun in the Renaissance towards an organic national standard was stopped in its tracks. Instead, a “dark age” descended on the Czech language. A flood of Germanisms and words and forms from dialects entered its written texts, and the stylistic sophistication of the previous era was lost. At the end of this “national catastrophe” Czech was ripe for a revival – but this revival depended on restoring what was lost between the “golden age” of the Renaissance and the Romantic era (1995: 61–62). Those who believe in the national destiny syndrome, Starý says, end up supporting frequent and pervasive language regulation as a way of counteracting the language’s “interrupted” development. Starý argues that the essential falseness of this myth is irrelevant. From the late eighteenth century until the 1990s, he says, it dominated linguistic thinking in the Czech lands and shaped the debate over regulation of the standard language (1995: 63, 80–81).113

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Spelling reform in Czech, 1400–1900

3. 1780–1900: The National Revival The turn of the nineteenth century brought a resurgence of interest across Europe in nationhood and national languages, and Czech was no exception to this trend.114 Renewing their focus on their language’s history, linguists produced descriptions of Czech that drew heavily on the refined language of the Renaissance. The growing nationalist sentiment saw one such work acclaimed as the basis for a new standard, setting the scene for a century of hard work rebuilding the Czech language as a suitable medium for education, commerce, and finally government. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Czech was a provincial language with shrinking status in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Marginalized in official and government proceedings, as we saw in the last section, it was even losing its foothold in schools, where German was ascendant. Although the university in Prague had a post in Czech language and literature from 1791, and from somewhat earlier a chair in Czech pastoral theology – to teach German-speaking priests to communicate with their flock (Sayer 1998: 68–69) – this apparently did not mean that Czech was a suitable language of instruction. It required an imperial decree in 1816 to enable teaching in Czech to return, in some measure, to high schools and universities.115 There were no official language institutions, and very few publishers of Czech books. Despite (or perhaps because of) the relatively small number of publications in the language, fundamental texts in botany and other subjects could easily founder and sell fewer than 100 copies to a Czechspeaking population of over 5 million (Jelínek 1962: 314). Jelínek commented further: It might seem that especially starting in the 1820s, the battle for the revival of standard Czech was opened on a much wider front than the current social and cultural state of the Czech nation demanded. If we look at Revival-era magazines and publications, we cannot banish the impression that the subjective efforts of Revivalist authors notably exceeded societal needs, as if they were expending their energy in areas and fields where there was no hope of timely application. This is apparently confirmed in the forewords to Revival-era publications and personal correspondence of individual authors where they often express disappointment in the lack of interest in one or another book produced with tremendous expenditure of strength and tremendous financial sacrifice.

According to Jelínek, people mostly did not buy grammars, dictionaries, or reference works in the early years of the Revival, perhaps due to the

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straitened financial circumstances of much of the Czech population, or the general low level of interest in language and education in the populace at the time. Instead they bought primers, novels, general-interest periodicals, and technical manuals, and learned from those.116 Only later did reference works specifically devoted to language gain in popularity (Jelínek 1962: 314–315). This hypothesis is borne out by publication statistics for one of the most successful works of the period. Hanka’s brochure Pravopis þeský ‘Czech Orthography’, was published in 1817 and, by the time of its twelfth edition in 1849, reached a print run of 12,000 – a significant number in a country of that size (Bílý 1904: 100). By the time demand appeared among the Czech populace for a fully-fledged written culture in the mid-nineteenth century, they found one had already been elaborated for them by a self-appointed cultural elite. The beginnings of the National Revival among groups of enthusiasts set a pattern that was repeated throughout the century, even as the new Czech standard language grew in prestige and functionality. 3.1. Dobrovský, Tomsa, and Pelcl In the 1780s and 1790s, a generation of philologists trained their sights on Czech. Tomsa (1782), Dobrovský (1791, 1809, 1819), and Pelcl (1795) produced descriptions and histories of the Czech language which sparked interest among the intellectual elite. Today, when a linguist writes a popular grammar of Czech (and for many other language communities as well), s/he tries to describe the language people should use for cultivated written and spoken communication. People do not need to learn how to speak to family and friends, so the linguist advises them how to write according to established conventions, or how to speak in more formal situations (at work, important social events, etc.). Dobrovský, Tomsa, and Pelcl had a different agenda. All three of them wrote initially in German, thus addressing a community that was more comfortable reading and writing in a different language,117 and they described an idealized, archaic Czech that where possible harked back to the Humanist language of the late sixteenth century. These facts suggest that they were teaching a nation only loosely connected to its own written tradition, and that they were not bound to a current written norm. They felt free

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to reintroduce various archaic spellings, forms and words if, in their opinion, these were worthier than the forms in current circulation. In this respect Pelcl was most dismissive of Baroque norms, while Tomsa was the most permissive towards them. Dobrovský, whose work was the most philologically thorough, hewed a middle path, acknowledging the existence of many forms used in the spoken language and Baroque writing, but tending not to admit them as part of his canonical written paradigms and inventories (Havránek 1979b: 88–90). Table 22 gives an overview of some crucial forms, according to Havránek and ýuĜín (1985). (Spoken forms from early and contemporary Czech are given in IPA for the sake of comparison to earlier charts.) Table 22. Linguistic features in Tomsa, Dobrovský, and Pelcl feature

spoken Czech c. 1800

Tomsa

instr. pl. masc. & neut.

(a)m+

-y/-i or -(a)mi

infinitive ending

t

3 pl. of verbs in -/'t(+)/

Dobrovský

Pelcl

modern SC

modern CC

-y/-i

-y/-i

-y/-i

(a)ma

-t or -ti

-ti

-ti

-t (since c. 1950)

t

'j

-ejí or -í, also for all verbs in -it(i)

-ejí or -í, verb by verb

-ejí or -í, verb by verb

-ejí or -í, verb by verb

'j

l, á

l

only l

only l

l vs. á

only l

l

#o, #vo

vo

o, vo118

o (vo in speech)

o

o

vo

ŽÖ, 'j

'j

-ej-, -ý-

-ý- (-ejin speech)

-ý-, or -ej- in roots

-ý-

'j

#WÖ, #ou

ou

ou

ú

ou

ú

WÖ, ou

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The forms recommended by these turn-of-the-century linguists were thus substantially different from what prevailed in the spoken and written language of the day. Written standard Czech was offered to its learners essentially as a “classical” language, based on a standard over 200 years distant. In the end, Dobrovský’s codification prevailed over that of other grammarians. It did not have the force of a national academy or educational establishment behind it. After all, there was no such infrastructure at the time. Instead, its success resulted from its adoption by language popularizers like Josef Jungmann and Václav Hanka. They used Dobrovský’s principles in their dictionaries and brochures, and proclaimed the superiority of his approach in polemical tracts. 3.2. Modern purism I: Jungmann and the early Revival If Dobrovský laid the theoretical groundwork for a revival of Czech, then Jungmann was its practical initiator. His monumental Czech–German dictionary was intended to establish that the Czech lexicon was broad and nuanced enough to serve as a national language, and in this it succeeded. Jungmann’s approach to Czech was far more programmatic than Dobrovský’s. In common with other early nineteenth-century purists, he aimed to prove the worth of Czech as a fully-fledged written language of international standard. One of the ways in which he did this was through a program of lexical nativization, replacing words of foreign origin wherever possible with neologisms from Czech roots. Frequently these neologisms were calqued on Latin or German models. ZemČpis ‘geography’ was modelled on geographia; slovozpyt ‘linguistics’ was based on Wortforschung. Other times they were adapted from other Slavonic languages. Záliv ‘gulf’ and náĜeþí ‘dialect’ came from Russian zaliv and narechie; zámČr ‘intention’ and úvaha ‘musing’ from Polish zamiar and uwaga (Jelínek 1971: 23–24).119 Dobrovský and Jungmann thus exemplify two common puristic strands in the evolution of Czech: the first was conservative, based on the reactivation of native words from the Renaissance, while the second was proactive in its calquing of words from other sources and borrowing from related languages that lack the politico-historical baggage of German.120 This combination, uneasy as it may seem to modern sensibilities,

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characterized Czech language activism in the first half of the nineteenth century and was reflective of general trends across Europe in that period. Thomas (1996b) sees this as the meeting of two puristic trends that he calls archaizing purism and elitist purism; Ševþík (1974) termed them historically motivated purism (historicky motivovaný purismus) and prestige purism (prestižní purismus), but the thrust is similar. Historically motivated purism was of use in reconstituting the grammar, phonology, and syntax of Humanist Czech and, to a more limited extent, the lexical stock. Prestige purism primarily served to enrich the lexicon, improving the language’s functionality through the creation of large numbers of words for concepts lacking in Humanist Czech. In Fishman’s corpus planning dimensions (see chapter 1, section 4), the Czech of this period scores highly for purism, classicism, and Einbau, focused as it is on removing certain foreign influences and replacing them with a mixture of native equivalents, revived lexical and grammatical items from an earlier age, and borrowings from related languages. From 1820, then, the revival of Czech took a new direction. Its goal was no longer just to describe the Humanist era and its language. It was to produce a resurgent standard variety, distinct from the current spoken varieties as well as from older versions of the language, and capable of competing with the dominant German language in various spheres. As the redefinition of the standard became fused with the revival of the nation, it became a matter of course to insist that the standard was not just a written code. It could be – even should be – used in speech, even if strictly hewing to the phonology of the standard made it considerably different from the native dialects of Bohemia and Moravia. In the early years of the revival, adhering to the newly developing standard was more than just good linguistic practice. It was a sign of patriotism and identification with the goals of reviving the Czech nation.

3.3. The founding of the Matice þeská121 From the mid-eighteenth century there were attempts to start a Czech Society (ýeská spoleþnost) that would focus on Czech language and literary culture. Tieftrunk documents efforts first by Pelcl, then Jungmann, to found such an organization. Jungmann evidently hoped that it would at least support the publication of some books and take over the publishing of Hlasatel

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þeský ‘The Czech Herald’, a quarterly put out by Jan Nejedlý until 1809.122 At the time, any non-Germanophone activity was regarded with suspicion in Vienna, and the cautious enquiries and requests made by Jungmann’s allies went nowhere. The founding of the National Museum (originally called the Homeland Museum, or Vlastenské museum in the Czech of the time) in Prague in 1818 gave the linguistic patriots unexpected and at first unjustified hope. The Museum was to provide a home for scientific study of the Bohemian lands, and Jungmann quickly tried to attach the Czech language movement to their goals. This had not really figured in the original plans, which called for only a small amount of popular religious and scientific material to be published in Czech. The remainder would be published in German (as Dobrovský himself and many other linguists had seen fit to do with their scientific work). Jungmann’s efforts to attach his proposed Society to the Museum were at first firmly but politely rebuffed, and the linguists were told to go away and come back when they had a proper plan for funding their activities. Several years later, with the involvement of František Palacký, the longawaited opening appeared. Palacký secured permission to start a Czech journal alongside the planned German one. The Czech journal would have a populist leaning and cover a variety of subjects found under the auspices of the Museum. However, when publication started, it declared its goal as: …to connect the preciseness of the Old Czech language with the scientific thoroughness of the new age; to lead writers away from sterile debates over words and towards attempts to educate the nation in a practical fashion. (Tieftrunk 1881)

Here we can note the connection between the superiority of the existing standard, an educational mission, and scientific progress – the same combination that will characterize the ideology behind functionalism, the dominant linguistic paradigm in the Czech lands throughout the midtwentieth century. With the existence of a Czech journal secured, the linguists began to agitate for the creation of an institute attached to the Museum that would answer for the quality of the Czech in the journal (which, they now admitted, needed some work) and could take on the task of writing a dictionary that would aid authors writing in Czech. The dream of a fullfledged scientific institute was not realized, but a Committee for Czech Language and Literature (Sbor pro Ĝeþ a literaturu þeskou) was finally

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approved at the end of 1830, and in 1831 a subscription fund, the Matice þeská, was begun, whose goal was to collect funds in support of the dictionary project and other endeavours. Despite tremendous problems recruiting enough donors and teetering on the brink of insolvency for much of the nineteenth century, it managed to support the publication of Jungmann’s monumental Czech–German dictionary and ŠafaĜík’s Slavonic Antiquities in its first decade.123 As the only official organization devoted to the cultivation of Czech language and literature, the Matice exerted a strong normative influence, at least partially because of the presence on its board of numerous influential and well-respected members of the cultural elite. But Sayer notes that in the first half of the nineteenth century, this elite was …small enough for the same few men and their sons – and occasional women – to be writing dictionaries, translating, editing magazines, boosting Czech theatre; small enough for many of them to be patronized by the same enlightened band of patriotic nobles; small enough for most of them to know one another personally. (1998: 80)

In the next fifty years, the mass urbanization of the Czech population and rising literacy would change this situation dramatically. As the language prospered and its elite became larger and more diffuse, calls for regulation institutionalized in a dedicated, government-backed institute became louder. The Matice, whose authority derived from the standing of its directors and from its position among the language community’s predominant publishers of cultural material, would not be suited to this very specific purpose. 3.4. The spelling reforms of 1820–1850 Although the philologists of the National Revival largely returned standard Czech to the grammar and phonology of the sixteenth century, today’s language looks substantially different from its Renaissance predecessor. This is primarily due to the typographic and orthographic reforms that took hold in the first half of the nineteenth century. The typographic reform was a shift away from the German printing style known as Fraktur to the so-called “antique” typeface favoured elsewhere in Europe (see Figure 3, p. 99). This move began in 1801 with the publication of Nejedlý’s grammar of Czech, and Jungmann’s (1820)

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work Slovesnost ‘Literary Culture’ was the first significant scholarly work to be printed in the “antique” typeface. However, this shift was a gradual one. Authors and publishers clung to Fraktur for many years afterwards, and Mácha’s poem Máj was first published in the Fraktur type in 1836 (Flajšhans 1924: 318–319).

Figure 3. Examples of Fraktur and antique type (Filzig’s 1827 Pravidla dobropísemnosti þeské and Dobrovský and Hanka’s 1822 Mluvnice þili soustava þeského jazyka)

The first successful spelling reform of the National Revival was proposed by Dobrovský in 1809. Although he believed in grammatical and lexical faithfulness to the language of the sixteenth century, Dobrovský decided that the orthographic practice of writing , after , , and , 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 , after and sometimes after and where he felt it

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made declension, conjugation and agreement patterns simpler and more logical.124 The success of Dobrovský’s reform, however, is often credited to Hanka, an enthusiastic linguist with a passion for orthographic change.125 He included the principles in his widely-used spelling manual of 1817 (see section 3) and personally convinced Jungmann to adopt the new style of writing.126 The next two revisions are often together called the synthetic reform (skladná oprava). The first took place in 1842, and the second in 1850. Examples of the synthetic reform are given in Table 23. These reforms altered the look of the language on the page substantially. Nowadays, when texts from the early 1800s are reprinted, they are inevitably modernized as a convenience to the lay reader. An example is Mácha’s Máj, undoubtedly the most famous poem in the Czech language, which had been published in 1836 in the traditional orthography (the first couplet is reproduced below): Original: Byl pozdnj weþer - prwnj mág – / Weþernj mág - byl lásky þas Modern: Byl pozdní veþer - první máj - / Veþerní máj - byl lásky þas ‘It was late evening - the first of May - / Evening May - the time of love’127 Table 23. Spelling reform between 1810 and 1850 IPA VU+\KÖ L'UV DKÖV ITWPV F'L VQW×C X+ÌGN

old spelling cyzj, cyzý gest bjt ÷runt dey tauha widČl

new spelling cizí ‘foreign’ jest ‘is’ bít ‘to hit’ grunt ‘basis’ dej ‘give!’ touha ‘desire’ vidČl ‘saw’

change y, ý > i, í after c & some z, s g>j j>í ÷>g ey > ej au > ou w>v

date 1819 1842 1842 1842 1842 1850 1850

What did it mean to conduct an orthographic “reform” in the Revival period? There was no legal authority over the language vested in any institution, and as we saw above, the community of literate Czechs was, at least in the first half of the nineteenth century, very small. To a certain extent, the first arguments over orthography were conducted among this tiny, self-appointed literary elite, and what mattered was which of them took up the reforms at what point. Dobrovský’s “ypsilon” or “analogical” reform met stiff opposition from many notable linguists of the period, including Hanka’s erstwhile mentor Josef Nejedlý, who favoured maintaining the traditional spellings. Once it

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had been adopted by prestigious journals, such as the Journal of the Bohemian Homeland Museum Society (ýasopis spoleþnosti vlastenského Museum v ýechách) in 1827 and the Catholic Clergy Journal (ýasopis pro katolické duchovenstvo) in 1828, it was well on its way to consolidating its position (Flajšhans 1924: 321–322). However, the Matice, which decided which orthographic conventions would be used in the Museum’s publications, was wracked by bitter arguments over Hanka’s synthetic reforms of 1842. Eventually the Matice accepted a few of them and rejected two – for and 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:

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…convinced that authors were deviating further and further from the standard language and using words formed and declined contrary to customary practice, heeding neither private nor public rebuke. And he added: “What is saddest about this is that in schools these mistakes are already being presented as rules.” And he repeated the suggestion above, promising an honorarium or reward to anyone who would compile such a Whetstone of the Czech Language such that, once confirmed by common consent from the Matice, it could in future be held up as a canon of the language. Jungmann’s suggestion was approved […]. But this challenge had no effect; no one came forth to take on this difficult task.130

Why appeal to the curious image of a whetstone (brus)? Thomas traces it to Konstanc’s 1674 work Lima linguae bohemicae/Brus jazyka þeského, which attempted to systematize and correct the language. The imagery of the whetstone is peculiarly Czech, and is not found in other purism movements (1991: 21–22). This set of conceptual metaphors (see chapter 8, section 8) treats the language as a tool, in this case a knife; used over time it dulls and becomes ineffectual. But the language user (the knife grinder) can hone it, to make it fit for its purpose again. To do this, he needs a book to teach him about the effective, correct, and aesthetically appealing use of language; it becomes his whetstone, the instrument with which he hones his tool.131 Eventually the Matice convened a commission to write this whetstone, comprising many of the leading lights of Czech literature and linguistics: Václav Svoboda, Jan Gebauer, Václav Hylmar, František Kott, František Patoþka, Otakar Slavík, and Karel Tieftrunk.132 The Matice’s Whetstone of the Czech Language was published in 1877. As it turned out, the Matice was in good company; the 1870s was to be the Decade of the Whetstone. In these years, a clutch of linguists, more and less competent by turns, churned out books that hectored, implored, and ordered Czechs to observe the author’s vision of what constituted good Czech. Thomas (1996) characterizes the ideology of these works as targeted xenophobic purism, while in Ševþík’s terminology (1974) it constitutes defensive purism (obranný purismus). These tracts differed from the grammars of the early nineteenth century. They were not meant to teach people the basics of writing. The role of the whetstone was to improve poor writers, who were ignorant of tradition and their nation’s literary heritage and, of course, prone to overuse Germanisms. It introduced them to the words, constructions, and factual background that they needed to overcome these failings. A glance through one example – Martin Hattala’s (1877) Brus jazyka

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þeského: pĜíspČvek k dČjinám osvČty vĤbec a slovanské i þeské zvláštČ (Whetstone of the Czech Language: A Contribution to the History of Culture Overall and Especially Slavonic and Czech) – gives a good idea what these manuals were about. Hattala devotes the first half of his manual (“On Matters Overall Most Necessary for the Honing of Language”) to general historical and philosophical background, with chapter titles like “The Difference between Man and Animal”, “By the Language of a Nation we can Recognize the Natural Character of its Soul and its Level of Education”, “On the Power of Habit over Language”. Again we see the overt connections between correct language use, education and science that provide an ideological foundation to regulatory activity. Arguments over etymology occupy several chapters, in which Hattala tries to convince his readers that although they must avoid words and phrases borrowed or calqued from modern German, they should not take too seriously injunctions against using any word ever borrowed from German at any stage of history.133 The second half (“On Matters Especially Necessary for the Honing of Czech”) gives advice on a number of tricky syntactic and lexical matters: enclitic particles, relative clauses, and particular grammatical forms, as well as lengthy descriptions of puristic conflicts over the past fifty years. Like the other purists, Hattala often ranged into matters quite far from everyday usage. They frequently bandied about authentic (and spurious) etymologies to promote or exclude particular words and phrases from the Czech lexicon. How these items were actually used in the language of the time was not a decisive factor; more important was the word or phrase’s provenance and what the leading lights of Czech linguistics had said about it. When current usage did appear in their debates, it was primarily as a negative example, to show how much improvement was needed.134 The purists developed their etymological arguments into principled rules. Ševþík (1974: 53 [emphasis original]) notes, for example, the synonymic criterion: …if in standard Czech there existed synonymic expressions, of which some had a semantic structure congruent with German, only those different from German were recommended for use. Those with a congruent semantic structure were labelled G er ma n is ms or at least as being of suspected German origin, and users of the standard language were advised to avoid them. And yet these were not for the most part complete synonyms, but only partial ones, so the result of this primitive purification of standard Czech was the enfeebling of the language’s expressive capabilities. Since German had been exposed to strong Latin and French influences, many of the

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expressive items cleansed from Czech for being Germanisms were in truth Europeanisms, i.e. elements common to European languages as a result of the common cultural heritage of Europe.

The notion of a language spirit was central to the xenophobic purist ethic of the late nineteenth century, and can be allied to Fishman’s uniqueness dimension in corpus planning, a feature that increased in importance as the century went on. In this particular ideology, foreignisms contravened the spirit of Czech and should, therefore be rooted out. These linguistic fifth columns could supposedly be felt by someone with proper language sense (jazykový cit). Thomas (1996: 409) proposes that the appeal to this highly subjective authority further robbed Czechs of their sense of ownership of their standard language: …many intellectuals never felt quite at home in SCz [Standard Czech]. This was especially true of everyday spoken discourse, where full use of SCz was never achieved. How, then, could they rely on their Sprachgefühl when they questioned themselves whether such and such an element was in keeping with the ‘spirit of the language’?135

While defensive purism predominated in the syntax and the lexicon of Czech, a strain of historical-prestige purism continued to operate on the grammar of the language. In the second half of the nineteenth century, further efforts were made to cleanse grammar of its Baroque colloquialisms. Even where early Revivalists like Dobrovský might have permitted two or more forms, the new grammarians successfully argued for the elimination of any that seemed dialectal – in other words, that bore a resemblance to the spoken language of the time.136 By the end of the century, then, the standard language was paradoxically even further removed from the spoken codes of the time than it had been in the early years of the National Revival. The puristic movements of the late nineteenth century thus served two functions. First, they reinforced and, where possible, increased the distancing of the standard language from contemporary spoken dialects. Despite their rhetoric, the direction of their movement was not necessarily back towards a previously existing model. The xenophobic or defensive purists were creating a standard that followed no precedent. Instead, it simply tried to avoid the bad example of current usage. Second, they further undermined the link between native intuition and standard usage. They issued conflicting messages about the purity of one or another expression, based on sometime suspect etymologies and appeals to

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a language sense that everyone seemed prone to violate. In doing so, they promoted a belief that native intuition was to be distrusted, and promoted an acquiescent attitude towards language authority.

4. Conclusions One of the most salient features of written Czech turns out to be the discontinuity of its tradition. Regardless of the extent to which the Baroque actually saw a functional decline in the use of Czech, we can still note the dramatic change in written Czech during the course of the nineteenth century. The developments of the Baroque are systematically weeded out in favour of a consciously archaic-looking standard that appeals to the Romantic notions of historical purity and national pride. The spread and maintenance of this new standard become closely entwined with the nationalist movement. Czechness is equated with a mastery of this variety of written Czech, and correct usage is a political act. Purism in Czech is in part an outgrowth of a search for traditional legitimacy. The preference for etymological Czechness amplifies and extends previous trends, in which the language of a pre-Austrian era was favoured. If purism in fact introduced insecurity and promoted deferentiality to linguistic authority among native speakers, it was perhaps only a logical outcome of the trends that undergirded the National Revival in the Czech lands. The authority of the newly-minted nineteenth-century standard rested on a combination of charismatic legitimacy and traditional legitimacy (see chapter 1, section 3.6). Its propagators were those renowned for their scholarship, like Dobrovský and Jungmann, or for their tireless activity, like Hanka. They, in turn, relied on the high prestige of the Humanist Czech which they drew on in order to justify many of their choices. On the other hand, their attempts to introduce innovations based on what they considered sound linguistic principles resulted in bitterly fought battles, some of which they won, and some of which they lost. The nineteenth century marks the end of this period and foreshadows the rise of rational legitimacy as the underpinning of linguistic authority. The writing of an “approved” whetstone in the 1870s preceded the establishment of other institutions in the twentieth century that took control of the direction and content of language reform. Their founders hoped that doing so would create a clearer, more consistent path for reforms of

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spelling and grammar, and thus a strengthening of the national language and Czech nationhood. Whether it in fact served this purpose will be seen in the next chapter.

Chapter 4 Spelling reform in Czech, 1900–1980

It’s been a long time since we had an aristocracy; snobs, however, we have aplenty. JiĜina Fikejzová in Právo lidu, 26 July 1990

At the turn of the twentieth century, Czech language cultivation entered a new phase. A hundred years after the Revival began, there were now enough published sources to make a new approach both feasible and accepted: using the body of existing literature to determine usage.137 This new spirit can be seen in the founding of two Czech institutions: The Rules of Czech Orthography and the Czech Dictionary Office. These institutions aimed to focus on real usage, combining it with principles of contemporary language planning while avoiding what they considered to be the excessive subjectivity of purism. In time, these same elements would manifest themselves in a new linguistic movement in the Czech lands: Prague School functionalism. The prosperity of Czech did not, however, mean an end to linguistic purism. If anything, the cries for a firmer line against poor usage only grew louder, and were eventually institutionalized in the journal Naše Ĝeþ (‘Our Language’). Puristic attitudes and plans were by no means absent even from the more reformist functionalist movement. 1. 1900–1945: Standardization and purism Shifts in regulatory activity accompanied significant, major changes in the status of Czech. Until 1918, Czech was a minority language that defined one of two large ethnic groups in a medium-sized north Austrian province. When the Great War ended, Czech became the official language of the new Czechoslovak state, “first among equals” in a country recognizing at least five linguistically-based ethnicities (Czech, German, Slovak, Hungarian, and Ruthenian). Overnight the roles of Czech and German were reversed: Czech, along with Slovak, was decreed to be the state language, while German was named as a protected minority language. In the space of a few years, there appeared numerous state and quasi-state structures that used

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Czech as the primary means of communication. As the language’s functional sphere grew, so did the perceived need for some sort of official standardizing body to replace the previous free-for-all of competing purists. 1.1. The first Rules In 1902, Czech society got its first officially approved spelling manual. Although there had been unofficial works aplenty, the Ministry of Culture and Schooling (Ministerstvo kultu a vyuþování) finally felt the need to commission a single standard for use in schools. According to ministerial decree, from the 1903–1904 school year Czech orthography was to be taught in conformity with the rules proposed in this book (Sedláþek 1992–1993: 1). The publication, titled Pravidla hledící k þeskému pravopisu a tvarosloví s abecedním seznamem slov a tvarĤ (‘Rules Regarding Czech Orthography and Morphology with an Alphabetical List of Words and Forms’), was, like the modern version, divided into two parts. Commission head and noted philologist Jan Gebauer was responsible for the description of the rules themselves. The spelling dictionary was the work of a larger group, and was based in large part on earlier manuals, especially on an 1886 Orthographic Index (Pravopisný ukazatel). At the time, despite a century of instructing and hectoring, Czech spelling still showed a tremendous degree of variation. Today the areas that concern Czech language planners consist of a handful of native words and most arguments revolve around borrowed (often scholarly) lexemes, but a hundred years ago there was far more variation across the spectrum of frequently used native words. In his study of the 1902 Rules, Sedláþek pointed to the difficulties that a lack of fixed norms caused for schools: One teacher sighed: “Our orthography needs stabilizing once and for all, especially so that school books can be written in the same orthography; for a child who in one book reads jméno, nalézati, vedlé, prácí, posílati ‘name, to find, next to, work (instr.), to send’ etc. and in another jmeno, nalezati, vedle, prací, posýlati flounders in doubts, loses faith in the authority of the book and his teacher…” The 1902 Rules tried, under Gebauer’s influence, at least to lessen uncertainty in this matter (1992–1993: 2–3).138

Gebauer was a pragmatist and a moderate who opposed knee-jerk purism. His nomination to the head of the orthographic commission ensured that its work would not be based on invented principles, false etymologizing, or anti-German sentiment. In writing the 1902 Rules, he aimed for

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compromise between a variety of reformist principles: while anchoring the principles of the Rules in real usage, he let himself be guided by the need for consistency and ease of learning. Sedláþek (1992–1993: 7) notes that the large number of doublets in the Rules probably reflected Gebauer’s desire not to impose a standard arbitrarily, but to let a consensus develop. Nonetheless, because the Rules were destined for school use, Gebauer often ruled in favour of one or another form where he felt a decision was possible and warranted. A selection of Gebauer’s decisions is given in Table 24. Table 24. The 1902 Rules and variation (according to Sedláþek 1992–1993) problem Stem vowel can be long or short in native words Stem vowel can be long or short in prefixed verbs Stem vowel can be long or short before the prefix -tel Suffix -dle can be long or short Suffix of foreign words can be long or short Both -n- and -nn- written with suffixes -ík and -ník Both -i- and -y- written in certain words

variants (underlined if in 1902 Rules) chléb vs. chleb

resolution offer both

vypíti vs. vypiti

offer both

váhatel vs. vahatel vedlé vs. vedle

both, or just short (word by word) short only

balón vs. balon

short only

kominník vs. kominík, denník vs. deník posýlati vs. posílati, syþeti vs. siþeti

only one, but with exceptions either one or the other, word by word

The “rules” section of the manual also contained morphological information, which was supposedly repeated in the dictionary (although Sedláþek demonstrates that this was not always the case; sometimes the dictionary authors took a different decision than Gebauer had recommended). In the light of modern Czech, Gebauer’s decisions look rather conservative. Many forms now accepted in the standard he rejected as not belonging to it. Sedláþek notes that the Rules were not generally well received. Despite Gebauer’s efforts at decisiveness, teachers felt the new manual was too permissive in allowing multiple variants. Sedláþek (1992–1993: 6) offers the following criticism from a contemporary reviewer and teacher: “It is a long time since I have been as impatient as in the run-up to the

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publication of this long-promised ‘official’ orthography. We already have a fair number of these Whetstones and Whetpebbles, and they contradict each other as blatantly as if they considered our orthography to be a stomping ground for the most varied of convictions and their own ideas. So I thought that with these new Rules we would finally get a definitive resolution of all doubts in the area of orthography. I convinced myself that a society of experts such as were invited onto the commission would surely sweep all uncertainty from our orthography and introduce an exemplary uniformity. Now the book lies in front of me… In reading it, I searched for instruction on various points that have disturbed my orthographic certainty. Instead of certainty, I found variation and even new uncertainties where I had never been confused before… I am almost of the opinion that holding to the new orthography means writing as your own convictions please you for the foreseeable future, ‘until usage settles down’.”

Ideologically, as we have seen, reforms were said to create clarity, which was also perceived to be a trait inherited from the Czech classical tradition. Clarity was in turn linked to the elimination of variation. In this way, the regulator’s authority to reduce variation was seen as a positive sign, proof of its ability to return order to the language. Sedláþek speculates that the other members of the commission, who were all schoolteachers, foresaw that the large number of doublets would not sit well with the Rules’ potential audience. Apparently they were quicker than Gebauer to hint – after the publication of the Rules – that some doublets might be eliminated in subsequent editions if the teachers objected. In fact, a shortened version in 1903 intended for primary schools did substantially reduce the number of doublets in native words (while expanding it in favour of “Czechified” forms for words of foreign origin).139 Three significant revisions to the 1902 Rules were published: in 1913, 1922, and 1941, all undertaken under the supervision of the education ministry of the day (see Sedláþek 1992–1993: 1–2, 7–8).140 1.2. The beginnings of the Czech Dictionary Office For Czech patriots, a full-scale native-language dictionary had been an elusive dream for a hundred years. The founding principles of the Matice þeská even explicitly mention it as a goal. However, none of the existing organizations had the funds or infrastructure to take on a task of this scope.141 Finally, in 1911 the Emperor Franz Josef Czech Academy for Sciences,

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Literature, and Art obtained funding from the Hlávka Foundation and the Ministry of Culture in Vienna to support a Czech Dictionary Office (KanceláĜ slovníku jazyka þeského). The linguists at its head set out to collect raw material – excerpts from literature – for a dictionary by commissioning external researchers to collect it.142 It was a lengthy and expensive process; funding was required for the coordinators as well as the external workers, who were paid by the excerpt. The idea of an authoritative national dictionary attracted both purists and a growing band of linguistic “progressives,” who wanted to accommodate the standard more closely to current spoken and written usage. Purists and conservatives, like co-founder Josef Zubatý, saw the dictionary as a monumental whetstone, useful for correcting slipshod linguistic practice. Accommodators, like Miloš Weingart, saw a usage-based dictionary as a necessary corrective to the growing stridency of the purists. The dictionary project was a long-running and financially draining endeavour; the first volume was not published until 1935. After Czechoslovak independence in 1918, the office was supported by subventions from the Hlávka Foundation, the Ministry of Education, and the Third Division of the Czech Academy, of which it was a constituent department (Machaþ 1971: 193–194). There were frequent calls for the state to take over the direct financing of the Dictionary Office, so that it could be expanded into a full-fledged language institute. Under a financial regime where funding depended on the benevolence of charitable foundations and the vagaries of the education budget, such expansion was not a possibility. This aspiration was in the end realized, but not until after the Second World War. 1.3. Modern purism III: Our Language In 1916, just before the founding of the new Republic in 1918, a new journal, Naše Ĝeþ (‘Our Language’), was founded. Its first issue, in 1917, began with the programmatic article “What We Want” (Co chceme): This great, exceptional era of ours calls for cleansing: for a cleansing both internal and external, for a return to naturalness and individuality, to the unsullied original sources, for self-sufficiency of knowledge and art – it calls in a far more audible voice for an unbroken means of communication: for a c l e a n , h o n e d l a n g u a g e .

Naše Ĝeþ was to uphold and promulgate strict standards of usage. Its orientation was decidedly purist, and the early issues of the journal mixed la-

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ments for the detestable state of usage among the educated and in the media with didactic explanations of what was proper and good. A third type of article consisted of the ongoing polemic between various puristic factions and, increasingly, between the purists and the non-purists. It would be wrong, however, to stylize the early Naše Ĝeþ as a publication from purism’s lunatic fringe. It tried to play a mediating role, much as the Matice’s Whetstone had done in the late nineteenth century. The editors castigated and hectored those who introduced new words and forms, which they viewed as the result of carelessness or misguided good intentions. However, they were equally hard on some purists, especially those who were ignorant of the structure and history of Czech or the basic principles of linguistics.143 Its editors included Josef Zubatý, Emil Smetánka, and Václav Ertl, all eminent linguists of their day, who brought a variety of viewpoints, from puristic to reformist, to the pages of the journal. 1.4. 1922: The second revision of the Rules In 1919, according to Naše Ĝeþ (Redakce Naší Ĝeþi 1921: 306), …the Third Division of the Czech Academy of Sciences assumed responsibility for the reform of Czech orthography and entrusted this work to a fivemember commission headed by Professor J. Zubatý. The commission set as the goal of its reforms to introduce into Czech orthography as great a uniformity as possible of orthographic principles, as long, of course, as they do not conflict with true, correct pronunciation and as long as they do not disrupt the overall existing shape of Czech orthography.144

The 1922 reform aimed to fix inconsistencies arising from the previous two reforms (1902 and 1913). Its primary focus was on foreign borrowings, a topic that was to occupy centre stage in discussions of orthographic reform for the remainder of the century. Modern loan words (see chapter 2, sections 5.2 through 5.4) are mostly internationalisms of Greek or Latin descent, or later words constructed from Greek and Latin roots. A smaller number are borrowings from a single language; of these, French and English loan words have traditionally prompted the greatest debates over spelling. These loans are, relatively speaking, a peripheral feature of the language. Their frequency compared to that of native words is very low, so the “overall shape of Czech orthography” is not greatly affected by any changes to their spelling. Among the features that were finally phased out

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was the use of , 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)

The greatest break with tradition in the 1922 reform was eliminating doubled consonants in loan words. Czech pronunciation does not distinguish between single and double consonants in these positions (cf. English unnatural vs. unalterable), so this reform met the stated criteria. Instead of kommisse ‘commission’, then, the new spelling was to be komise. However, this brought with it another problem. Traditionally, single was pronounced [z] in loan words, while double was pronounced [s]. Getting rid of the doubled letters meant that some were to be pronounced [s], others [z]. The reformers were not particularly afraid that people would pronounce [z] everywhere; instead, they were worried that people would be tempted towards spelling pronunciation, consistently rendering as [s] even where it should be [z].145 The commission therefore suggested that 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 .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

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assumes that historically correct forms should be maintained or reintroduced regardless of their status in the contemporary language; the second strives to achieve regularity or predictability across all forms of a word or derivational pattern, even if current usage dictates otherwise (emphasis original): A graphic proof of how both principles I have just sketched d i s r u p t t h e d e s i r e d s t a b i l i t y of our standard language is provided by t h e R u l e s o f C z e c h O r t h o g r a p h y . It is quite surprising how little attention members of the public (and even the specialists among them) pay to the development and activities of this institution, which is invested with official authority. In the United States President Roosevelt had to back down in the face of enraged public opinion when he tried to use his official power to introduce practical simplifications of the graphic form of English words in perhaps a dozen places. Yet here, people look on silently when one or two reformers – these days anonymous ones – dictate drastic changes both in form and usage from their desks with official effect, not only in the established graphic form of Czech words, but in their pronunciation as well. And they do not introduce these new written forms, new pronunciations, and new forms of corrected words all at once, so that these changes might, after a single shock, become firmly established; instead this reforming tendency grows ever stronger in new editions of the Rules and gradually brings with it more and more innovations. For example, not until 1913 did the form zviĜátko enter the Rules to replace the earlier zvíĜátko, or srdeþko to replace the previously admissible [doublet] srdeþko and srdéþko; in the most recent Rules of Czech Orthography we even find koupadlo in the introduction on page XIX but kupadlo as the only correct form in the alphabetical listing. The surface of our standard language is thus constantly, pointlessly rippling and our linguistic intuition is undermined. The uncertainty that arises this way is all the greater for the fact that nowhere does any new edition of the Rules say how it differs from the previous edition. The results are distressing. While years ago, as I myself remember well, it was not difficult for an educated Czech to write in correct orthography, nowadays it is hard to find anyone who can manage it. People blame it on the decline in education, but they often forget that the main reason is that the Rules of Czech Orthography undermine linguistic usage. It could hardly be otherwise when even professional experts on the Czech language must turn to the Rules if they want to write correctly according to the officially acknowledged orthography of the day.148

Mathesius was disturbed that authority (in the guise of the Rules) had failed to yield predictability, decisiveness and stability. The functionalists were to

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try their hand at spelling reform soon enough, and would learn just how intractable these problems were. 1.5. Proposals for a national language institute Why did linguists think a state-supported language institute was such an important goal? Václav Ertl’s (1922) article “Ústav pro jazyk þeskoslovenský“ (“A Czecho-Slovak Language Institute”) gives some clues, and touches on several issues that were to echo down into the 1990s. Ertl’s first and foremost argument concerned continuity (1922: 98–99). An institute, he said, would ensure that scientific principles of linguistic examination and regulation (as opposed to idiosyncratic, individually cherished language bugbears) were observed and handed down: This scientific working method is a very valuable commodity, which it is necessary to cherish, maintain, expand and perfect; for this we need a permanent institution, in which this tradition can live and be immersed from generation to generation – not merely a representative committee or commission, which can disband today or tomorrow, never to meet again.

Only an institute, he claimed, could attain the authority necessary to make its pronouncements generally acceptable, and at that, it would need to be headed by a suitably well-respected figure: Given our national character, which inclines towards individualism come what may, towards stubbornness to the point of small-mindedness, towards the personal right of veto wherever possible, and given our view that in linguistic matters everyone who has learned to speak Czech can judge and decide at least for himself, an authority that merely impresses will not suffice. We need an authority that imposes – that is, one which, being founded on a firm scientific base and firm principles, will nonetheless have enough power to halt vulgar despoiling of the language, whether it comes from flightiness and lack of respect for one’s mother tongue, or from lack of knowledge and ignorance in the very places where knowledge of the language should be a significant component of qualification and education.

The first example Ertl brings of this is, not surprisingly, orthography: Orthography is certainly a matter on which there can be very different opinions, but we all know that, in the end, at any given moment, it makes no difference whether we write this way or that. It is true that orthography can be harder or easier, and that it can be simplified in various ways, but we also know that the main requirement for any orthographic system is not

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quality, but unity – the consciousness that orthographic principles of this or that sort only make sense if we all, to a person, obey them.

He then goes on to lambaste those who rejected the 1913 Rules: If there is any place for voluntarily submitting to authority, then it is surely in the matter of orthography. And yet with the last edition of the orthographic Rules (1913) we witnessed one part of our scientific community turning the matter on its head and failing to recognize this amendment (for it was not a thorough renovation) of orthography. This [occurred] despite the fact that the 1913 Rules changed nothing substantial in orthography, merely stabilizing those points where the 1904 Orthography had already indicated a preference according to the demands of the time, and despite the fact that they were based on an authority surely more qualified than any other: that of the Professor of Czech Language at the Czech university.

A national language institute, Ertl argued, would have many desirable effects. It would take responsibility for ensuring that “practical, cheap, and easily understood manuals” were available, so that people could be sure of writing correctly; it could undertake work in dialectology and historical linguistics; it could produce, alongside a comprehensive dictionary, smaller ones for the general public. When the Czech Language Institute (CLI)149 finally did come into existence in 1946, it fulfilled most of the desiderata Ertl laid out. Certainly, at least, it functioned in all the spheres he foresaw. However, Ertl signalled two problems that would dog the CLI in later years. First, Ertl, although accommodationist in some areas, was a product of his times. An editor of the puristic Naše Ĝeþ, he strongly believed in the need to educate the populace to use language correctly and without excessive Germanisms. An institute produced along Ertl’s lines would be prone to the centralizing, “one-right-answer” mentality that characterized much language regulation of the day. In essence, the very existence of such an institute compels belief that it has certain rights and responsibilities, regardless of which rights and responsibilities we then choose to confer on it. In direct contrast to this, Ertl also foresaw that authority would be a sticking point for any new institute. Given his predilections, he believed it should have legally binding powers. It would need authority to create unambiguousness (unity) and thereby clarity in the language. This wish, as we will later see, was never really fulfilled, although it came close to fulfillment during totalitarian rule. The CLI was thus in some respects a hybrid whose weakness was only revealed after the restoration of democ-

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racy in 1989. The product of a nationalistic age that believed in simple answers to complex linguistic questions, the Institute had never been granted the persuasive force and compulsive powers to push through its agenda, for which it was dependent on external bodies and organs. 2. 1918–1945: The beginnings of functionalism The interwar period saw the birth of a major linguistic movement in Czechoslovakia. It goes by a number of names, which are worth disentangling here. Founded in the capital city of Czechoslovakia, it is often called the Prague School. It evolved from the regular meetings of a group of like-minded linguists and their colleagues, known as the Prague Linguistic Circle (Pražský lingvistický kroužek, henceforth PLC), although not all the members of that group are adherents of the School. Its original fundamental tenets – that “language is a system of purposeful means of expression”, and that the goal of analysis is “to uncover the structural laws of linguistic systems and their development”150 – eventually led to two distinct angles of investigation, functionalism and structuralism. While the latter was for some years suppressed in Czechoslovakia and enjoyed its greatest success in the United States and Scandinavia (witness the rise of American structuralism and Danish glossematics), the former remained closely tied to its country of origin.151 Historically, functionalism’s emphasis has been on uncovering the various functions for which language is used, and how those correlate with the linguistic devices available in one language or across languages.152

2.1. Functionalism and language cultivation Unlike some linguistic schools, the Prague School had an international character from the first. Two of its founders (Vilém Mathesius and Bohumil Trnka) were Anglicists, as was its chronicler best known in the West, Josef Vachek. Others, like Bohuslav Havránek and Miloš Weingart, were Slavists by training, and the movement was enriched by the flood of Russian refugees who streamed into Czechoslovakia in the 1920s: Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoi were two of the most prominent, but by no means the only ones. The Prague School was thus never a narrow, na-

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tional school: its intentions and arguments were directed at the way language was studied and described in general.153 However, the daily lives of its members played out in a language community greatly concerned with language correctness, and thus its members naturally took an interest in language standardization. This interest is evident in the 1929 Theses and is more fully elaborated in the 1932 volume Spisovná þeština a jazyková kultura (‘Standard Czech and Language Culture’). The functionalists pointed out that the language standards debate in interwar Czechoslovakia was being conducted without reference to function; it was based entirely on evaluation of form. When purists argued about whether one or another lexical item or expression should be excluded from the standard as a “Germanism”, for example, this was formalism par excellence: the utility of an item was being determined by factors that had nothing to do with how it was used. In the 1920s and 1930s, then, some PLC members followed a programme to sketch out the particular functions for which we use language, and then describe how various linguistic devices (jazykové prostĜedky) and particular functional languages (funkþní Ĝeþi) were or could be harnessed to serve these functions. Purism was based on the aesthetic reaction of the listener or reader to linguistic items. Functionalists explicitly rejected this stance and insisted that they proceeded first from the point of view of the language producer.154 In other words, the most important concern was: which language functions did the speaker or the writer need to perform (Mathesius 1929 [1972]: 28)? As Havránek wrote in 1969, looking back on the early goals of functionalism: For contemporary standard language to become a fully fledged subject for scholarly research, it was necessary to change the basic methodological principles of linguistic research. It was necessary to move to a functional perspective, to a perspective on what tasks a language has, both in general and in concrete linguistic utterances, and with what goals and in what situations we use a standard language.

The idea of a standard variety as distinct from non-standard varieties played a key role in their thinking, in keeping with the prominent position of the standard vs. non-standard dichotomy in Czech society. According to the functionalists, the standard had certain functions that implied specific needs. The 1929 Theses describe the standard as having “greater demands placed on it than on popular speech (Ĝeþ lidová)”, among which were its various governmental and scholarly functions. These led to a need for an expanded vocabulary for abstract concepts, complex ways of expressing

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interrelatedness and the control or censure of emotionality. “This more normed and normative cast of the standard language is connected with a more careful and demanding attitude to language,” continue the Theses (1929: 45–46, underscoring original). Language culture, then, was in the functionalist view restricted to cultivation of this standard variety. The Theses define it as “cultivation so that in t h e s t a n d a r d l a n g u a g e – both literary and conversational – the characteristics required by the special functions of the standard language might be strengthened” (1929: 57–58, spacing and underscoring original). This definition circumscribed the excesses of purism. It did not purport to lecture people on how they used language in the home or with friends. But it did leave open a wide field for the regulation of all aspects of the standard, including pronunciation and orthography: As concerns pronunciation: it must follow from the basic requirements described that pronunciation should be stabilized, even in places where up until now variants have been permitted (e.g. in Standard Czech the written group sh- is pronounced sch- and zh-, shoda etc.)…155 Orthography, as a purely conventional and practical matter, should be easy and clear, so far as its function of visual distinction permits. Changing orthographic conventions, especially if it does not contribute to their simplification, goes against the need for stability. Contradictions between the orthography of native words and the orthography of foreign words should be removed at least where they lead to confusion in pronunciation (e.g. in Czech orthography s in foreign words has the value s and z). (1929: 58)

Functionalism thus did not spell the end of language cultivation, orthographic reform, or the push for national bodies and binding conventions to institutionalize these changes. It did not remove the ideological presupposition that regulation must lead to unity and clarity. Instead, it simply changed the principles on which regulatory activities would be conducted. 2.2. Similarities between functionalism and purism Despite differences between functionalism and purism, there are commonalities between the two approaches to language. This general point has been made several times with different emphases, most notably by Starý (1992, 1993, 1995) and Thomas (1996a, 1996b). Some similarities seem perfunctory. For instance, functionalism does allow for an aesthetic perspective when dealing with the standard language;

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this is laid out clearly in the “General Principles for Language Culture” (Pražský lingvistický kroužek 1932: 249). But this aesthetic dimension is dormant for most of the early years of functionalism, re-emerging only in the 1980s as an explanation for some phenomena of language culture that could not otherwise be explained. Both purists and functionalists believed clearly in the necessity of language regulation and active language cultivation. The purists called for a return to an original, pure state of the language; the functionalists strove for the stabilization of the standard language, bringing it to a state they called flexible stability (pružná stabilita), in which only carefully planned, necessary changes were implemented (see, for example, Mathesius 1932: 17 and Havránek 1932: 32). In other words, functionalist linguists had a duty not only to map linguistic functions onto linguistic forms, but then to actively promote these findings and make sure that language reform reflects them. Although the functionalists wanted to topple the purists, they had different ideas for the linguistic institutions the purists controlled. They would install themselves in the purists’ place, from where they could shape a standard language governed by rational, objective criteria. Mathesius wrote (1932: 25): It would be quite possible to rely solely on the refining influence of authorial practice and on the language commentary of non-linguists gifted with a delicate sensibility for semantic nuance and rhythm and the melody of speech. These forces sufficed to form and refine the majority of standard languages that arose before the nineteenth century, and these are the most refined languages in the world. But the current state of linguistic theory enables us to accelerate the process of refinement a bit through scholarly intervention – and anyway, the current position of standard Czech is rather different from that of the great cultural languages at the time of their refining.

Functionalism thus included elements of applied linguistics as well as being a tool of pure linguistic analysis. This inclusion presupposes a progression from observation of function to description and recommendation. The creation of functionalist policy-making was a master stroke of word-play, an inversion of functionalist principles disguised as an extension of them. In effect, the functionalists claimed that scholars could observe usage and deduce the functions of linguistic elements from it, but they could also rule on linguistic points and determine the fate of linguistic elements, as long as their judgment was based on functional-

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ist principles. These decisions would then find their way into the language system and become part of it. In other words, instead of merely observing a system and describing it, functionalists were invited to imagine or project an ideal system of functions and create the conditions for it to exist. Here we come across a notable and perhaps not so coincidental parallel between functionalism and socialism. In light of general sympathy for socialist ideals in the 1930s, this development was not surprising, and could not have been gone unnoticed in the period after the Communist coup in 1948.156

2.3. 1941: The third revision of the Rules In 1938, Czechoslovakia was dismembered by the Third Reich and the Czech lands reconstituted as the (German) Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Perhaps surprisingly, some ordinary language cultivation activity continued in this period, notably with the issuance of a new version of the Rules of Czech Orthography in 1941. The 1941 Rules in some respects undid previous revisions. For some domesticated borrowings, the spelling reverted to the original form. The authors explicitly mention a feature that does not figure in earlier or subsequent discussions (Šmilauer 1943: 27 [emphasis original]): The format of foreign words, which differ from native ones in their spelling of the nominative case form and in declension, is a notably complex matter. There is a clash here between dual tendencies: (1) the natural attempt to adapt foreign words towards native ones in both writing and declension… (2) the opposite attempt not to disrupt any connections with foreign languages with changes.

Prior to this, Czech linguists had not typically promoted this idea – that the language itself should reflect connections with foreign languages in the way it treats borrowings – as a way of defending conservative spellings. It introduced an internationalizing dimension (Fishman 2004: 85) to Czech corpus planning. Up to that point, connections with foreign languages had been part of the arsenal of the pan-Slavists. The pan-Slavists had wanted spelling to have a more phonetic cast and cited the close relations between Czech and Slovak, Polish and Russian as a reason for adopting a more phonetic transcription of loan words.157 The revisions undone by the 1941 Rules included: to ; to

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; some instances of 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

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The CLI’s remit was wider than that of its predecessor organization. First and foremost, the new institute anticipated a greater presence in the public arena. It was to advise the public on language use, and to this end, a Language Service was set up to answer phone calls and letters. The CLI established links with Czech Radio and began broadcasting the Language Corner (Jazykový koutek), which continues to this day. The CLI also took an interest in school curricula, helping to develop both syllabi and textbooks. It produced popular manuals about Czech, as well as reference works for everyday use (Daneš and Dokulil 1971: 202–203, KuchaĜ 1971: 218). Other branches of the CLI would research the dialects and history of Czech. The CLI quickly acquired the two most important linguistic journals in the country. Naše Ĝeþ became a CLI publication in 1949, and Slovo a slovesnost followed two years later (Daneš and Dokulil 1971: 203). Slovo a slovesnost had always been a functionalist journal, focusing attention on general issues of concern to linguists and counterbalancing the sometimes hectoring pronouncements of Naše Ĝeþ. Acquiring the latter, however, was a real coup for the functionalists, and it signalled the demise of an organized puristic movement in the Czech lands. Havránek took over as editor-in-chief of Naše Ĝeþ in place of the purist JiĜí Haller, and most of the editorial board were replaced by functionalists (like Daneš, who became managing editor), or others (like Trávníþek) chosen primarily because they were congenial to the current political regime.162 This coup spelled an end to the strong puristic orientation of Naše Ĝeþ and saw its reinvention as a journal devoted to the linguistic study of Czech. The CLI quickly began to increase its authority by forming contacts outside the field of linguistics. It was the natural home for terminological commissions of individual fields, where its employees served as members and advisors. The institute appointed “external members” at various publishing houses, on editorial boards, and in administrative roles, who were charged with looking after language affairs in their workplace (KuchaĜ 1971: 219). With the communist coup of 1948 and the establishment of a totalitarian state, the CLI acquired further tasks: Especially in the first years of the Institute’s existence, much effort was devoted to assisting directly with the linguistic stylization and format of texts, so over time this activity had to be limited to editing texts important from a linguistic and society-wide perspective (party and government documents, constitutions, certain laws, etc.). (KuchaĜ 1971: 217)

The fact that the CLI had a hand in the wording (although, of course, not

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in the content) of highly visible politico-doctrinal texts would prove controversial after 1989. 3.2. Linguistics and politics Despite the seeming peripherality of linguistics as a discipline, it was subject to many of the same political pressures as other academic subjects, and a certain political lability was a distinct professional asset for an ambitious Czech linguist in the late 1940s and early 1950s. With the imposition of Soviet-style totalitarianism, the previously independent institutions of higher education in Czechoslovakia were forced to accept a top-down organizational model, where their structures and curricula were largely dictated by the political and practical needs of the state. This period coincided with waves of purges, firings, imprisonments and executions of the politically suspect.163 The effect on the universities is described in convincing detail in Connelly (2000); suffice it to say that adherence to the political currents of the moment often seemed to be a prerequisite for professional, and sometimes personal, survival. Scholars’ mettle was tested almost immediately, when they were asked to accept two linguistically suspect dogmas. In 1948 they were presented with the dubious teachings of Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr and required to endorse them. Two years later, an article signed by Stalin appeared in the Soviet Communist Party daily Pravda, consigning Marr’s tenets and methods to the dustbin. This article and one of the amplifications to it were translated into Czech and published in the prestigious Czechoslovak journal Slovo a slovesnost.164 Czech journals of 1951 and 1952 teem with articles praising Stalin’s wisdom and shaking their proverbial heads over their recent delusion.165 Structuralism (see Trávníþek 1954) was roundly attacked as bourgeois and “cosmopolitan” – Jakobson was a Jew, of course – and it disappeared from the sight of Czech academia until the late 1950s, when it made an officially-sanctioned comeback, complete with the partial rehabilitation of Jakobson’s position as a member of the Prague School. Against this backdrop, functionalism consolidated its hold on Czech academia. The robustness of the functionalist approach certainly had much to do with its success, but politics played a role as well. Some of the functionalists, most notably Havránek, had longstanding socialist sympathies, and hitched functionalism to the new political order, ensuring its prosperity.166 In addition, because it appealed to usage as a primary determinant, functionalism had elements of vernacularism in it. These could be allied to

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the new regime’s stated goals of democratizing society and widening participation in decision-making. Purists, whose efforts in keeping Czech linguistics alive during the war had strengthened their sense of moral resolve, did not hesitate to use the language and structures of the new totalitarianism to try to arrest the course of language liberalization.167 Oldstyle Czech purism, however, was unabashedly elitist in its orientation and thus less congenial for the purposes of the communist regime. The top positions in language departments, institutes, and linguistic journals thus gradually passed into the hands of the functionalists.168 One area of natural affinity between functionalism and socialism was in the area of language and spelling reform. We have already seen that functionalism, crucially, embraced the notion of a regulated and centralized language bureaucracy, in line with the top-down models of control imposed by the new communist government. Functionalism continued to emphasize Havránek’s notion of “flexible stability”, focusing on the need to maintain continuity in a linguistic system without losing the prospect for change. The tension deliberately built into this carefully balanced slogan soon became evident. Some of the traditionalists focused on “stability”, seeing “flexibility” as necessary only in absolutely minor and occasional instances. Others focused on “flexibility”, proposing relatively extensive admission of non-standard elements to the standard while declaring them to be functionally marked, thus preserving the supposedly stable nature of the existing elements. In the area of grammar, the traditionalists were to win out. Sgall’s early proposals to introduce many features of Common Czech grammar into the standard (Sgall 1960, 1962, 1963) were rejected in articles published in the Russian journal Voprosy iazykoznaniia and in Slovo a slovesnost in the early 1960s (BČliþ, Havránek, and Jedliþka 1962, Havránek 1963). Skaliþka (1962), Karel Hausenblas (1962), Novák (1962) and others also contributed to this debate. Despite these setbacks to the reformist agenda, as we will see in section 4, some smaller reforms did succeed.

3.3. Compromised credibility Functionalism thus settled into an uneasy coexistence with socialist totalitarianism. This section will give a whistle-stop tour of some pro-communist pronouncements of functionalists in the 1950s and 1960s. Its purpose is not to discredit functionalist linguistics; after all, much of the rheto-

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ric was incidental to the principles underlying functionalism and was penned by those allied to it only loosely, while many leading functionalists found their activities and influence curtailed under communism.169 Instead, these examples hint at why functionalism’s authority in the public realm suffered after the end of communism. The co-opting of functionalism to serve totalitarian ends undermined its public image in later years, and indirectly condemned the 1993 reforms to a long and difficult birth. Stalin’s articles of 1950, which were loaded with vague and uncontroversial formulas about the development of language, provided a quick and easy way for functionalists to show how in step they were with the times. Havránek (1951–1952c: 81 [emphasis original]) wrote: A M a r x i s t s c i e n c e o f l a n g u a g e , wonderfully illuminated in recent articles by Stalin himself, gives us clearly for the first time an explanation of why language changes in all these parameters. Language is in Marxist science a s o c i e t a l p h e n o m e n o n . We can say concisely in Stalin’s words that “there is no language outside society”, and further consequently that without language society would cease to exist; it would fall apart. All societal phenomena serve society, and language serves it in a special way.

Long before there was a “Marxist science of language”, functionalists had pointed out the need to consider the functions of language in society, but Stalin’s articles gave some of them the chance to dress up their theory in the politically acceptable fashions of the day.170 Stalinism was even used to reintroduce structuralist ideas, which could be seen as relying on natural “laws” and were thus “scientific” and inevitably “Marxist”, and to support language cultivation activity based on structuralist linguistics, even when that activity favoured the language of the educated elite: It is necessary to look upon our contemporary standard language as the result of a long historical development. The creative efforts of our populace and the constant cultivation of our great personalities are expressed in it. The paths of this development conform with the inner developmental laws of language. Therefore, today’s language cultivation must be founded on the scientific discovery and confirmation of these laws; it must flow from them. We thus reject a liberalistic position towards the language, which descends at times into an almost nihilistic position: that directed cultivation of the language and intervention in it on the part of linguists is impossible (Jedliþka 1955: 149).

The rhetoric of socialism could also prove useful for silencing critics:

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In this situation [during the German occupation of 1938–1945] a certain number of language workers thought – incorrectly, and in contradiction to the true needs of the language – that it would be appropriate to renew knifegrinder purism, which positioned itself against true or often imagined foreign influences, even where it concerned items stable and ensconced in the language; that it was right to revive a one-sided revulsion against foreign words. And thus with the agreement of certain linguists, condemnations have appeared of words of foreign origin such as kolektiv, aktiv, and even realistický, which are closely linked with our new reality. (Jedliþka 1955: 147)

Although this reproach may seem mild to anyone unfamiliar with 1950s Czechoslovakia, Jedliþka was essentially accusing the new purists of rejecting key means of expression borrowed directly from Soviet models. Kolektiv ‘collective’ was used to describe the supposedly self-governing groups of workers in an enterprise or office. Aktiv referred to an official committee or group of people active in a particular cause, usually a political one. Realistický meant of course ‘realistic’ and had existed in Czech before the communists came to power, but was quickly adopted into a number of communist clichés: realistické Ĝešení politických otázek ‘a realistic resolution of political matters’, where it meant ‘pragmatic, bowing to the reality of changes since 1948’. Aligning functionalism and Marxism involved an inevitable oversimplification. Many of these tracts hailed functionalism’s suitability for managing the coinage of new words to reflect the building of a socialist society. Again, though, the connection between functionalism and socialism was only in the sphere of applied linguistics. Borrowing and calquing would have occurred with or without the functionalists. What they offered was a supposedly scientific way to optimize the acceptance of new words. Not all socialist rhetoric was directed in favour of the functionalists. In the early 1950s, young scholars like Sgall led an attempt to re-evaluate the utility of functionalism, claiming that the “bourgeois” structuralist principles that underpinned it compromised the school’s efficacy. While valuing the contributions of many of leading functionalists, Sgall criticized structuralism for its immanence, by which he meant its tendency to regard language as a system unto itself. A true Marxist linguistics, Sgall said, could incorporate elements of functionalism, but not all of it.171 The Prague School survived this and other objections by concerted defences of their positions and tactical retreats where necessary. When the form-centred description of structuralist approaches did fall out of official

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favour for a number of years, the Prague School temporarily jettisoned them to preserve the functionalist approach to language, which was precisely the aspect on which the language planning elements of the Prague School were based.172 When the political climate allowed, prominent functionalist-allied scholars did dare to show their colours and criticize certain excesses of the communists. For example, in an article published in 1968 on the eve of the Prague Spring, the once-stalwart Jaromír BČliþ permitted himself to note: The strict concentration of all journalism to such a great extent on the standardizing propagation of building socialism and its consolidation did, of course, have unfavourable effects, especially in the 1950s: creative journalistic genres such as the opinion piece and the column were severely limited in the daily press and elsewhere, thereby greatly weakening the stylistic possibilities of journalistic writing, and the newspapers lost their appeal and variety, acquiring the character of a tedious propagandistic gazette. (1968: 268)

With the end of the Prague Spring and the so-called “normalization” of Czech society, stricter political control was reasserted over academia: The appointment of an extreme hard-liner as minister of education brought about the wholesale dismissal of academic and administrative staff who had been active or shown sympathy with reform communism. The education minister’s campaign even involved the circulation of questionnaires requiring detailed information on the activities of both faculty and students in 1968 and 1969. The purges went beyond their immediate targets insofar as they also touched the families of those directly affected. The normalized regime did not regard dismissal from employment or notice to quit accommodation as sufficient punishment but also exacted retribution from, for instance, the children of targets, who were not infrequently barred from secondary and higher education. (Wheaton and Kavan 1992: 8)

Linguists from all schools of thought were affected by this crackdown, with demotions and firings common. Consequently, the very style that BČliþ had once criticized returned to dominate linguistic studies, and leading functionalists retreated to a defensive position, reiterating the school’s close links with communist ideology (see e.g. Havránek 1973). Their defence was nowhere as strident or tendentious as some of the rhetoric in the 1950s had been, but it nonetheless used the regime’s political code words to bolster the position of functionalist linguistics: This theory – whose notable contribution to general linguistics is incidentally valued worldwide to this day – demonstrated its viability, its progres-

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sive character, its practical utility, under new societal conditions as well. We could even say that only with the new societal situation was it possible for the theoretical knowledge consolidated earlier to be put into practice to its full extent. (KuchaĜ 1971: 214)

Terms like progressive character (pokrokový charakter) and new societal conditions (nové spoleþenské podmínky) were universally understood code words respectively for pro-Marxist and Soviet-style socialism. This reflexive use of boiler-plate Marxist slogans applied to institutions as well as linguistic schools. Ten years later, in describing the primary tasks of the CLI, its director placed first on the list “the study of the foundations of Marxist linguistics, and criticism of bourgeois theories in linguistics” (Petr 1981). This was, like most of these sorts of pronouncements, a risible exaggeration. Petr himself had in fact published extensively on the language of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (Redakce Naší Ĝeþi 1990: 103), and certainly members of the CLI did pen the occasional dutiful anniversary article with paeans to the progress of Marxist linguistics and its superiority to Western methods.173 Given the amount of time and attention that staff devoted to their other tasks, this politically oriented work hardly qualified as their top priority; nonetheless, it would not have done to say otherwise at the time.174 Political labels were often purely opportunistic, anyway. The functionalists convened conferences on perfectly serious topics hidden under tendentious names (Problems of Marxist Linguistics [Vácha 1962]; Contemporary Issues of Language Culture in Socialist Society [KuchaĜ 1979]), whose proceedings – when read beyond the tendentious keynote articles – include numerous interesting scholarly contributions. These few examples represent only the tip of the iceberg. By the 1960s, then, a group of functionalists had succeeded in presenting aspects of the Prague School programme as a leading Czechoslovak incarnation of Marxist linguistics. In the short run, this allowed “real” functional linguistics to prosper, as it was “protected” by the occasional dreary leading article intoning its correct class perspective. In the long run, though, once the communist system collapsed, this identification created problems for functionalism and the institutions it helped to create. 4. 1957–1958: The first communist-era Rules The 1957 and 1958 editions of the Rules of Czech Orthography represented the last major spelling changes before the revision of 1993. Unlike the 1993

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reforms, they came into effect with little public debate and passed quickly into use. Examining the terrain of the 1957–1958 reforms, however, we can see the hints of dissent that were to re-emerge almost forty years later. 4.1. Preparations for the reforms From the late 1940s onwards there began to be talk of the need for another spelling reform and a new edition of the Rules of Czech Orthography. As we have seen, previous reforms had been somewhat of a mixed bag.175 The 1922 “simplifications” in the spelling of borrowed words with had given rise to confusion, but in the opposite direction from what had been expected (cf. section 1.4). Already in the 1920s, the functionalists noticed a tendency for people to pronounce all intervocalic in borrowed words as [z]. While the 1941 reforms made numerous less controversial changes in the spelling of native words, they failed to address this issue, and managed to add to the confusion surrounding the spelling of borrowed words by reintroducing many Latinate spellings previously abandoned (cf. section 2.3). Table 25. Analogy and spelling pronunciation pre-1922 spelling 1922 spelling orthoepic pronunciation expected problem in 1922 actual problem proposed resolution in 1940s

‘crisis’ krise krise [z] by analogy with diskuse people will say [s] none spell instead of

‘discussion’ diskusse diskuse [s] none by analogy with krise people say [z] vigorously correct and continue to spell

Spelling reform was, of course, not exclusively a Czech preoccupation, nor were the Czechs the only nation to take a top-down approach to the issue. Similar reforms were taking place at this time across the new Soviet bloc and were reported in the Czech scholarly press; these included, among others, Romanian (HoĜejší 1954), Serbo-Croatian (Jelínek 1958), Slovak (Šmilauer 1950b; on the modern situation see Blanár 1999), and Lower Sorbian, a small Slavonic language spoken in the (then-) German Democratic Republic (Frinta 1948, 1951). The Czechs also reported on the pos-

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sibility of orthographic reform elsewhere: in France (Buben 1956), Portugal (Hampejs 1957) and the English-speaking world (Fried 1957). A CLI commission was formed in 1951 to instigate a further orthographic reform. Its composition appears in books and articles as: Jaromír BČliþ (“head of the collective”), Eduard ýech, František Daneš, Vladimír Daníþek, Alois Jedliþka, Adolf Kamiš, Julie Olivová, Vladimír Šmilauer, and František Váhala.176 Of these, Daneš, Jedliþka and Šmilauer are widelyknown and respected functionalist linguists. The commission had external advisors representing various professions, including journalists (KuchaĜ and Váhala 1960: 41). Váhala described the tasks of this new commission, which would be: to continue the “domestication” of foreign words; to make changes to the rules for capitalization; to simplify how the prepositions s and z, and the prefixes s- and z- were used; to make changes in the principles of hyphenation and word division; and to explore areas where Czech and Slovak orthography might be harmonized (1951–1952: 115–117). There were two constituencies that needed to be appeased in planning a new edition of the Rules: the Czech public and the communist apparatus. Both potential audiences loom large in the documents that detail how the reform was planned and carried out.

4.2. Consulting the public From the very first, the revisers sensed that the public could react badly to further changes. Daneš (1953: 124) warned: Certainly none of us want orthographic rules and the spellings of individual words to be constantly changing, but on the other hand, everyone knows full well that the currently valid 1941 Rules are not completely satisfactory, as they are in some places pointlessly complex or inconsistent [...] and for writers, they impede reliable mastery of the standard language in its written form, not to mention correct reading and correct pronunciation (see e.g. the frequent errors in words like diskuse, kultura, etc.). The inadequate state of our orthography is also clearly shown by the ceaseless seesawing in the way individual words are written in various editions of the Rules. For example, it has been determined that from the publication of the Orthographic Index (1886) to the ninth edition of the Rules of Czech Orthography (1926), approximately 1100 words and forms changed their orthographic form, and in the alphabetical index of the 1941 Rules there are over 1200 instances of changes from the 1926 edition.

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This was a clear slap at what the revisers considered excessive intervention, and the upcoming Rules were thus sold to the public in a different guise. They were to be a partial revision that regularized details but avoided wholesale changes in writing conventions. Daneš 1953 also details efforts to open up the reform process to the reading and writing public. He and his colleagues conceived of the programme in four stages. In the first stage, the CLI convened a panel of its own employees and other specialists to work out its fundamental principles. In the second stage, this orthographic commission circulated its proposals to a select group of teachers, authors, journalists, and editors, and convened a consultative meeting to discuss the proposals. A new, revised proposal was then produced. In the third stage, the commission produced a lengthy questionnaire to circulate to the public, primarily through schools and other workplaces. It contained numerous individual words and grammatical forms where there was some question as to what spelling or form would be most acceptable. In the fourth stage, the commission would assemble the final version for publication. The first consultation engendered, according to Daneš, a “lively and substantial” discussion (1953: 126). As a result, some of the more radical proposals were dropped. The meeting hit an impasse on the issue of how permissive the Rules should be: There was […] an interesting discussion on the extent to which orthographic rules should permit two ways of writing, especially where they result from two different views on a subject (e.g. capitalization, comma placement, adverbial compounds, etc.). Those on the practical end in schools and typography recommended that the Rules not permit such possibilities; in such instances, pupils and the majority of the writing public supposedly clamour for an unambiguous answer (this is right, that is wrong). In contrast, the writers’ representatives, along with many other participants, correctly pointed out that such excessively simplified rules would impoverish the language and deprive authors of the possibility of expressing themselves in a rich and nuanced manner. (1953: 127)

The commission then revised its recommendations and sent them to the governing board of the Academy of Sciences for approval. Once this hurdle was cleared, the commission prepared the questionnaire for public consultation. The questionnaire was an incredibly detailed document. Its fifty-plus pages covered a vast range of words and features, where respondents were asked to fill in a missing ending or word, say which form of two or three

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they preferred, or state whether they agreed with a formulated rule. An anonymous note in Slovo a slovesnost said the questionnaire was sent to “leading active users of the standard language, foremost writers, translators, and journalists” (Redakce Slova a slovesnosti 1955: 128). Unfortunately, the return rate was very low, pointing up a fundamental problem: to be useful, the questionnaire needed to be extremely long, but its length apparently put people off. Why limit the questionnaire to three select professions? There were practical and ideological considerations. On a practical level, it minimized potential problems with the data. The questionnaire assumed a significant level of linguistic competence and selfawareness. The commission needed to be sure that respondents had a reliable knowledge of the standard and were familiar with the various linguistic conventions and shortcuts used in phrasing the questions. But this choice of respondents hides an ideological presumption as well. Despite rhetoric about making the standard language easier to master for the average user, the functionalists continued to follow the principles set out in 1932: that the standard is an instrument of greater refinement and subtlety than the common spoken dialects, and that its regulation must respect these higher-level functions. It therefore follows that only people fully conversant with these special functions can be entrusted with the regulation of the language. This presumption is not uncommon or unwarranted, but it is fundamentally elitist. While this was going on, the commission was busy publishing a string of articles in Naše Ĝeþ, Slovo a slovesnost, and the popular press, informing people of the upcoming changes.177 4.3. Placating the Party and government The second audience that needed to be reassured about the nature of the reforms was the Communist Party. Party membership, of course, was a requirement for fulfilling most responsible administrative functions, down to the level of individual departments at universities and scientific institutes. Those entrusted with coordinating the reforms (Havránek, Trávníþek, BČliþ, and Váhala) were Party members, but important decisions had to be referred up to the higher echelons of the Party. Orthography was a subject of enough importance that what Váhala blandly termed “responsible political places” participated in discussions of the reforms:

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…it is necessary to realize that adaptations to orthography – which is, after all, a matter of agreement between all users of the standard language – is not a matter only for linguists. Thus it was necessary to allow all the highest institutions, which bear responsibility for our cultural, economic, and political development, to evaluate the original draft of the Rules, and they also weighed the possibilities for implementation in the given situation. (Váhala 1956: 214–215)

From the very first, reformers attached great importance to gaining the Party’s confidence. In announcing the preparation of the new Rules, Váhala (1951–1952: 115) put a socialist spin on the need to update them and to continue earlier reforms nativizing the spelling of loan words: What previously was specialized and rare has long since ceased to be so. With the scientificization of working methods, with the penetration of specialist literature into the broadest masses of our workers, with the governing of daily life according to the scientific laws of historical and dialectical materialism, many words that were previously truly narrowly specialized have now become the common property of the whole of socialist society. The existing method of writing them has divided society clearly into two groups: those who are college graduates, know several languages, and can thus figure out how to write and pronounce each such word – and on the other hand those who do not have such education. This, however, is an untenable state of affairs. To the extent possible, it is necessary to render the spelling of these foreign words independent of foreign orthographic systems, and to write them according to the pronunciation that has crystallized in standard Czech. This is what has been done wholesale for words borrowed through Russian, e.g. dispeþer ‘dispatcher’, kombajn ‘combine harvester’, šeping ‘shaping frame’.

Váhala (1951–1952: 116) also suggested that the reforms presented an opportunity to bring Czech and Slovak orthography into closer alignment: The harmonious coexistence of two fraternal nations in a common state has shown that it would be an advantage for both if certain orthographic matters were treated in the same manner and on the same principles.

This particular movement had a long and convoluted history. It can be traced to the appearance of Czechoslovakism before the First World War. This ideology considered Czech and Slovak to be two varieties of the same language. It eventually became the guiding language ideology of the first Czechoslovak state. However, as Slovak orthography had consistently opted for more rapid convergence between spelling and pronunciation, the desire to align Czech and Slovak orthography also came to be associated

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with a more reformist approach towards spelling in the Czech lands. The gloss of “socialist brotherhood” on Czech-Slovak convergence was merely the latest incarnation of this trend. Plaudits from officially approved authors Pavel Bojar and Marie Pujmanová graced professional consultation sessions on the reforms. From the quality of Pujmanová’s prose in her address (reprinted, for those who missed it, in Naše Ĝeþ later that year), it was clear she was selected on merits other than literary ones: We love our mother tongue. We love Czech not only for patriotic reasons, but because it is wonderful material for our work. The language is lovely, with a flective, epic verb, vivid, concrete, three-dimensional, many-hued. It is a joy to write in Czech. [...] Often I have noticed that a common reader, when he comes upon a foreign word that he cannot read or understand, feels ashamed, excluded, devalued. I therefore recommend that all foreign words be written in Czech so that everyone can read them without errors in his mother tongue. It is necessary to create a consistent, democratic order on this point. (Pujmanová 1953: 128)

A series of poorly formulated recommendations followed, but they were obviously not the point of her speech: she was put on the podium to parade the commission’s official stamp of approval. It could not have hurt that, after her address, anything proposed by the professional linguists conducting the reform would look eminently reasonable by comparison. One would think, from the reformers’ rhetoric, that communist leaders were favourably disposed to these changes and the so-called “demo-cratization” of orthography that they brought. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that the opposite is true: many communists, especially those higher in the Party, admitted the changes only grudgingly. Stich claimed that when the commission proposed the wholesale introduction of spellings with 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.

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4.4. The format and content of the reforms The 1957 reforms brought a number of innovations. The entries and examples throughout the Rules were rewritten using socialist vocabulary and clichés (see chapter 6, section 2.1) to reflect the new political reality. Missing from the new Rules were the lengthy summaries of Czech grammar found in the introductions to all the previous editions. Even so, the introduction grew substantially longer through the addition of numerous examples, transcription tables, and fuller explanations of the principles of Czech orthography. The dictionary section ballooned in size, bringing the overall length of the Rules to 477 pages – as against a scant 192 for the 1941 Rules. The material that formed the basis for the spellings and grammatical forms was also subtly different from that of previous reforms. Jedliþka (1950) reported that the CLI had begun collecting a morphology excerpt file to complement its long-existing lexical file. He stressed that in their excerpting work, they relied on popular texts; fiction and scholarly literature were included sparingly or left to one side, because the excerpters wished to focus on the “ordinary standard language” (jazyk bČžnČ spisovný). With literature, Jedliþka stated, they only added excerpts after careful consideration as to whether a form was used for effect rather than neutrally. This represented a significant shift from the approach that prevailed in the 1920s– 1940s, when the Czech of literary authors was considered to be the gold standard. The most obvious innovation, however, was that the Rules were published in two editions, intended for differing audiences and with significant differences in their content. The first version, published in late 1957, was termed the “full” version. It was brought out by Academia Publishers, the press of the Academy of Sciences, hence its later nickname: the “academic” edition. Its large dictionary contained a substantial number of technical terms. This edition was aimed at the “professional” language user: academics, journalists, translators, and editors. The large number of doublets in the dictionary appeared twice each, in both their alphabetical locations, i.e. first esej i essay, then later on essay i esej. This cumbersome solution was an attempt at neutrality on the matter of doublets: it left users to decide for themselves which spelling they preferred. Now that the grammar overview had been cut, this edition contained no grammatical information at all; it was simply a spelling manual.

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The second version appeared in 1958 with the State Pedagogical Publishing House (Státní pedagogické nakladatelství) and was dubbed the “school” edition, as it carried the approval of the Ministry of Education and Culture for use as an “ancillary book for general educational, pedagogical, and technical schools”. At 389 pages, it was substantially slimmer than the “full” version. Its introduction was shorter by half, with more simply formulated explanations for pupils. It lacked “certain details which are meaningful only for mature users, should they need at times to strive for a subtler shade of meaning or style, etc.” (BČliþ 1958a: 103). The dictionary was also shortened, with many technical terms left out. However, the grammatical information in individual dictionary entries had been beefed up. This was a response in part, at least, to the fact that general grammatical principles were no longer available in the introduction. The authors also added to the dictionary some very common words that were never misspelled, but had a number of possible forms (BČliþ 1958: 104). Typically these were words where the standard form was archaic in spoken communication, but older editions of the Rules had refused to admit written equivalents of the spoken forms. Doublets were handled differently in the school Rules. Each pair was listed only once, under the nativized spelling (esej i essay). BČliþ (1958a: 103) commented: In this way, the second spelling is admitted as possible, although for use in schools the first form is recommended. This is in the spirit of the developmental tendencies of Czech to write domesticated foreign words with a nativized spelling; and as in schools we are dealing with new users of the standard language, who are not as encumbered by older orthographic tradition, it was possible, in contrast to the academic edition, to select an arrangement that supports the developmentally progressive form.

The division of the Rules into two versions thus attempted to accommodate those who wanted choice and those who wanted clear recommendations. Changes to the content of the Rules were far less radical than changes to the format. Váhala (1956) divides them into seven areas: – – – –

Changes to the prepositions s and z and the prefixes s- and z-; Changes to vowel length in some native words formed from a root plus infix; Changes to the spelling of loan words; Expansion of the use of capitalization for proper nouns;

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–

– –

Expansion in the number of prepositional phrases written as a single word: propĜíštČ for the older pro pĜíštČ ‘for next time’, bezesporu ‘doubtless’ vs. older beze sporu, which was now to be used only in the literal sense of ‘without an argument’; Reformulation of rules for comma use to allow more leeway; Word division (hyphenation).

In addition, there were changes to the morphological information given in the school edition, although Váhala points out that these were based on previous work by specialists in morphology; he did not regard codification of morphology as within the purview of an orthographic handbook (1956: 223). The spelling of loan words was the most controversial, and deserves some closer attention, because it was the subject of clashes in 1993–1994. As we saw earlier, linguists observed that when pronouncing borrowed words, Czechs tended to lengthen certain vowels and adapt non-Czech consonant clusters to a recognizable shape, although these tendencies were not universally applied. The 1957 Rules continued the trend of accommodating spelling to what scholars deemed to be the accepted Czech pronunciation of these words. Exceptions were made for uncommon words and for specialized technical vocabulary. In some cases the older forms were left alongside the new ones, while in other cases the new, supposedly more phonetic spelling replaced the old one entirely (see Table 26, p. 139). These changes were clearly reformist, but were not a final solution. A large number of words followed the analysa/analýza type, having two possible spellings. The innovative one was recommended but not prescribed. The rules for introducing new phonetic spellings and allowing doublets were vague, relying on a sense of when a term had entered “general usage” and whether or not it still had a “specialist connotation”. They were, as befits the functionalist credo, usage-led: in other words, they followed observation of how words were (or should be) used, rather than looking for abstract categories based on formal criteria that could be mechanically applied to all words of a certain shape. The problem is that usage-led criteria are in constant flux as usage changes, and the situation can look substantially different from differing perspectives. 4.5. The reaction to the reforms The vast majority of published reactions to the new Rules were positive.

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KuchaĜ and Váhala (1960: 42) list enthusiastic reviews in the Communist Party flagship organ Rudé právo, the cultural weekly Literární noviny and the teachers’ journal Uþitelské noviny, as well as dailies Práce and Rovnost. This uniformity was not surprising. News media and professional organs were controlled by a system of party oversight. They would have found it politically difficult to oppose a reform that had received clearance at the highest levels. Table 26. Changes in the spellings of foreign words gloss ‘anaemia’ ‘theory’ ‘synthesis’

older spelling anaemie theorie synthese, synthesa

1957 spelling anémie teorie syntéza, synthese, synthesa tenis konzerva

‘tennis’ ‘conserves’

tennis konserva

‘analysis’

analysa

analýza, analysa

‘president’

president

president

‘workshop’

atelier

ateliér

‘culture’

kultura

kultura

principle Æ Æ still optional for a few words Æ everyday vocabulary: Æ as pronounced abstract vocabulary: Æ optional but recommended small no. of exceptions where remains write long vowels where they are pronounced exception for [WÖ], still usually

If the lead articles and editorials took an overall positive tack, opinion pieces and “man in the street” interviews revealed some decidedly negative sentiments among the public. Summarizing the period in retrospect, KuchaĜ and Váhala (1960: 45) admitted the depth of opposition quite candidly, although they had sharp words for their detractors: Critical voices also expressed themselves in our press, calling attention to actual (in lesser numbers) and supposed inconsistencies and insufficiencies in the Rules, certain principles, and individual changes. These were primarily critical reactions of readers of the older generation, who were led more by emotional impulses than by a true factual knowledge of the new edition of the Rules, or even of the preceding [1941] version. Frequently the

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new Rules were criticized for amendments they did not contain, occasionally for changes which had already been made in earlier Rules. Both general and concrete criticisms often lacked an adequate factual foundation. [...] Sometimes – especially in the regional press, but also here and there in central press organs – [...] it was evident how poorly informed the newspaper journalists and correspondents were, and how irresponsible the editorial board had been toward its readers. In these instances, orthography was confused with language, its vocabulary and grammar (they would write, for example about the Rules of the Czech Language) and the Rules were made out to be a linguists’ fiat (in contradiction with reality – they had forgotten about the public questionnaires preceding the publication of the Rules).

They also dismissed the three lengthier review articles of the Rules that had been most critical of them, saying they were “not meant as a serious critical analysis”, “without sufficient factual analysis, despite the harshness of certain rebukes”, and that they contained “mistakes and errors of a fundamental nature” (KuchaĜ and Váhala 1960: 46). The only criticism that they acknowledged as being well founded was a letter from the copy editors and proofreaders of Rudé právo, printed in Tvorba (22 January 1959). These workers admitted that the large number of doublets for loan words in the new Rules had probably been the only possible solution, but felt that it encouraged people to use either form more or less randomly. They therefore asked that the number of doublets be drastically reduced in future editions. KuchaĜ and Váhala also looked at which changes had taken root most easily and which had caused problems. Less problematic were reforms to and 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 . 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 in places where the Rules did not

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recommend it, e.g. kurz ‘course’, prezident ‘president’ and even socializmus ‘socialism’ on a commemorative 30-heller stamp (1960: 51– 52). Newspapers were the first to convert. They encountered significant problems implementing the new spellings consistently. Journals followed more slowly, with many – especially in technical fields – adopting a mixed style in which they retained older spellings for words specific to their discipline. One reason for this was that the principles behind nativized spelling of borrowings brought the Rules into conflict with orthographic commissions for particular technical fields. These specialized commissions were most often run under the auspices of the CLI and had an official CLI representative on them. For the most part, they agreed on implementing some subset of the Rules in their journals and publications, but often rejected nativized spellings of specialist terms, preferring to follow the more international spellings they had used to date. KuchaĜ and Váhala found “isolated” instances of magazines and journals that simply continued to follow the 1941 Rules, about which they said: This is an incorrect and unjustified approach. It is certainly possible that even after some time traces of an older form of writing will continue to appear, but if such retention of old habits is deliberate, it is in no way possible to approve of this (1960: 53)

This statement highlights a new feature of the 1957 Rules: their assumed universal applicability. Earlier editions had been mandatory only in schools, and this by virtue of the fact that the Ministry of Education would commission the revision and/or participate in the process, before having approval over the final product. Whether or not publishers adopted the Rules had been a matter of their own judgment. But in a totalitarian state, where the one ruling party had been involved in commissioning, altering, and approving the Rules, the potential for applicability was much wider. The authors clearly saw universal conformity to the Rules as a great benefit to society. In whose interest could it possibly be, after all, for journals and newspapers to spell a word different ways? Orthography was not, in their view, an integral part of language, but merely a tool for rendering it. Imposing a certain set of spellings or options was, they felt, hardly a reason to cry censorship or suppression. Two facts about Czech society explained the near-universal implementtation of the Rules in the press.

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The first was the scholarly authority of the CLI. In the late 1950s, the CLI was at the height of its authority; its orthographic commission boasted the country’s two most influential linguists (Havránek and Trávníþek) as its patrons, and other distinguished linguists made up the ranks of the authors. Consultation had been undertaken with the country’s educated elite from the earliest stages. The authors of the Rules thus had every expectation that their recommendations would be fully followed. The second was that mechanisms for ensuring compliance were now available in a way that they had never been in democratic Czechoslovakia. The Party and government apparatus was well represented in every institution in the country, and Party discipline meant that a decision handed down from above, questionable or otherwise, was to be implemented with a minimum of fuss. The gradual but eventually almost universal implementation of the new Rules after 1957 testify to the success that the orthographic commission had in bringing the Communist Party on board and making their acclamation and implementation a matter of Party policy. 4.6. Discussions in the 1960s and 1970s Debates over orthography did not end with the publication of the 1957 Rules. Cvrþek (2006) has shown that, far from it, the introduction of partial reforms encouraged many linguists to believe that a more comprehensive and radical reform could be just around the corner. Scholars like BČliþ, who had been an author of the 1957 reforms, and Vachek, an early member of the Prague School, as well as up-and-coming younger linguists like Sgall and Novák, argued in scholarly journals for varying degrees of simplifying and rationalizing the principles of Czech orthography. In their views, and those of other scholars at the time, Czech orthography contained many traps and difficulties that were the result of historical accident. During this period, linguists collected objective evidence that Czechs found their spelling difficult to master. In Vachek’s view, inconsistencies in spelling complicated the process of moving from the natural spoken domain to the written one. These leftovers from a previous era lacked functionality and should not be retained (Cvrþek 2006: 48–59). A more moderate group agreed on the linguistic principles behind the idea of reform, but doubted that they could be implemented. Cvrþek places one of the Prague School founders, Bohumil Trnka, in this group, as well as Lumír Klimeš, who argued:

Conclusions

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Radical reform […] would come into conflict with the norm, for this new codification would not be a reflection of the current norm, but the result of a noticeably artificial construct, even if it is very well thought through and in theory excellently designed. (cited in Cvrþek 2006: 52)

However, for other linguists, orthography was also portrayed as a cultural artifact, with value unto itself. Kopeþný stood against the possibility of any reforms, calling orthography part of the “heritage of the whole nation” and deriding frequent reforms as “displays of disrespect” for the nation’s common property (Cvrþek 2006: 52). These views set aesthetic and historical criteria against the linguistic ones of the reformers and moderates, seeing orthography as something far more significant than a mere linguistic tool. In the end, the sceptics and anti-reformers won out, and the issue of radical reform was shelved. As a consequence, the 1957 Rules were to far outlive their anticipated lifespan. Previously there had been substantial revisions to the Rules every decade or two, but the 1957 Rules survived in essentially unaltered form for 36 years. Minor revisions were undertaken at approximately 5-year intervals, when the academic version was republished; these changes were then incorporated into the school version, which was reprinted more or less every year. Frequent articles in the scholarly press testify to the fact that linguists had not yet given up entirely on the idea of further root-and-branch reform of the spelling system and continued to explore both the problems of the existing spelling system and ways to address them.179 5. Conclusions The history of orthographic reform in the Czech lands shows the same concerns arising again and again. The relationship of the language to that of its foreign neighbours, the role of purism, and the influence of authoritarian views of language are abiding concerns that appear in different guises in different periods. We can also trace the rise and fall of particular structural conditions for reform and changes in the societal background to them. 5.1. Motivations and spelling reform In the history of Czech, we see clear shifts in the “status agendas” identi-

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fied in Fishman (2004) (see chapter 1, section 5.3). The preoccupation with purity, associated in the nineteenth century with the “revivers” of Czech and its standardizers, has in the course of the twentieth century become the province of those opposed to the regulators. The latter group has, beginning in the 1920s, begun to incorporate elements of vernacularism into its agenda, with the high point of this being in the 1950s, when the science of linguistics promised to provide regulators with a planned path for the rapprochement of the standard code with the language’s spoken varieties. Uniqueness has never played a strong role in Czech language planning, but as the fashion for basing planning decisions on etymology waned throughout the twentieth century, the opposing pole of internationalization assumed increasing importance. However, internationalization itself did not have a single, uniform direction. A pan-Slavist variant, strongest in the late nineteenth century, the 1930s, and the 1950s through 1980s, looked to developments in Slovak, Russian and other languages in the Slavonic world, while a Western-oriented variant, strongest during the Nazi occupation and then again in the 1990s, emphasized the traditional cultural ties of the Czechs with the Germanic and Latin world. The former pushed orthography in the direction of reform and nativization of loan words, the latter towards the preservation of spellings familiar from Western European languages. Classicization emerges as a potent force in Czech during the National Revival, with its express intention of resuscitating many elements of a prestigious older variety of the language to invigorate the contemporary code. Like purism, it reaches a peak of influence in the mid- to late nineteenth century and then recedes as the developing contemporary standard becomes more firmly rooted. The particular history of the Czechs, with its traditional view of the neighbouring German/Austrian language culture as its oppressors, has discouraged any Sprachbund motives for spelling reform. Einbau motivations appear at several points in Czech language and spelling reform. Nineteenth-century borrowings from Russian and Polish, two languages with more continuous literary traditions, can be seen as evidence of an Einbau motive. In the interwar period, Czechslovakism provided an opportunity for spelling reformers to advocate the harmonization of Czech and Slovak spelling – a cause that continued in the communist period, long after the First Republic’s political movements had been buried.180

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In terms of Ager’s motivations (see chapter 1, section 4), identity and insecurity have been constant motives in attempts to regulate the look of the Czech language. The promotion of German in the Czech lands as a state language starting in the 1620s increases the ideological (in Ager’s definition) significance of Czech language regulation. Inequality in the Czech context has traditionally focused on the subservient position of the Czech language vis-à-vis German. With the rise of teachers’ organizations and an education ministry, the inequality motive was extended to the social sphere. It is here that we see the first strong pushes for simplification on the grounds of social exclusion from the “writing classes.” And instrumentality first appears as a motive in the seventeenth century, growing in importance throughout the National Revival until it explicitly becomes part of the functionalist language programme. 5.2. Spelling reform and language reform We have seen that spelling reform does not follow the same course as language reform in general. Some of the most enthusiastic purists as regards the language’s grammar and vocabulary were its most avid spelling reformers. For these people, spelling is a means of transmission of linguistic form – a sign pointing to a sign, if you like. Respect for the sign of the first order (the language’s forms) is achieved by manipulating these signs of the second order (the orthography) to make it yield a truer picture of them. One trend that grew as the twentieth century wore on was the number of people who raise the status of these second-order signs to the level of the firstorder ones, claiming that e.g. museum and muzeum (both pronounced with [z]) are as different as, say, the choice of the old-fashioned infinitive dČlati over the modern dČlat ‘to do’, or the more colloquial form kupuju ‘I buy’ over the traditional kupuji, where the different spellings reflects two distinct morphological endings in pronunciation. The general population has not usually shared the linguists’ eagerness to make this distinction between orthography and language. As a result, public rows over spelling rules have spilled over into the debate about the gulf between the standard and its spoken dialects. Proponents of spelling reform are assumed automatically to favour drastic moves to adapt standard grammar and vocabulary to that of the common spoken dialects, and vice versa.

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5.3. Purism and spelling reform Can we still discern purism in the Czech language debate? The answer is yes, but its legacy rests half with the conservatives and half with the innovators. Following Blommaert (1999a, 1999b), we can divorce puristic ideologies from their links with particular backers and notice how they are reproduced in the arguments of various parties. Those who object to reform in modern Czech are, unlike the resistors of a previous era, not purists in the classical sense of the word. They are conservatives or traditionalists, who object to change on the basis that it disrupts cultural and practical continuity. Much of the conservative rhetoric continues typical purist arguments about Czech values and metaphoric representations of the language as an object, person, animal or plant to be tended and cared for, but in the area of spelling, their agenda is devoted to preserving a higher status and cachet for loan words – the very opposite of purism. This testifies to a new role for the foreign borrowing in Czech after the Second World War: with the growth of internationalisms, loan words could become a sign of prestige and culture, rather than of cultural disintegration.181 The other traditional strand of purism has striven to establish a mechanism that would ensure greater regulation and prescription. This mechanism was to a large extent embodied in the creation of the CLI in 1946. However, it has passed definitively into the hands of the innovators, whose viewpoints on spelling, grammar, and pronunciation are more relativistic and based on observation rather than a supposedly immutable “right and wrong” based on intuition and feeling. While the philosophical orientation of the “power brokers” of Czech orthography has changed, their commitment to a system of orthographic regulation has continued.

5.4. Functionalism and spelling reform The appearance of functionalism on the Czech linguistic scene marked a sea-change in the way the nation’s language institutions conducted language reform. Still, functionalism did not manage to solve all the problems associated with the reform of Czech spelling. Of all the changes functionalism underwent, the most striking was its entanglement with the communist regime and its adoption of the socialist slogans of the time. This was undoubtedly a rational gambit, given the po-

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litical climate. However, further down the line, it seriously endangered the first post-communist reforms. The Czech public of the 1990s, as any public anywhere, proved to be fundamentally uninterested in matters of pure linguistics. They could not evaluate the theoretical underpinnings of functionalism or judge whether there had been any real linguistic consequences to the debates that had gone on behind the façade of Marxist rhetoric. But it did not require a doctorate in linguistics to see that many of the nation’s leading linguists – including those responsible for instigating the reforms in the 1950s and those who had headed the CLI at the beginning of the 1990s – had in bygone days pledged their support to a now-discredited political creed and emphasized the close connections between Marxism and functionalism. Regardless of whether this embrace of Marxism was genuine, tactical, or misguided, the link itself was a matter of record. It was on plain view to anyone opening Naše Ĝeþ, Slovo a slovesnost, or any of the various university monograph series and edited volumes of the time. Functionalism’s socialist pedigree led members of the public to conflate the goals of spelling reform with those of the regime, even though they were often opposed. Linguist Zdenka Rusínová, commenting in the cultural weekly Respekt (November 1993) on language reform, says: The way the former regime conceived of it was an ideologized and politicized approach, through which the standard language was, as they said, brought closer to the “broad masses.” Often it involved the illogical and hasty nativizing of foreign words, as well as the artificial “popularizing” of the language. The result was not the cultivation of the “people’s” language – which is spontaneous and regulates itself – but rather a reduction in the dimensionality of standard Czech, which could be seen in the near demise of linguistic presentations of a higher and more cultivated nature, […] in the degradation of public expression, in the flattening out of artistic language, in the formalization of expression precisely where it should have been relevant and precise, etc.

This pronouncement collapses issues promulgated by linguists (nativizing foreign words) with sins where responsibility more properly rested with the Communist Party, such as the general degradation of public language, and shows the extent to which the two groups had become one in the mind not only of the general public, but even of those specialists who had been “outside” the reforms. There were other places where functionalism ran into conflict in promoting spelling reform. Its leading scholars insisted that methods that had proved successful for language description would be equally applicable

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to language prescription. Working from actual usage meant that the recommended rules had to mirror the messiness and inconsistency of a language change captured at a point in time. As a result, the functionalists would create lists of rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions. Their critics would therefore ask why the word teorie should be written with a 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

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reform: the belief that authority is best lodged in a single institution. Although purists from the country’s cultural elite were among the earliest and most vocal proponents of it, their particular vision of institutionalization did not triumph. Pressure from groups such as teachers and certain linguists made the institutionalist agenda reformist rather than conservative. The successes of the purists were embodied foremost in the unofficial sphere: the journal Naše Ĝeþ in the interwar period. The vision of institutionalization that ultimately triumphed was that of the functionalists, who managed to ally it to a scientific ideology: the belief that data from “objective” studies of language could be applied to language planning. Parallel to the debate over institutionalization was a debate over the inclusiveness of orthographic reform. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, we saw attempts to include various actors and interest groups in the process of reform, but they were by no means broad-based. With the advent of “approved” manuals, the consultation process was formalized, but it nonetheless at each stage targeted some groups while explicitly or implicitly excluding others. Those who could speak the “language of linguistics” were, under certain conditions, offered a voice in the reforms, while those who did not were assumed to be only consumers of language reform. While the formal structures correspond well to the sort of cost/benefit model proposed by Cooper (1989: 80–83), the informal debates reveal a much messier picture, where rational bean-counting is subordinated to individual aesthetic reactions and beliefs. 5.6. Reactions to reform The most consistent lesson we can draw from the history of Czech orthography is that reforms have come and gone, but a growing and vocal class of intellectuals has been generally reluctant to accept changes that they feel are being foisted on them by politicians and teachers. Proposals for reform may be welcomed in theory, but they are then fought tooth and nail, and it has required tremendous personal charisma, prestige, and doggedness on the part of the reformers to see them through. Successful language reformers began with a workable idea, and cajoled the more authoritative people and institutions around them into accepting their suggestions. Unsuccessful reformers may have had a bad product – but then again, it may just be that they failed to persuade enough of the great and the good

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onto their side. A continuing source of conflict is the fact that standard language reformers are trying to strike a bargain that is to the detriment of many of the language’s existing users. To smooth the way for the next generation, the current generation must re-learn many of their habits. But people who have already mastered the basics and some details of Czech spelling, although they may report themselves as being in favour of reform, have a “feel” for how things are spelled and in actual fact are loath to part with this security. It is precisely this group that is in a position to make decisions and to proclaim their views to the literate community. Consequently, they are the ones who can do the most damage to a language reform. We see evidence of this widespread public resistance throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in 1993 it exploded in its most virulent form yet.

Chapter 5 Czech orthographic reform, 1980–1994

We underestimated orthography. It’s not just the most trivial thing about language. It’s also the most visible. Karel Hausenblas182

Each revision of the official spelling manual of Czech, the Rules of Czech Orthography, has proved highly controversial. The 1957 reform, despite its extensive consultation period, was perceived by many as being a “topdown” imposition, as were further reforms introducing elements of nonstandard Czech into the arena of the standard. Any discussion of reform from thereon in had both a practical linguistic component and a sociopolitical subtext. In this way, a relatively minor set of changes came to be seen as a national scandal, prompting a widespread public outcry. This chapter outlines the “where and when” of recent orthographic reforms in Czech. The issues they raised are taken up in the following chapters.

1. The reforms from 1980–1989 An orthographic commission had existed since the 1930s, and was composed of Czech linguists from a variety of backgrounds and departments. At some times it was moribund, although there were periods of greater activity. According to Sedláþek, this commission always consisted of 30 to 40 members drawn from the Czech academic community. It was convened under the leadership of Bohuslav Havránek in the 1960s, Václav KĜístek in the 1970s, and Jan Petr in the 1980s.183 Most documents relating to the planning of these reforms are not part of the public record and many were pulped long ago. This applies as well to documents tracing the relationships between the Communist Party and the reforms. Still, there are occasional references to planned reforms in the scholarly literature and the underground press. The need for further partial reforms was signalled as far back as 1981, when Petr, in an article entitled “Na okraji výroþí Ústavu pro jazyk þeský ýSAV” (“A footnote to the Czech Language Institute’s anniversary”, Petr 1981: 6–7) wrote that,

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…the orthography commission now faces the pressing task of drafting partial corrections to individual points, as per the intentions of the 1957 reforms, primarily to eliminate some inconsistencies and introduce uniform resolutions for difficult cases (e.g. capitalization).

A personal interview with Petr Sgall, however, casts the situation in the early 1980s in a slightly different light. According to Sgall, the existing orthographic commission, of which he and his fellow revisionist JiĜí Hronek were members, had by 1983 prepared a proposal for a far-reaching spelling reform.184 The commission had been convened under the patronage of Education Minister Milan Vondruška. According to Sgall, it was widely understood among the membership that Vondruška had cleared the idea of radical reform with his higher-ups and that implementation was expected to move smoothly forward. In the event, he said, the reform was blocked by Communist Party chairman Gustav Husák and other influential Party members. At this juncture the commission was disbanded, and it never met again in this incarnation. The idea of radical spelling reform was abandoned and has not received widespread mainstream support among linguists since that time. Evidence for the existence of a plan for radical reform is documented in a letter to the editor (ýeský deník, 1 June 1993), which quotes extensively from a 1988 essay by well-known cultural critic, author, and former dissident Ludvík Vaculík: Four years ago [i.e. 1984 –NB], the Party offices carefully unleashed on the public the idea that, for easier school instruction, for the economy and for the progress of science, it was necessary to change Czech orthography: basically, to simplify it radically. And they set certain of their own people on the task of preparing this reform. However, educated society reacted with disgust, so the reform was withdrawn from the programme for the meanwhile; I think the Party offices decided to wait until more people of the old school die off and until their own new simpletons are greater in number.

Further evidence comes from an open letter published in 1987 by Charter 77 (Charta 77), the well-known dissident organization. It was addressed to various organs of the government and the Academy of Sciences: Two years ago an announcement about changes being proposed to the rules of Czech orthography elicited a broad response. One of the suggestions discussed, whose realization assumed a radical reform in which orthography would be brought into line with pronunciation to the greatest extent possible, was negatively received by the public. Critical voices warned against

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the negative results of such a reform, which would in a stroke have changed the graphic shape of the language radically and alienated younger generations from all literary works printed under the current rules. Language users protested as well against the artificiality of this swerve, which instead of the promised simplification of orthography would have brought new orthographic difficulties. The broad, spontaneous interest in linguistic questions meant that, contrary to habit, public opinion found a voice in the mass media, a voice which soon could not be repressed or hidden. The exchange of opinions soon ceased and the state authorities confidentially instructed the appropriate places to forbid any changes to the rules of Czech orthography.185

Petr’s (1981) article explicitly addresses orthographic reform, but makes no mention of any more radical proposals. In this light, his call for moderate, partial reform looks like either a strategic positioning against wideranging changes or the careful posturing of an official unwilling to “spill the beans” on what would have been a highly controversial and unpopular move.186 Was it purely the will of these top Party functionaries that killed orthographic reform in the 1980s, as Sgall reports, or did the opinions of an affronted public play a role? In any event, abandoning radical reform did not remove the myriad other practical reasons for undertaking a revision of the Rules of Czech Orthography. Spelling reform apparently had enough institutional inertia that within two years a further commission was being formed, this time within the Czech Language Institute, to consider more moderate and partial measures. The Rules had, since 1957, been published in two editions, called “academic” and “school”.187 Following the practice of their predecessors, the 1986 commission began work first on the academic edition of the Rules, but then were ordered to quickly prepare and release a new school version of the Rules as well. According to commission member Olga Martincová (personal interview), the Institute’s director, Professor Jan Petr, never gave the commission a clear reason as to where this change in direction had come from, but in retrospect there seems to have been pressure from the Education Ministry and the State Pedagogical Publishing House, both of which expressed a strong desire for a revised version of the Rules for schools. Whether there were further political pressures is perhaps beside the point. As anyone who uses reference works knows, they go out of date with surprising rapidity, and at a certain point must either be revised substan-

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tially or removed from print (see chapter 6, section 2.1, for examples). Letting the Rules go out of print was not even a consideration: their publication was seen as part of the CLI’s core remit. Once this revision had been commissioned, the temptation to re-examine the principles on which the Rules were based would be irresistible.

1.1. The Czech Language Institute Who, then, exactly was charged with this reform? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the CLI was a small-to-medium sized institute of the Czechoslovak (after 1992 the Czech) Academy of Sciences. Its work to this day covers a variety of areas in Czech linguistics. Its most visible public face is the Department of Grammar and Language Culture (oddČlení gramatiky a jazykové kultury). This department publishes the popular-scientific journal Naše Ĝeþ (‘Our Language’) and runs the Language Service (jazyková poradna), which answers telephone calls, letters and e-mails from the public about language usage.188 The Department of Lexicography and Terminology (lexikograficko-terminologické oddČlení) publishes dictionaries such as the well-known 1993 single-volume dictionary of Czech that is now the standard in the field. A third department, Stylistics and Text Linguistics (oddČlení stylistiky a lingvistiky textu) is internationally known for its work on discourse analysis and the analysis of spoken language. Other branches of the Institute are compiling the Dictionary of Old Czech and the Dialectological Atlas, which are being published volume by volume.189 At its smallest point in 1993 the CLI had only thirty employees, but this came on the back of a 50 percent reduction two years earlier (Lidové noviny, 27 February 1993); the number has since grown again. The people involved in the new orthographic commission after 1985 would always have constituted a minority of the CLI’s employees and only a portion of the work ongoing at the CLI. The orthographic commission constituted in 1986 had nine members: ZdenČk Hlavsa, ZdeĖka Hrušková, JiĜina HĤrková, JiĜí Kraus, Olga Martincová, Alena Polívková, Miloslav Sedláþek, Ivana Svobodová, and VČra Vlková. Martincová headed the school edition, and had responsibility for relations with educational institutions; Hlavsa was responsible for the academic edition, and was in charge of relations with the press and publishing industry. Kraus was recruited to work on the so-called PĜídavek ‘in-

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sert’ that prescribed transcription systems for non-Latin alphabets.190 Sedláþek was on the committee specifically as a representative of the schools. Several other linguists are listed in the forward to the academic edition as contributing “through solutions to specific problems and consultations (zpracováním dílþí problematiky a konzultacemi)”.191 The commission sat at the behest of the CLI’s director: first Jan Petr, then, after the Revolution, František Daneš, followed by Kraus. 1.2. The commission’s work before 1989 The relatively small size of the commission suggests that it was convened to effect a quick revision rather than to undertake a prolonged, consultative exercise. A larger, more representative body would have given the reform more authority in the eyes of the public, but would undoubtedly have bogged down in the variety of different opinions. Furthermore, if it had recruited widely from among the distinguished members of the Czech linguistics community to bolster its authority, the threat of the committee splitting publicly over its disagreements would have been greater. Using a commission drawn largely from within a single institute had the advantage of imposing workplace hierarchies onto the commission’s activities. Commission member Sedláþek remarked in August 1994 that “it was lucky there were only nine [members] – otherwise the new Rules would never have seen the light of day” (Lidové noviny, 29 August 1994). In the eyes of many members of the public, this would perhaps not have seemed a bad thing. The first draft of the Rules arose without any public consultation. Martincová (personal interview) saw this as a necessary step: When work began on the Rules, it wasn’t possible to walk around carrying a banner saying “something’s under preparation” when we didn’t even know what results all those ideas, considerations, and analyses of material would yield.

In Martincová’s view, the decision to keep the commission’s work under wraps was more practical than anti-democratic. They did not see the sense in a public consultation until there was a proposal on the table to consult. However, for anyone who identified the leading representatives of Czech linguistics closely with the communist regime, it was tempting to cast matters in a different light. The underground Czechoslovak human rights organization Charter 77 wrote in 1987:

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At the beginning of February 1987 Professor Jan Petr announced at a public meeting of the Communist Party of the Czech Language Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences, that a new edition of the rules of Czech orthography was being prepared. This new codification of the orthographic norm is to be published by the end of this year. It is being worked on by a commission whose composition was not revealed. Institute Director Petr simply announced that his news was strictly confidential and must not get out to the public.192

Was the failure to consult an act of omission, or a sin of commission? It can legitimately be seen both ways. Linguistic and political motivations seem to have coincided here. If the commission had gone public with a half-formed proposal, it would instantly have been slated by the public. However, it is impossible to rule out political pressures from on high to keep the reform a quiet, minor affair. Charter 77 expected the Rules to be published late in 1987, but this forecast proved premature. In 1988, the commission published a so-called “white book” (bílá kniha), a typescript bound between white covers. It contained the core of what would later constitute the explanatory part of the Rules. The white book included a full explanation of the proposed changes, but without the spelling dictionary in which all the proposed changes were to be instantiated. According to Martincová, the book was sent to approximately 30 institutions around the country, including publishing houses and the Czech language departments at universities and schools. They were instructed to circulate it as they saw fit among their employees. The white book also contained a questionnaire about morphology. Respondents included well-known academics such as the Baroque Czech specialist Alexandr Stich, and pedagogy experts Marie ýechová and Vladimír Styblík.193 The white book’s questionnaire testified to the interest of the specialist public in matters of codification. Although only thirty questionnaires were sent out, between 600 and 700 came back, according to Martincová.194 The original questionnaires were widely photocopied and distributed, reaching far beyond their original target: into science departments and the ranks of the reading and writing public. Because this questionnaire concerned morphology, it was not destined to influence the shape of spelling rules (although it was, in retrospect, a clear harbinger of the high level of public interest to come). The statistics the commission gathered informed their decisions about which morphological forms to put in the school edition of the Rules. Anyone wanting to comment on spelling at this stage had to formulate a free-form response to

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the proposals in the white book. Students were also involved, although no information about this was published. Martincová explained (personal interview) that this consultation had taken the form of “soundings” (sondy), in which the students took short written tests (písemþiþky) designed to check their level of knowledge of various features. The commission then analyzed the results to see where students had the most problems. These tests were done in Prague, Brno, Hradec Králové and elsewhere, and were similar to tests conducted by educationalists like Styblík when authoring textbooks and setting curricula. Although some copies of the white book did filter out beyond the language departments that received them, there was no guarantee this would happen. Many people remained outside the loop. This was true of scholars in other arts and humanities departments, such as the historian Antonín Kostlán (personal interview). It was also true for linguists working outside traditional Czech language departments, such as the prominent linguist and language planning specialist Petr Sgall in the Applied Linguistics Department of the Mathematics and Physics Faculty (personal interview).195 Are there any further reasons why so many prominent specialists in the field later claimed that their views had never been sought, or that the entire process had been conducted in secret? Commission member JiĜí Kraus saw the problem this way (personal interview): It’s the same old bureaucratic experience. Not that I’m an old bureaucrat…. You take a weighty decision, you write to everyone that this will be happening and this is how it will look. And most of the time it just disappears; the secretary puts it somewhere, or someone says: “Hey, something’s come in, have a look,” but no one reads it.

The entire consultation thus relied to a great extent on the goodwill and efficiency of individual department secretaries and chairs to disseminate the small number of copies sent around. When this failed to happen, people were effectively disenfranchised from the reforms. In places the situation was more complicated. Josef Šimandl, now a staff member at the CLI, was a lecturer in the Czech Language Department of Charles University in the early 1990s, and authored articles that took a critical view of the Rules. His story gives a different perspective on the consultation process (personal interview): Shortly after the new Rules came out [in 1993], a very stormy meeting took place in the Friends of the Czech Language Club, where Martincová, Hlavsa and – I’m not sure if anyone else, I think perhaps Ivana Svobodová too – came on behalf of the Rules. Everyone jumped on them, writers and

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we [at the University] as well, and I must admit I objected that there had been no consultation in a university setting, etc. And Dr. Hlavsa protested strongly that there had been. That evening I left with the sense that they were trying to sweep something under the carpet. But memories come back, and about half a year later I remembered how in 1990 I had been rehabilitated and rehired at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts, catching Professor Karel Hausenblas as he was retiring.196 I remembered belatedly that he had run seminars for junior staff, and at one of these seminars there had been extensive material from the Czech Language Institute where, for each of these tricky features, there was a comparison of: the state of affairs before 1957; according to the 1957 Rules; then according to the subsequent minor revisions and the new proposal. There were cases such as, for example, “Three White Rams Wine Bar” [i.e. capitalization in proper names]. I can remember that it discussed matters such as: if the word mušelín ‘muslin’ is written with a long , then how should [the diminutive] mušelínek be written, and so forth. […] At the time Professor Hausenblas closed the debate, saying that there were surely more important things we could be doing these days than picking around in orthography. And so we never reacted to it. Three years then passed, and I managed to forget all about it, remembering it only belatedly. But they [the CLI] had in fact sent it around. The return rate they got was obviously less than 100 percent, because at the time the Czech Language Department of the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts sent nothing – this I know for sure. But later it counted itself among those who had not been consulted. So things are a bit complex. It’s also due in part to the fact that it was discussed at that doctoral seminar and then I don’t know what its fate was subsequently. Shortly after that Professor Hausenblas [retired and] moved out of Prague and that is why the request fell flat. So they are telling the truth; they did announce it. I can confirm this in retrospect, and it bothers me that I managed to forget it for a time.

Šimandl’s account goes some way towards explaining the puzzling fact that the CLI’s consultation documents elicited no official response from the Czech language department of the nation’s most prestigious university, even though the two institutions are less than a ten-minute walk apart. Even without these roadblocks, the 1988 consultation was evidently intended to be a limited one. It targeted specialists in Czech linguistics, both in the research and teaching sphere, and a couple of the largest publishing houses, but did not attempt to reach outside this particular audience – not even to those who had served on previous orthographic commissions

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(Sgall, personal interview). No comprehensive results of the consultation were ever published. The authors of the planned Rules, then, consulted with the people who were to “administer” them: academics, schoolteachers, and publishers. In the period before 1989, they did not consult with people who would merely use them, except by accident. 2. The commission after 1989 The 1993 reforms would probably have been the 1990 reforms, had history not thrown a wrench in the works in the form of the Velvet Revolution, toppling the Communist regime at the end of 1989. By this point, plans were already well advanced for the publication of the Rules. Final drafts went to the publishers SPN and Academia in January 1989, with a view to having the completed editions appear in 1990 (Martincová, personal interview). After the revolution, these plans were put on hold. Martincová cites the general upheaval as one of the primary reasons. Many institutions, including the publishing houses SPN and Academia, changed their entire top management (personal interview). In addition, the CLI had its own change in leadership. Director Jan Petr died on 13 December 1989 in an alleged suicide, and was replaced by František Daneš, who had also served as director from 1965 to 1970. As the political situation developed, it became clear that the clichés of Communist society so bountifully represented in the Rules’ copious examples would be an embarrassment in a new publication. This became a further reason to revisit what had been thought to be a completed project. After 1989, a distinct change in approach is noticeable. The commission took a more inclusive approach to consultation. This included seeking formal institutional support as well as wider publicity among language users. On 30 March 1990 the Scholarly Council (vČdecká rada) of the CLI met to discuss the latest version of the Rules. The documentation of that meeting shows that The Scholarly Council of the Czech Language Institute has considered the principles behind the new academic Rules on 30 March 1990 and has taken a basically affirmative position on them. For some features, however, it recommends that a more active position be taken toward usage through the medium of the Rules.197

The “basically affirmative position” did include recommendations for a

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host of mostly minor changes. The oblique reference to “a more active position” on certain features was about the spelling of and 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-

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ions about orthography, changes to orthographic rules, and orthographic manuals. We hope, with your assistance, to gain an understanding of this. We are sure you will be amenable to our request and thank you for your willingness to participate.

This encouragement is balanced against what appears in the booklet itself: Especially in the case of schools, it is useful for them [i.e. language users] to be acquainted with where and in which orthographic features development demands certain codificatory changes. Therefore, we welcomed the initiative of Teachers’ Union Press to let the public familiarize itself with the new codification of orthography before it becomes binding, when the Rules are published in book form.

There are three possible conclusions that can be drawn from these juxtaposed statements. One is that the responding public uniformly supported the CLI’s proposals; the second is that the questionnaire was window-dressing that came too late to effect substantive change; and the third is that the questionnaire was meant to gauge public reaction to further possible changes. Based on the cautious wording of the questionnaire and the booklet’s constant emphasis on the partial, repetitive nature of orthographic change, the third possibility seems the most likely. The wording suggests that although the CLI was interested in gathering this information, the Rules were by this point a finished product. It is hardly surprising, then, that the rules finally published are virtually identical to those proposed in Co pĜinášejí nová Pravidla? In addition to these direct forms of contact, there were regular articles in the press inviting commentary; I have registered articles from 1990 to early 1993 with explanations of the proposed changes and explicit appeals for comments from the public. These appeared in such varied publications as ýeský deník, Fórum, Lidová demokracie, Mladý svČt, Reportér, Tvorba, and Vesmír. Of these, two are daily newspapers from the centre and right of the political spectrum, three are journals of news and opinion, one is a lifestyle and news magazine and one a popular science magazine.201 Teachers would find themselves on the front lines when the reform took effect, and so informing them was a priority. Journals targeted at them printed contributions from the authors of the Rules, particularly Martincová and Sedláþek. A series of articles in ýeský jazyk a literatura, a journal for school and college teachers of Czech language and literature, laid out the history of spelling reform and the proposed changes (Hlavsa and Martincová 1991–1992; Sedláþek 1992–1993), as did a brochure by Knop (1991).

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Public meetings with teachers were also held. Martincová reports that she did a lecture tour (pĜednáškové turné) of at least 40 schools where she summarized the impending changes for teachers and collected suggestions and impressions.202 Why, once newspaper articles began to appear, did prominent specialists fail to request copies of the informational brochure or try to inform themselves in other ways? It seems inconceivable that to a person, they and everyone they knew could have missed every single article on the subject in the Czech Republic’s most widely read newspapers and magazines. I asked Petr Sgall why he, for example, had not made an effort to learn more about the proposed reforms. His exclusion from the commission, he responded, had led him to conclude that his input was not wanted. In any event, he had no interest in trying to fine-tune a minor, partial reform, which failed to address the central problems of Czech orthography and went contrary to the principles set out by the linguistic committee of the Academy of Sciences in 1964.203 In essence, he and others like him foresaw the huge public outcry over the Rules, and decided to steer clear of it. The problem, then, was not that Sgall and other prominent linguists had no avenue to learn about the proposed changes to the Rules. But once excluded from substantive contributions in the initial phases of the project, they were reluctant to engage in the process and to attach their names to it. In this way, the commission’s pre-Revolutionary beginnings and the limited nature of its early consultations compromised it later on. A relatively quick reform was purchased at the cost of shallow support among members of the profession. 2.2. The debate in Literární noviny The debate in the cultural weekly Literární noviny (‘Literary News’) showed the extent to which reforms had been trailed and publicized in advance. An initial article by Alexandr Stich in 1990 was followed by a lull of two years, and then a further five articles by Michal Ajvaz, Petr Fidelius, Dana Svobodová and Stich in late 1992 and early 1993, before the publication of the Rules. These articles did not debate the specifics of the forthcoming reform. Instead, they discussed (in heated terms) the advisability of conducting reform at all, and who should participate. Stich, a consultant to the commission, was a strong proponent of spelling reform, and defended it robustly. Fidelius and Ajvaz took, respectively, a political and poetic

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outlook on reform, opposing it on the grounds of democracy and freedom of expression. 3. The publication of the Rules and initial reactions On 22 April 1993, the first announcements appeared in newspapers of the publication of the new Rules. As with the 1957 Rules, they were issued in two editions: the school edition and the academic edition. However, in contrast to the 1957 Rules, the 1993 Rules were issued first in the school edition, published by the aforementioned Pansofia. This change was more a matter of practical coincidences than of design. As mentioned before, the pressure for a new edition of the Rules had come primarily from schools. The academic edition, according to Martincová (personal interview), hit several snags: The top management of Academia Publishers changed about three times in a row. And both editions of the Rules were supposed to come out at the same time, which did not happen. Pansofia, which was publishing the school Rules, published first. And we found out (and I don’t know how this happened) that the diskettes for the academic edition had been lost at the publisher’s. This could have been for a number of reasons. One possible reason was that in all those changes it simply got misplaced. Academia were in the process of selling off their reproduction outfit at that time. There was a tremendous amount of movement in the editorial offices, so they could have just been lying around somewhere. The diskettes turned up half a year later. I think it was Tomský who was the director [of Academia] at that point, but I’m not entirely sure. He had no interest in publishing the academic Rules because he insisted they couldn’t turn a profit on it. Then he said they’d print the introduction. So Prof. Kraus and Dr. Hlavsa went to explain to him that people expected both parts – and especially the dictionary part, where the spellings of individual words were. Then the publisher said yes, and finally at the end of the year, the academic Rules came out.

The fact that the school edition came out first had three noticeable results. First, it prompted a great deal of speculation as to why the order of publication had been changed from previous editions. Second, it made the morphological changes in the school edition breaking news, and associated them more strongly with the new spellings. Third, it meant that the school edition was the one drawing fire and criticism from the start, which had an effect on the behaviour of the Ministry of Education.

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The initial reaction to the school edition of the Rules was mixed.204 Over the course of the first month, articles and notices appeared in ýeský deník (22 and 23 April), Respekt (26 April), Mladá fronta dnes (30 April), ZN noviny (30 April), HospodáĜské noviny (30 April), Telegraf (17 May), Svobodné slovo (20 May) and Lidové noviny (29 May and further articles). The tone of these initial articles did not always reflect the newspaper or magazine’s later stance. Early reporting in ýeský deník, one of the most vocal opponents of the new Rules, made the changes out to be almost insignificant, and Telegraf, which later also ran a strong campaign against them, printed a quite civil question-and-answer piece explaining the rationale behind the changes and reprinting some questions and answers from a recent CLI press conference. Reporting in Mladá fronta dnes was more skeptical, claiming that but for the mass protests of teachers, the Rules would have contained more radical and unwanted changes. These early moderate reactions gave way quickly to more emotionally charged and generally negative pieces. While one newspaper, ZN noviny, announced that it was going over to using the new Rules as of 10 May, two – ýeský deník and Telegraf – announced on 13 May and 11 June respectively that they would not accept them. Telegraf asked its readers to write in with their reactions. In many instances, a key article – usually presented as an opinion piece – kicked off the wave of primarily negative responses. The earliest was Martin Daneš’s “Terorizmus režizérských kanonĤ” (‘The terrorism of directorial canons’), published in ýeský deník on 12 May. They ranged from the cogent and incisive, such as Antonín Kostlán’s “Políþek þeské kultuĜe a tradici” (‘A slap in the face of Czech culture and tradition’) published in Telegraf on 11 June, to the hyperbolic, slapdash, and barely coherent, as in JiĜí Šváb’s “Všem lidem mocným slova” (‘To all people capable of speech’) appearing in Lidové noviny six days earlier. Over the six weeks from 12 May to 25 June, ýeský deník published 25 letters and commentaries on the new Rules, of which only three defended them. The wave of rebellion that swept through Telegraf occurred slightly later, with 27 letters and essays published from 11 June to 14 August. On 16 June 1993, Telegraf reported having a huge backlog of letters on the subject, and apologized for postponing their publication. Those published reflected only a selection of what they had received. The newspaper Lidové noviny, often regarded as the Czech Republic’s paper of record, offered the most extensive long-term coverage, with some 27 letters and opinion pieces between June and December 1993. The news-

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paper had a regular page in its weekend supplement NedČlní LN (Sunday LN) devoted to language, in which most of the discussion played out. In addition, Lidové noviny alone of all the newspapers had a regular language column, Jazykové zákampí ‘The Lee Side of Language’. The column was written by linguist Milan Jelínek, who undertook in a series of ten articles in the second half of 1993 to lay out the basics of the new reforms and what he thought of them. In retrospect, Martincová (personal interview) offered the following view of the situation surrounding the publication of the Rules: …there were signs that this journalistic storm was whipped up by a publisher who had wanted [to publish] the school version. There were probably some personal relationships there in the background…. Our group of authors was commercially inexperienced; what’s more, it never even occurred to us that we should be attending to various publishing contracts and examining everything going on around them. For us the important thing was the text of the Rules and the principles behind them – the very rules they involved. We argued about where to write s and z. There were people involved in these decisions from outside the Institute and we kept putting the whole matter forward and voting on it again and again. With discussions involving three different viewpoints across about fifteen people in whose jurisdiction it lay, voting was the only way forward. At any rate, those were our internal battles, and we were paying attention to them instead of to what was happening outside. With hindsight I see that we should have leaned harder on the press to present and lay out what was going to be in the Rules. Although even now I’m not sure that it would have helped.205

With the controversy over the Rules, strangled noises started to waft forth from the Ministry of Education. The school edition of the Rules had been issued with the Ministry’s approval certificate (schvalovací doložka) upon publication, but then the Ministry began to hedge over its validity. Deputy Minister Pilip ventured that a wider consultation process was needed before the Rules could be accepted as the only recommended orthography guide for schools (see chapter 6, section 3.1). In October 1993, Academia announced the publication of the “academic” version of the Rules. This was an important milestone. In publishing the academic version, the CLI fulfilled the last remaining condition that the Ministry of Education had set for it in the certificate of approval. But the prevailing negative reaction to the Rules had further impacts that would be felt in the course of the coming months. One reaction came from the Writers’ Council (Obec spisovatelĤ), which

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met in DobĜíš on 25 November 1993. Newspaper reports say the comments from its members were generally negative. The Council’s board (rada Obce spisovatelĤ) met a few months later to continue the discussion, with a curious result. The chairman of the Council, noted author Karel Pecka, subsequently proclaimed in a scathing article in Lidové noviny that the Council board had recommended to its membership that they ignore the new Rules altogether („Nová pravidla chaosu“, 17 March 1994). This interpretation was disputed by the deputy chairman, Petr KovaĜík, in a subsequent article. KovaĜík said there had been no such resolution at the meeting, as the board members had held differing opinions on the matter (Lidové noviny, 18 March 1994). 4. Official responses to the public reaction In the winter of 1993–1994, the Ministry of Education began ex post facto to gather a wider range of views on the new Rules. This effectively led to a further series of hoops for the Rules before they could be certified for use in schools. 4.1. The experts’ seminar On 17 March 1994, the Ministry convened an experts’ seminar (expertní semináĜ) to discuss the matter. One member of this committee, Jaroslav Hubáþek, reported in an interview in Uþitelské noviny (29 March 1994), the weekly magazine for teachers: “Our task – we were a committee of roughly forty teachers of Czech from scholarly institutes, and institutions of higher, secondary, and primary education – was to formulate a position with respect to the Rules published in 1993. We conscientiously weighed all possible approaches from scholarly, pedagogical, and developmental perspectives, as well as from the perspective of language culture. And last of all from an economic perspective. Finally we agreed that the Rules were acceptable and could be used in the classroom. Subject, of course, to the publication of methodological instructions about features that had not been fully thought through or are not unambiguous.”

This constructive and optimistic account of the meeting was gainsaid by a ministry official, Miloslav Bartošek, who, defending his part in the affair

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later on, said of this meeting to the newspaper ýeský deník that “the confrontation that took place at the seminar was very pointed” (26 July 1994). One participant, Josef Šimandl, gave a bemused account on 21 March in Mladá fronta dnes: At the seminar we heard criticism (concerning conceptual inconsistencies and details of which the journalists leading the battle against the Rules have no inkling), justification (primarily of that which no one had questioned), demagoguery (teachers and bureaucrats: “just approve Something for us”; the representative of the institution that issued the Rules: “so will they be in force, or not?!”), and even many sensible voices (which often magnanimously passed over the concrete problems). When the clamour died down (there is no more fitting expression), it turned out that this parliament of specialists was not capable even of voting on whether it should vote on its conclusions (of about 35 present, there were 13 for, 11 against, and the rest abstained).

The views aired in Lidové noviny on 18 March 1994, the day after the seminar, showed the depth of dissatisfaction among scholars. Some, like Sgall, were unhappy with the extent to which the CLI had, in their view, monopolized what should have been a widely consulted process among the linguistic elite. They saw these meetings as a chance to rectify this situation: The reason these discussions are taking place after the publication of the rules is that after “normalization” [the tightening of political and social controls after the Soviet invasion in 1968], the revision of the rules came to be perceived as an internal matter and unfortunately, even after November [1989] they continued to be perceived as the remit of a single institute.

Uliþný, speaking to Lidové noviny that same day, regretted that the Rules had been drafted at all in these conditions and that the CLI had called the public dissent “irrational”, but he then emphasized the issues on the table: In my opinion, the authors of the Rules did not stick to their own principles at numerous individual points. And this is the subject of our discussion.

A third participant, Jelínek, reported that The majority of contributions come to the conclusion that users of the standard language should in the end receive a codified product, even if it has certain debatable points. Any problems should in future be discussed purely as linguistic issues.

The final outcome of this seminar was a decision that the Rules were not

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so severely flawed as to prevent their use in schools – subject to the reinstatement of certain variants with and long final vowels alongside the “new” forms. The seminar decided to prepare an addendum (dodatek)206 to the Rules, and after its meetings were over, an eight-member committee, including Hlavsa, Sgall, Krþmová, Uliþný and others, met in the Ministry building to sketch out the text of it. 4.2. The results of the experts’ seminar On 27 April 1994, Petr PiĢha resigned as Minister for Education, and his portfolio passed to his deputy, Ivan Pilip. Miloslav Bartošek became Pilip’s deputy minister. The newspapers reported that the new addendum was due by 30 June 1994. It was to contain the suggested revisions and instructions for teachers on how to teach the new Rules.207 The CLI delivered its Addendum to the new Rules a week ahead of schedule, and it was sent out for three expert reviews. The reviewers were: the immediate past education minister, Petr PiĢha; the chair of the Linguistics Association, Professor Jarmila Panevová; and Professor OldĜich Uliþný, the head of the Czech Language Department of Charles University’s Philosophy and Arts Faculty. There were obvious solid reasons for choosing all three of these reviewers. PiĢha was to represent the schools, and Panevová and Uliþný represented linguistic expertise, she as the chair of the Republic’s foremost association of linguists, and he as the head of the country’s most prestigious department for the teaching of Czech language and linguistics. However, all three of them had criticized the new Rules from the start, and the CLI later through the newspapers faulted the Ministry for not having included anyone among the reviewers with practical experience in the primary or secondary classroom or in teacher-training courses (such as a staff member from a pedagogical faculty). It was therefore not entirely a surprise when all three of the reviews of the Addendum came back with a negative recommendation. However, Sgall (personal communication) gave a different view of the process from the inside. At the meeting where the Addendum was written, Hlavsa took down the text we agreed on, with a view to making copies of it at the CLI and sending it round, but this never happened. Only when the Ministry demanded it several months later did they get the text of the Ad-

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dendum from the CLI, and it had been changed such that it was not acceptable – not even for Uliþný – and had to be altered further, or rather returned to make it closer to what had been originally agreed.

Lidové noviny reported that the reviewers rejected the Addendum because it was overly complex (20 July 1994). In an interview with ZN noviny later that year on 8 August, Panevová elaborated on this point, saying: As the head of a scholarly organization – the Linguistic Association of the Czech Republic – I was asked by the Ministry of Education to lend my expertise on the Addendum to the school edition of the Rules, which had been developed by the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Particular matters of interest included whether the Addendum could serve as a methodological tool for teachers and whether, with its help, one could orient oneself as to where the new Rules apply and where they yield to the old version of the Rules. Why did my report recommend rejection? The Addendum was written in a murky style; it lacked clear instructions. This led me to conclude that without a fundamental revision, it could not serve its intended purpose.

Summer was well underway and the Minister of Education had already begun his summer vacation when, on 15 July 1994, deputy education minister Bartošek announced that the Ministry was rescinding its decision to make the new Rules mandatory in schools from September. In effect, the Ministry was revoking the Rules’ certificate of approval. Ministry secretary Arnošt Kastner explained the decision in the newspaper ZN noviny on 20 July 1994: The text [of the Addendum] did not respect the conclusions of the experts’ seminar of Czech and Moravian Bohemists held in March. It lacks methodological instructions for teachers as to how to work with the Rules. As regards borrowed words, it simply is not clear which written form is recommended and which is permitted for use. The new Rules are thus unusable for teachers in their individual work.

Deputy Minister Bartošek, looking back on the controversy in ýeský deník on 26 July, said he felt his hands had been tied: When the textbook Rules of Orthography came out, we were assured that specialists had been consulted about it. Then objections from linguists appeared, and the situation resulted in the March seminar on the contents of the Rules. The conclusion was: Produce an Addendum to the Rules. This [addendum] was then put forward, but according to the seminar’s participants it did not correspond to the agreement. The clash that took place at the

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seminar had been very strident. And at the end of July, it was not at all apparent whether there was the will to renegotiate the whole matter. The Ministry of Schools, Youth, and Physical Education had, in addition, promised teachers that a final decision would come down by the middle of August. The seminar had said: Yes to the new Rules, but with the Addendum. Because the Addendum did not meet the requirements negotiated, what had to follow was the removal of the Rules from the register of [approved] textbooks. […] At the time I took this decision, I did not see any possibility of further agreements. Personally I’m curious whether the Addendum that has come out of the last round of negotiations will be suitable, or whether it will again become the subject of criticism from a significant group of linguists.

This change to a school curriculum only six weeks distant threw the educational establishment into a state of panic. Over the past year, new textbooks had been written and old ones revised on the basis of the new Rules, with an eye on receiving their certificate of approval in time for use in the autumn of 1994. Now these certificates were under threat; it began to look as if, with the withdrawal of the new Rules from the curriculum, all the new school textbooks that had adopted them would become unusable as well. On 18 July 1994 František Talián of Fortuna, the Czech Republic’s largest textbook publishing house, asked the Ministry to compensate him for losses incurred, as he had published textbooks based on the new Rules that were about to lose their validity (Mladý svČt, 26 August 1994). This looked to be the first of a potential raft of similar claims from publishers across the country; a similar claim appeared in Mladá fronta dnes from the textbook publisher Kvarta a few days later (21 July 1994). Meanwhile, schools all over the country had begun preparing for the introduction of the Rules. They had acquired copies for their staff, ordered new textbooks written in conformity with the Rules, and commenced retraining their staff. Now these plans were all threatened on short notice. The affair was widely reported in newspapers across the Czech Republic. Suddenly orthography had assumed the proportions of a national crisis. Minister Pilip cut short his vacation and announced on 20 July 1994 that he was suspending his deputy’s decision pending a meeting with officials from the CLI and other linguists. Kraus, by that time director of the CLI, described these meetings (personal interview): It was an especially comic situation for me. Because the whole time I’d been grumbling about them [the Rules], but then as assistant director [of the CLI] I couldn’t distance myself from them. I was the only person who was supposed to defend something I wasn’t convinced of myself, but I think that

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that summer we reached an agreement with Dr. Cink at the Ministry and the Addendum came out… It was thanks to a lot of people. Not that they wanted to mess with the Rules, but they just wanted to see the situation resolved. [….] I tried to follow it through, because, as I said, so much work had gone into it that we couldn’t just drop it. So I agreed this with the ministry and am very glad we did manage to reach an agreement.

Two days later, Pilip announced a compromise, by which the CLI would rewrite the Addendum within two weeks, and the Ministry would see that it was printed and distributed to schools before the end of August.

Figure 4. © ZdenČk Hofman in Telegraf, 28 July 1994. “I’m no Dumpster diver; like an idiot, I tossed my old Rules of Czech Orthography in here!”

On 4 August 1994, the Ministry announced that the revised Addendum had been reviewed and approved by the three original reviewers (oponenti) and parties to the March agreement. Many newspapers printed the text of the Addendum in full; a scant three pages in book format, it fit easily into a half-page newspaper article if judiciously edited.

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5. The endgame of the 1993 Rules Once the Addendum had been approved, the Ministry undertook to see that it was printed and distributed on time. Newspapers followed the story with short bulletins for the next two weeks until, on 25 August 1994, just a week before the start of the school year, the Ministry announced that the printing was complete and the Addendum was on its way to the schools.

Figure 5. © Vladimír Jiránek in Mladá fronta dnes, 5 August 1994. A primary school head says to a teacher: “Colleague! Come down from that tree immediately! (Now, how do I spell that?)”

A few events along the way ensured that the controversy over the Rules would continue for some time yet. In Svobodné slovo, an article on 11 August detailed how ýeská tisková kanceláĜ (ýTK), the primary wire service for the Czech Republic, planned to handle the new liberalization of spelling. ýTK planned to go back in every instance to the pre-1993 spelling, and to continue to respect the new Rules “in the remaining instances (capitalization, hyphenation, etc.)”.208 This had a significant impact on the daily press, as much of the news they printed was taken directly from ýTK. On 10 August 1994, several

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newspapers (including local dailies in the medium-sized cities of Hradec Králové and PlzeĖ, Hradecké noviny and PlzeĖský deník, announced that they were returning to spelling words like kurs and puls with an instead of a . 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].

The greater freedom offered by a loosely formulated Addendum thus clearly appealed to some, especially those with a strongly developed linguistic sensitivity. Nonetheless, a sketchy Addendum that contradicted many of the entries in the explanatory and dictionary sections of the Rules was not a satisfactory expedient for everyone. It made for a frustrating experience for many users of the Rules, as amply documented in the daily press.

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Figure 6. © ZdenČk Hofman in ýeský deník, 8 August 1994. In the bookstore window are two new books: the small Rules of Czech Orthography, and a giant Addendum.

The standoff continues to this day. Authorized editions of the Rules since 1993 have included the Addendum along with the introductory explanations, but no systematic revision of the Rules’ dictionary has been undertaken. Meanwhile, some unauthorized editions of the Rules have amended the text of the dictionary and explanations, incorporating the principles found in the Addendum. How adeptly this has been done and with what consequence for the nuances Kraus mentions is a question for further consideration. The copyright issue continued to run through the summer and autumn of 1994. The authors of the Addendum stated that they had not copyrighted it, so that it could be distributed as widely as possible, and because they did not think such a small document had any commercial value that could be exploited (Práce, 12 August 1994). Perhaps as a result of this, some newspapers ran the text of the Addendum under their reporters’ by-lines, slightly amended at the beginning or end, or possibly with a few cuts. Reporter

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Daniela Prokopová at ýeský deník took her colleague Vlaćka Kuþerová of Mladá fronta dnes to task in print for doing this.209 A more serious problem with copyright erupted shortly thereafter, when the publishing house FIN brought out its own version of the Rules. Pansofia, who had brought out their authorized edition the year before, charged that the new FIN edition was identical to it, except that a few words had been changed in various places and a new author listed. Moreover, FIN claimed to have a certificate of approval from the Ministry as well, although they had not gone through the process themselves, and appear to have been relying on the certificate granted to the Pansofia edition. The CLI was then caught in a tricky situation. The head of FIN was a lawyer, who argued that the Rules were a legal document, and that all he had done was to cite them at length within the context of his own work, as was provided for under Czech law. The CLI claimed they did not have the funds for a legal battle, and were worried that a suit would be seen as a move to assure their own royalties from the authorized edition – royalties they were frequently suspected of receiving, despite repeated testimony in the press that they had received nothing besides their one-off honoraria. The head of Pansofia nonetheless took FIN to court, claiming that the Rules were not a legal document at all, and that her contract with the copyright holders had been violated (Mladá fronta dnes, 24 October 1994). The current situation is an uneasy compromise. The Addendum in effect scaled back the scope of the 1993 reforms, but in doing so, it introduced a whole new set of optional variations into the language. In decreeing them to be stylistically different from each other, it has in effect complicated the language further rather than simplifying it. Spell checkers and computers in general are not yet capable of making these sorts of subtle distinctions, and since a significant portion of the population now uses them for their everyday work, they are having an effect on everyday written discourse whose extent has yet to be studied and analyzed.210 The situation in publishing nowadays is equally confused. Some new conventions have been adopted, while others have remained outside the pale. A check of three online newspapers, however, revealed some interesting findings, reported in Table 27 (p. 176). Lidové noviny is traditionally held to be the Czech Republic’s paper of record. Mladá fronta dnes is the nation’s largest circulation quality daily. Blesk is the nation’s largest selling paper, a down-market mix of celebrity gossip, scandal, and bits of news. Several trends seem clear in these figures. First of all, eight years after these changes were introduced, the new -izmus endings with a had

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made no headway at all in the two most influential papers in the country. By and large, they seemed to have been rejected by the country’s elite. The same seems true of the spelling diskuze, although here the occasional new variant does sneak in. Table 27. Usage in three online papers, March 2001 word (old) (new) kapitalismus kapitalizmus diskuse diskuze kurs kurz universita univerzita balón balon archív archiv

lidovky.cz (Lidové noviny) tokens percent 170 (100%) 0 (0%) 1491 (99.4%) 9 (0.6%) 810 (94.6%) 46 (5.4%) 2 (1.0%) 189 (99.0%) 28 (27.7%) 73 (72.3%) 4 (2.7%) 142 (97.3%)

idnes.cz (Mladá fronta dnes) tokens percent 52 (100%) 0 (0%) 725 (97.7%) 17 (2.3%) 754 (83.0%) 154 (17%) 8 (5.6%) 135 (94.4%) 57 (33.5%) 113 (66.5%) 11 (90.4%) 104 (9.6%)

blesk.cz (Blesk) tokens 19* 2* 26 0 22 35 0 15 10 0 3 6

percent (90.5%) (9.5%) (100%) (0%) (38.6%) (61.4%) (0%) (100%) (100%) (0%) (33.3%) (66.7%)

* = includes all words in -ismus/-izmus.

Kurz is more interesting. The old spelling with predominated in Lidové noviny and to a lesser extent in Mladá fronta dnes, but in Blesk by 2001 was outnumbered by examples of the new spelling with . For univerzita, the new spelling with was dominant, with only occasional examples of the old spelling with . 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

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style guides. Enforcement of the style guide may be lax in places where spell-checkers, for example, permit both forms. At any rate, the recent spelling reform apparently has not had the effect of reducing variation and rationalizing Czech spelling in the popular press. 6. Conclusions It would be easy to ascribe the difficulties in the 1993 reform to the collapse of communist-era lines of command, but this is too simplistic a view. After all, orthographic reform has been a constant theme in Czech history since the early 1800s, and many of the centralized structures that could have been used to implement these changes do still exist in the Czech Republic, much as they do across the rest of Europe (England’s educational bureaucracy being a fine example of a top-heavy, dictate-laden state apparatus beholden to political and ideological whims). More importantly, the collapse in these lines of command shattered what had been at best a fragile consensus that reforms would happen from time to time, and opened a series of frank, sometimes virulent debates. The main question was: Did orthographic reform belong in the hands of any institution at all, and who in any event was to be trusted with it? As the debate progressed, many of the truths the reformers and public regarded as self-evident came under scrutiny. What after all constituted a reform? Who was bound by it? How was it implemented? Who oversaw the process? Under these circumstances, it is easy to see how the early 1990s were both the best and the worst of times to contemplate such a reform. They were the best of times in that the reformers were able to seize a crucial moment in history, reflect the rapidly changing circumstances around them, and bring the Rules into the post-communist world. They were the worst of times in that the endeavour required trust from the public and reliable government structures that could bolster the reforms’ legitimacy. The public, however, buffeted by economic uncertainty, and provoked by the newly free press that was now constantly exposing the seamier side of public life for all to contemplate and comment on, was in a deeply suspicious mood, and the paths to government approval were now constantly shifting as the ministries adjusted to the realities of a democratic state. This chapter has outlined the trajectory of the 1993 reforms. In the next chapters, we will examine more closely the participants in the debates and some of the issues raised in the course of the reforms.

Chapter 6 The actors in spelling reform: Issues and debates The spelling rules are a mess. Stefanka Mikešová, pensioner, interviewed in the women’s magazine KvČty, 2 September 1994

The potted history of the 1993 reform in the last chapter focused on the how of the reforms, when, of course, the most interesting question is: why did matters unfold as they did? A partial answer lies in the motivations that underlay the reforms and the reactions to them. In this chapter, we will consider the different players in the orthographic debates and the way the debates shaped perceptions of the players’ actions. A large portion of the argument is devoted to the role of linguists, and specifically reformers, although I will also consider the role of the press at some length. The debates explored in this chapter and the next explore the ideologies behind and the opinions expressed in primarily “non-factual” articles: those that have a motive other than the presentation of objective information. However, as we will see below, journalistic objectivity may be limited by context and preconceptions. The presentation of apparently factual material can still, through its arrangement and selection, reflect ideologies about language and reform. The corpus that forms the basis for my analysis of public opinions contains 549 articles from the Czech press. These articles were gathered in three ways. First, the CLI granted access to their clippings file. In 1993 and 1994, the CLI had subscribed to a clippings service run by Pražská informaþní služba (Prague Information Service). The service collected articles about language from national and regional papers. A little more than half of the articles came from a careful culling of this file. Most of the remaining articles came from a thorough perusal of the major Czech dailies. The corpus covers the following papers in the period April 1993 – September 1994: ýeský deník, HospodáĜské noviny, Lidová demokracie (folded 1993), Lidové noviny, Mladá fronta dnes, Práce, Rudé právo, Svobodné slovo, Telegraf, ZN noviny/ZemČdČlské noviny.211 All of these are considered “quality dailies”.212 They represent a range of

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political views, from strongly left-leaning to libertarian. Two of them have somewhat specialized audiences: HospodáĜské noviny focuses on economic news, while ZN/ZemČdČlské noviny traditionally concentrated on the agricultural sector, although this specialization is not as marked. I also made a thorough sweep of the following weekly, fortnightly, and monthly periodicals: Literární noviny (‘Literary News’), Mladý svČt (‘Young World’), Reflex (‘Reflex’), Respekt (‘Respect’), Rozhlas (‘Radio’), Tvar (‘Form’), Uþitelské noviny (‘Teachers’ News’), Vesmír (‘Cosmos’). These were partially chosen for their availability, and partially because the clippings file had contained the occasional item from there, demonstrating that the magazine did cover the orthography controversy. They represent a spectrum of different subjects. Weekly magazines like Mladý svČt and Reflex cover general cultural news and trends; the papers Tvar and Literární noviny are more closely focused on “high” culture. Rozhlas is a magazine for radio listeners, aimed at a culturally literate audience. Vesmír is a monthly popular science magazine that has traditionally had a column on language. Respekt is a weekly newspaper of social and political analysis, and Uþitelské noviny is a journal for teachers. Finally, cross-references from articles in the corpus helped to fill in gaps and to ensure that all the most influential articles were included. An overview of the distribution and variety of articles in the various sources can be found in section 3 below.

1. Participants, beneficiaries, and victims of reform The content of any given reform may be incidental to the reactions it evokes. People’s training and their societal roles, self-defined or otherwise, in part shaped their reaction to reform proposals. A detailed scheme of actors that goes beyond the reformers themselves will thus be helpful. The taxonomy proposed below includes four major groups, classified along the lines of their backgrounds, their particular areas of concern, and the types of responses they gave. I. Linguists consisted of those with specialist linguistic knowledge or training. The vast majority of them did not participate in the compilation of any given reform. Their opinions influenced the debate to a greater or lesser extent depending on how well-known they were in the field and by the public. They – more than any others – were influenced in their responses by prevailing linguistic schools and current or past linguistic theories. They

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may also have been swayed by personal considerations: linguists are likely to have stronger feelings than the general public when it comes to who was included in or excluded from the orthographic commission. Some linguists preferred to stylize themselves as belonging to the “implementer” or “proficient user” groups, depending on their profession and point of view. This reflects the fact that linguist was to some extent a dirty word during these debates, and was often used as a synonym for “revisionist”. Ia. Reformers constituted the primary architects of the reforms. They propagated the reform in the press and responded to comments. Although in training they were essentially indistinguishable from the main group of linguists, their position as “insiders” meant that they were more favourably disposed towards reform from the outset, and were likely to defend their commission’s conclusions. II. Implementers were those charged with executing spelling reform. The bulk of this group consisted of teachers, copy editors, native-language textbook authors, and proofreaders. Other members of the public (for instance, parents of school-age children) stylized themselves as implementers, inasmuch as they saw themselves as executors of these new policies (helping their children with homework and explaining grammar and spelling to them). IIa. Officials were mostly non-linguists who held responsibility for areas in which the reform took effect, e.g. bureaucrats or ministers in the field of education. Their responses differed from those of other implementers in that they were concerned with issues of authority and precedence rather than practical matters of spelling reform, of which they professed to know little. Their incursions into the linguistic arena tended to muddy the waters of reform, but were more easily understood and appreciated by the public than those of linguists. III. Proficient users employed the standard language as a matter of routine in their professional capacities, although its form was not normally a central concern for them. Lawyers, secretaries, businessmen, government officials, writers, and members of the intelligentsia fell into this category. Those who contributed to these debates regarded it as natural that, as members of the “writing classes”, their opinions ought to matter in any consideration of spelling reform. Members of this group were quick to stylize themselves as “implementers”, because a large majority of them were also parents or had some responsibility for finished written products. IIIa. Discipline-based specialists were prone to view spelling reform for its impact on their field (e.g. economics, molecular biology, structural en-

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gineering). Their primary concern was to advance the needs of users in their discipline. IIIb. The media occupied a peculiar position in this scheme. Reporters, presenters, and their assigning editors had similar backgrounds to other proficient users, but had a disproportionate ability to influence the way the public perceived the reform. Their contributions – deliberate and inadvertent – to the reforms will be considered at length. IV. Non-proficient users – those who experience great difficulties in utilizing the written standard language – were the least represented in these discussions. Members of other interest groups claimed to speak on their behalf or stylized themselves as peripheral members of this group, but core non-proficient users were rarely consulted directly and did not engage in the debate unless asked by the media. Nowhere in these debates were nonnative speakers mentioned in more than a peripheral fashion. IVa. School pupils constitute a special sub-group, because they were the primary target of this and previous reforms. Although non-proficient users at the time, they were expected to graduate to proficient users. There was only rare evidence of direct reaction from or consultation with this group, although their needs were measured and assessed by others. 1.1. Affiliation and representation In the public face of these debates, Czechs presented themselves as representing various factions or interest groups. Their affiliations can be either explicit or implicit, and the way this is presented makes a difference to their argument. A columnist or correspondent automatically acquires a certain gravitas, whereas a letter writer has no particular claim to authority. However, even a letter writer can have his authority boosted by a sufficiently weighty signature: From a letter by Assoc. Prof. Milan Žemliþka, M.A., Department of Czech Language and Literature, Pedagogical Faculty, College of Engineering and Textile Design, Liberec213

Many letter-writers and columnists habitually referred to their professional experience as well in their letters. However, others (including some wellknown linguists) preferred to write instead as ordinary citizens and language users, without making any reference to their profession or knowledge of the field. This is in itself a way of marking social affiliation, as it separates a person’s private opinions from his professional ones.

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2. The reformers The linguists who wrote the Rules had motives that were linguistic, practical and politico-social.214 The linguistic motives, discussed below in chapter 7, section 1, reflect underlying attitudes and beliefs about language that derive from Prague School linguistics. The practical motives revolve around the obsolescence of the existing manuals, and politico-social motives reflect the substantial upheaval in Czech politics and society in the early 1990s. The reform’s final product – the Rules of Czech Orthography – reflects this combination of motives. The commission was not a monolithic entity. Despite their commonalities, each member had an individual vision of what the Rules could or should be, and his own reasons for participating. By the same token, the beliefs and situations that influenced them were not unique to the members of the commission. Most of the commission’s linguists were, if anything, squarely in the mainstream for their field, generation, and country. If they had blind spots and failures, these tell us less about them as individuals than they do about the limitations of Czech functionalism as a language planning tool and the state of knowledge at the time. Many public responses specifically mentioned the reformers. They give an important glimpse of how people perceived this group of actors and what the public thought their role should be. 2.1. Practical motivations for spelling reform Linguistic ideology does not fully explain why a new version of the Rules was expected. There were practical reasons for a revision, many of which had nothing to do with the theoretical concerns of language planning. In any society, handbooks date rapidly. The updated editions to the 1957 Rules that appeared in 1961, 1966, 1969, 1974, 1977, and 1983215 had taken care of the occasional anachronism that had arisen in the examples of the “theory” section. For instance, the 1957 Rules (Pravidla þeského pravopisu 1957: 74) give these examples of commas used in appositives: ýSR je státem dvou rovnoprávných národĤ, ýechĤ a SlovákĤ. ‘The Czechoslovak Republic is a state of two nations, Czechs and Slovaks, equal under the law.’ Antonín Zápotocký, president ýeskoslovenské republiky, byl i vynikajícím spisovatelem. ‘Antonín Zápotocký, the president of the Czechoslovak Republic, was also an outstanding writer.’

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The first of these sentences had dated factually; the second had dated culturally. The Czechoslovak Republic had changed its name in 1960 to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and this was reflected in subsequent editions of the Rules. Zápotocký, a lifelong socialist and communist with literary pretensions (he published autobiographical novels) who presided over some of the fiercest purges and repressions in the early 1950s, was to say the least a controversial figure. His presence in the 1957 Rules is curious, but fits with the political tenor of the times. This sentence was dropped from later editions of the Rules and replaced with an example about composer BedĜich Smetana (Pravidla þeského pravopisu 1983b: 88). Such occasional problems would have been dealt with as a matter of course in the 1993 Rules, but as it turned out, the level of revision required was far more substantial. While later editions of the 1957 Rules had changed only the odd entry here or there, the institutional and philosophical changes after 1989 required a thorough re-editing of the Rules and a wholesale shift in priorities. No longer did the Rules have to fit a particular dogma or political stance, and in fact when a minimally altered version of the old Rules was reissued in 1990, it was subject to harsh criticism.216 In 1993, it was no longer enough to eliminate the occasional tendentiously political sentence. The scale of the changes can be seen in the spelling dictionary, where examples are supposed to show the reader how common words are used in names and how the capitalization rules work. Usage reflects the societal context, and is not surprising that pre-1989 editions of the Rules were steeped in communist-era terminology and examples. The word dĤm ‘house, building, institution’, for instance, is still a relatively lengthy example in the 1993 Rules. We are shown how to capitalize it in a variety of instances. However, examples such as DĤm pionýrĤ a mládeže Julia Fuþíka ‘Julius Fuþík House for Young Pioneers and Youth’, which no longer exists (Fuþík was an early communist, martyred during the Second World War), are replaced with more contemporary ones. In the entry for strana ‘party/side’, the 1983 edition mentions only the Communist Party, while the 1993 mentions the Greens and, of course, the ruling Civic Democratic Party. The communists, although still a significant political force in the country, are edited out. The word únor ‘February’ was a politically important one before 1989. The old Rules make the point that the word was not capitalized in ordinary references to the month, but was always to be capitalized when referring to the communist putsch of February 1948 (e.g. Únor). The only exception

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was that if the phrase VítČzný únor ‘Victorious February’ was used for these events, then the first word would then “hold” the capitalization for the entire phrase. No further explanation of these terms was required; the authors clearly considered them to be common knowledge. This orthographic orthodoxy becomes irrelevant after 1989 and the change of government, and in the 1993 Rules, the word is offered with no examples at all.217 These examples are not confined to the orthographic dictionary. Reading the expository section of the 1983 Rules (Pravidla þeského pravopisu 1983: 87), we come across examples of comma usage and phrase structure such as: SovČtský svaz, usilující o svČtový mír, má vĜelé sympatie pracujících celého svČta. ‘The Soviet Union, which strives for world peace, has the fervent sympathies of workers the world over.’ Naše lidová armáda, budovaná péþí KSý, podporovaná vším lidem, je nepĜemožitelnou záštitou míru. ‘Our people’s army, built under the care of the Communist Party, supported by the entire nation, is an invincible bulwark of peace.’

The 1993 reforms thus had a practical dimension as well. After 1989, anyone using a pre-revolutionary handbook would become increasingly frustrated at its lack of relevance to post-communist society. It did not contain the examples and phrases people saw around them, and was chock full of outdated (dĤm, únor) and possibly irritating ones (strana). Continuing to publish and republish the 1957 manual would have made the CLI look like a retrograde, hidebound institution. This motivation arose only partway through the project, as the basic revisions were already in more or less final form by 1989. Ironically, however, it assumed a singular importance in the wake of the social and political changes in transitional Czechoslovakia, and was widely cited in the press both by authors of the reforms and reviewers as a feature of the new Rules. 2.2. Political motivations for spelling reform To what extent is orthographic reform a political matter? Certainly language planning can have a political or strategic cast in many societies. A frequent subject of study has been the politics of minority communities within a larger political entity (see Schiffman [1996: 148–172] on the status of languages in India and Ager [2003: 57–61] on the status of Scots, English and Welsh in the British Isles) or the nation-building attempts of

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formerly colonized states and their reaction against a pervasive colonizing language (see Druviete 1997 on Latvian, Wexler 1992 on Belarusian, and Buyássyová and Ondrejoviþ 1997 on Slovak). However, orthographic reform is easily politicized in a variety of contexts. French is an example of a majority language of a powerful state assuming a highly politicized role in national discourse, much as in the above examples. The minority-majority and decolonization issues are not at all irrelevant for French, as it turns out. It has been argued in several places – most recently and clearly by Ager (1999) – that the French perceive their nation and language to be under threat, especially from English. Sally Johnson (2005) describes the legal battles over German language reform, and other attempted reforms in e.g. the Netherlands, Norway, and Russia (see e.g. Jacobs 1997 on Dutch, Bull 1993 and Hallaråker 2001 on Norwegian, Lopatin 2001 on Russian) show that majority and dominant languages are also prone to it, although one then needs to look for factors within the dominant political and social culture. Czech, the majority language of a state independent for almost 90 years, falls clearly into this latter category. The politicization of spelling reform in Czech owes much to its close historical ties with Czech nationalism and the general politicization of linguistic theory, linguistic institutions, and language culture that took place under the communist regime (see chapter 4, section 3.3).218 The proliferation of political content in pre-1989 editions of the Rules is an established fact, as we saw in the last section. Some of these examples are essentially referential. A rulebook, after all, refers to the society where it was written, and we would not expect it to ignore common names and words just because they have some political content. Many examples are gratuitously preachy and moralizing – but we can, if we wish, excuse these as a simple and necessary political façade on an essentially non-political structure, and this is how the CLI was in fact keen to portray them. An apologia is offered by Daneš in a March 1993 article in the popular science magazine Vesmír: Critics sometimes come forward with the assertion that this Czechification219 was the product of communist despotism and the primitivism of its bearers. Was it truly thus? Of course, the Rules did not develop without this force’s inclusion and intrusions, and linguists’ interaction with it was not simple, but I know (if indirectly – I was not personally present) that the communist elite did not have a (uniform) opinion on the matter; instead, they brought chaos and inconsistency into the decision-making process. The

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fundamental question “how to write foreign words?” is basically non-political in nature (although it can often acquire a political aspect) and Czech orthography did not begin to deal with it until “under the communists”.220

Daneš casts linguists as keeping their own counsel, but “spinning” their work so that it would be palatable for the communist overlords. In his view, there is an objective, non-politicized spelling reform movement, reflecting the traditions and values of the Prague School. The communist cant that at times camouflaged it is, in Daneš’s eyes, insignificant. In fact, Daneš goes so far as to say that non-politicized reform had not been possible in the precommunist era. This view was in sharp contrast with those expressed by non-reformers. 2.3. Public views of the CLI under the previous regime As we saw in chapter 4, the CLI and the functionalist school of linguistics were to a certain extent compromised in the public mind by virtue of their existence under the previous regime and the accommodations they had made to its demands.221 Whether functionalists in the CLI had co-operated with the Communist Party more readily than they needed to is at this point a matter of second-guessing; the fact is that many of the goals of functionalism accommodated reasonably well to the politics of the time, or could be justified in a roundabout way using the populist-socialist slogans of the totalitarian regime. Naturally, many a correspondent in the early 1990s picked up on this connection, and used it to discredit the reforms.222 Sometimes the mere association sufficed to cast doubt. In 1994 in ýeský deník, Antonín Kostlán devoted most of an article to showing that, “[i]n the 1950s the Rules of Czech Orthography arose on the direct order of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and under its supervision.” This fact was easy enough to prove: the involvement of the Party is not difficult to trace through available scholarly journals. Any reform arising under such circumstances, Kostlán concludes, must be suspect, and needs close examination. By later in the controversy, the connection between the CLI and the Communist Party had been made so often that an ironic hint would suffice: The authors at the Czech Language Institute justified the new orthography of the words kurz, konkurz, pulz, impulz and Alojz in their manual What the New Rules Bring, published in 1991, by saying that “expressions written with z were already appearing frequently” (in the records of [Communist

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Party] Central Committee meetings there frequently appeared “we’ll get to the bottom of those dizzidents”)…223

Similarly, in Martin Daneš’s influential 1993 polemic on the reforms, there is a subhead a quarter-way through the article: VzhĤru k socializmu ‘Upwards to socializm’

Why choose the word socializmus, when many other words with this suffix would do? By playing with a now-defunct cliché, the newspaper highlights succinctly the author’s belief (expressed in numerous other asides, although never directly) that the reforms reflect a totalitarian approach to language regulation linked directly with the traditions of the old regime. The academic Karel Oliva (writing in the weekly Literární noviny on 9 December 1993) saw totalitarian thinking in the commission’s desire to avoid a wide public consultation: The Czech Language Institute was working on the new Rules of Czech Orthography even before 17 November 1989. For the information of the less knowledgeable: by order of the then-director of the Institute this work was secret, to the extent that employees of the Institute were explicitly forbidden to speak about it (even among themselves). Now the results of this work have been revealed. What a shame: it would have been more useful for Czech orthography (not to mention orthoepy, morphology, and stylistics) if they had remained secret for good. After 1989 the Czech Language Institute had a unique opportunity to remove from Czech orthography all that linguistic rubbish that had collected there since 1957, through no fault of the Czech language, its development, or the majority of Czech linguists. The opportunity went unused; what was delivered into the public’s arms was the posthumous child of totalitarian politicization and vulgarization of [our] language.224

Others focused more explicitly on the social-engineering side of language regulation, and spotted in spelling trends they believed were characteristic of communist social policy: I gazed with horror upon the frightful forms codified in the new rules as the only acceptable ones. It’s simply the continuation of the work of communist linguists, who in place of the exalted universita forced the degenerate univerzita on us.225

Frequently, correspondents expressed the fear that ongoing orthographic

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change was designed to cut off the younger generations from literature of a previous era, which would become incomprehensible, or would at least look old-fashioned.226 Others saw the pernicious hand of the Slovaks, who had been well represented in the former Czechoslovak federal government: After the rise of the Slovak federal government and Husákoid Czech “new speak” [sic], the Czech language once again politically adjusted itself to the image of the new powerfull lords. The announcers of the new fedderal orders from the East not only thought in Cyrillic, but even used it for writing phonetically in transcription into Latin letters.227

For many correspondents, the provenance of the changes was crucial in evaluating them. Remnants or reminders of the previous regime were tainted, suspect, and best rejected. 2.4. Public concern over financial arrangements A second argument directed at the reform commission concerned the publishing arrangements for the school edition of the Rules, which was the first to appear. As distinct from previous school editions, which had been published by the State Pedagogical Publishing House (Státní pedagogické nakladatelství), the 1993 Rules were published by Pansofia, which, as Antonín Kostlán pointed out, was a private imprint. The authors received an honorarium from the publisher which, according to Hlavsa, was under 30 percent of their annual salaries – a significant amount, but they were not to receive royalties from the arrangement.228 In the context of Czech society of the early 1990s, the idea of academics earning a partial salary from their outside activities was no odder than it is in the West. If anything, such extra payments were more prevalent in postrevolutionary Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. The basic salaries paid by state institutions were hardly generous even in communist times. Authors were thus regularly paid for contributions to journals (even if these were nominal amounts) and frequently undertook paid outside work in the form of translating, interpreting, broadcasting, and consulting. Furthermore, in the early 1990s, price controls were removed, and high inflation hammered the consumers of Central and Eastern Europe’s transitional economies. Extra income above and beyond one’s salary became an imperative. Still, the honoraria gained by the authors of the Rules proved to be a stumbling block in the debate. The ideology that underpinned this thinking called on the image of the venal little Czech, and declared that if money

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was involved, it must be the driving factor, and thus threw the propriety of this practice into question. It was often suggested that the authors had written the Rules for their own personal gain or for that of their underfunded institute, at the expense of the equally cash-strapped public who would have to shell out for new reference manuals. After the completion of the Addendum, the Ministry of Education required that it be bound into all future versions of the school edition. Publishing house Fortuna then insisted that the competition to publish this “new” edition be reopened. They saw the matter quite differently from members of the public, as publisher František Talián made clear in an interview (ZN noviny, 10 August 1994): Aside from the authors’ honoraria, we have offered royalties from the sale of the book, which the publisher Pansofia certainly did not do when publishing last year’s Rules. The authors created the Rules on work time, and the funds which the state expended on publication would be returned to it through our financial offer. If the director of the institute does not take advantage of it, either he does not understand his job and therefore should not be doing it, or he is pretending ignorance and is thus deliberately harming the organization he leads. Of course, he would have to have some reason for doing this.

He then threatened to instigate a complaint leading to criminal proceedings on this basis. Talián implied that for authors to accept payment while the CLI as an institution received nothing was in essence a form of corruption, where individuals looked out for their own interests without safeguarding the financial interest of their employer and the state. His allegations raised a further question: was the private sector often complicit in this game, in the interest of keeping more profit for itself? These suspicions were not confined to those in the publishing industry.229 Intellectuals voiced their reservations as well. Vladimír Karfík, writing in Literární noviny on 20 January 1994, opined: A steady earner is the dream all authors dependent on their book royalties either admit to or keep secret […]. I am not thinking of anything as ephemeral as, say, Forever Amber, but of books that are far less prepossessing, which nonetheless stay in print without much effort on the part of their authors, like the Highway Code. Among such books is the Rules of Czech Orthography; the last version from 1957 has now reached a noteworthy nineteenth edition. There is nothing strange about this; mandatory school texts are published

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over and over – new classes enter the schools, the language changes, and we must keep pace with it and update the rules, as long as we allow our linguistic traffic to be regulated as well. The motivations for creating the Rules are of course strong ones. Who would not jump at the opportunity to author a book that has one new edition after another, practically guaranteed by law? […] What if we stopped paying the authors of the Rules? Maybe we would get along fine with just a dictionary of Czech.

No one would ever have raised this argument against a scholarly work or an ordinary textbook for which an author received royalties – but then, the Rules were not an ordinary work: they were to be compulsory in the school classroom. Editor František Kostlán, writing in Telegraf on 22 July 1993, put the problem succinctly: The new Rules of Czech Orthography were, without forethought or consultation, accepted and purchased by institutions, offices, schools, editorial collectives (except ýeský deník and Telegraf), etc. This fact has two aspects worthy of comment. In the first place, a defining one – the rules by which the majority of the media and institutions are governed were published by a private publisher, and the copyright to the school edition of the rules (see the subtitle) is held by the head of the authorial collective, Olga Martincová. Not, as could be expected, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic or the Czech Language Institute, which is listed on the book cover as guarantor of the Rules of Czech Orthography. It is evidently unnecessary to add specifically who made a nice little bundle of money off this violation of the Czech language.

This accusation that new editions of the Rules were dreamt up to line someone’s pockets became a refrain. It crops up regularly almost as an aside in people’s articles, as just one further reason to despise the new Rules. For example, in a polemic devoted primarily to the secrecy in which the Rules were created, author Karel Pecka wrote: One’s blood boils at the thought of the new Rules of Czech Orthography. They are the creation of a group where, of nine authors, one is an associate professor and five have doctorates. With a gigantic print run, that’s a decent share of royalties per head.230

A slightly different, although still monetary point was made by Pavel JĤza, writing in ýeský deník on 13 August 1994. He compares the Rules to Gabþíkovo Dam, a giant hydroelectric project on the Danube that was the subject of bitter disputes between Slovakia and its neighbour Hungary,

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which claimed the ecological consequences would be catastrophic. JĤza takes a fatalistic attitude, saying good money always gets thrown after bad: The new Rules will take effect, because much money has already been invested in them. Gabþíkovo Dam stands, because by the time of the first public protests, 10 billion had already been invested in it.

In the early 1990s, money as a driving force in public affairs was an unfamiliar concept in the Czech lands. Most people had little experience of the interaction between the public sector and emerging private enterprises. The public was thus susceptible to arguments that portrayed dealings with the private sector as profiteering. On the one hand, an agreement had openly been struck between the CLI and the Ministry of Education to mandate the use of the Rules in schools. On the other hand, there was the private nature of the publishing transaction – a deal between the authors and a private publishing house. Once the authors had accepted a contract and honoraria from a private publisher, there were bound to be accusations of backroom deals and money changing hands. These spats diminished the authority of the publication, regardless of whether the accusations were justified or not. 3. The press We now need to consider the role of the environment in which the debates on orthography were played out: namely, the pages of the daily and weekly newspapers and newsmagazines of the Czech Republic in 1993–1994. Because the vast majority of contributions were found in newspapers, our analysis will focus on them. The 1990s saw a massive change in the Czech media. From a strictly controlled press with relatively few outlets, the press underwent a dramatic expansion in the years following 1989. Eventually, the laws of the free market began to bite and a gradual and lasting downward trend set in, whereby the number of publications shrank and their ownership became concentrated in fewer (and often foreign) hands.231 Before 1989, the national newspapers of note in the Czech lands were tied to political parties or other official organizations. Rudé právo was the organ of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Svobodné slovo and Lidová demokracie were affiliated with two minor socialist-style parties that were permitted to exist alongside the communists. Práce was a union

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paper, and Mladá fronta was the paper of an officially-sponsored youth movement. According to ýulík (2002b), the privatization of these newspapers after 1989 allowed newspaper staff to continue to publish while avoiding the need to “purchase” the papers from the state [emphasis original]: The leading Czech newspapers (Mladá fronta, Rudé právo, Veþerní Praha, ZemČdČlské noviny and others), although owned by the state under communism, were confiscated by their respective members of staff. These people set up private companies, abolished the state-owned newspapers and created new ones – with a slightly changed name. This made it possible for them to take over the established trademarks of the papers as well as their subscribers (both were worth large sums of money), claiming that from a legal point of view, their newspapers were new ventures. Thus Mladá fronta became Mladá fronta Dnes, Rudé právo became Právo, Veþerní Praha became Veþerník Praha, ZemČdČlské noviny became Zemské noviny, etc.). The editorial staff who thus stole the newspapers they worked on later sold their newly acquired property to foreign owners, making considerable personal profits.

In 1993–1994, this process was well underway, but still in progress. It is worth noting that not all of the name changes were connected with the change in ownership, and some may have in fact been a search for broader markets – the dropping of the word rudé ‘crimson’, long associated with the communists, from the name Právo ‘Right’, or the change from ZemČdČlské noviny ‘Agricultural News’ to ZN noviny and then to Zemské noviny ‘Country News’ may be cases in point. Among the other national papers to survive from the Communist era into the early post-communist period were Svobodné slovo (originally Slovo) and HospodáĜské noviny, a business-oriented title. The early 1990s saw the rise of many new publications alongside the privatized state ones. Among the newspapers to start up in this period were Lidové noviny, which was the direct inheritor of a small dissident samizdat circular of the late communist era, and the dailies ýeský deník and Telegraf. Of these, Lidové noviny has been sold to foreign owners and survived, while the other two have folded. There were other papers with more hardline anti-communist views that arose in this period but did not survive past the mid-1990s or have gone to electronic publication only. These papers represent the so-called “quality” dailies, meaning that they focused on news reporting. But the post-communist era also saw the rise of

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the mass-market tabloid, with minimal news content and a soft spot for celebrity gossip, human-interest stories, scandal, and the paranormal. Of these, three – Blesk, Haló noviny, and Špígl – achieved respectable circulation figures and the first two have survived until the present day, with Blesk gaining market share to become the largest-circulation daily and the second most widely-read paper in the country after Mladá fronta dnes. Local news underwent a similar expansion and then consolidation, although during the period under consideration the regional market was a relatively varied one, with some larger towns and cities having at least briefly two or more dailies. Of the weeklies and newsmagazines, some, like Literární noviny and Tvar, continued a pre-Revolutionary title or were run by collectives previously responsible for other publications. Others, like Respekt, were new and, while they had an editorial line, contained a spectrum of political and social views. Before attaching political labels like “conservative” or “liberal” to the Czech press, we need to define what these terms mean in a society in transition from Soviet-style totalitarianism to multinational capitalism. Such terms are not immediately clear in the post-Soviet context. “Conservative”, for example, can imply resisting change and thus a pro-communist, procollectivist attitude, the very opposite of what it means in the American or British environment. I will use the following terms as defined to refer to the period from 1991–1995. Left-wing papers are those that support much or at least parts of the social and political agenda of the previous communist regime. The moderate left wing tends to favour the retention of the progressive communist social agenda (comprehensive benefits, universal employment and education, state planning) within a more democratic, pluralistic political system, while the hard-line left wing favours restoring dismantled features of the previous system (strict controls on social interaction and possibly even on freedom of speech, restoration of state control over the economy and its redirection back towards a collectivist, egalitarian model). Right-wing papers are those that broadly support all or some of the social and political agenda of the post-communist government, led at the time by the free-market-espousing, Thatcheresque Civic Democratic Party (Obþanská demokratická strana) of Václav Klaus. The moderate right wing agreed with the main points of the CDP programme: the gradual liberalization of the economy, reintegration with Europe, the privatization of state

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enterprises and a reduction in the scope of the state benefits system.232 The hard-line right-wing argued for the principles espoused by the CDP, but in a more drastic form than that actually undertaken by the CDP in government, pushing for a more radically free-market economy, the removal of all barriers to personal liberty, and the dismantling of the social safety net. There were also publications on the “fringe” left- and right-wing that espoused more extreme viewpoints, but none of the papers examined here fall into that category. Centrist papers stake a position between the two. Typically they might generally back the government, while also voicing support for a more egalitarian social agenda. A rough ordering of national quality papers from “right” to “left” in the early 1990s would see the newer publications followed by the transformed pre-communist ones. On the hard-line right were Respekt, ýeský deník and Telegraf, followed by Lidové noviny and HospodáĜské noviny on the moderate right, then Mladá fronta dnes, Svobodné slovo, and Lidová demokracie in the centre. On the moderate left were ZemČdČlské noviny (later ZN noviny) and Práce, followed by Rudé právo and Haló noviny on the hard-line left. Scandal sheets like Blesk and Špígl are more difficult to classify, as their news coverage is spottier and tends to concentrate on the sensational of any political stripe. The number of national newspapers at this time is significant. The Czech Republic was a nation of 10.5 million, and yet in 1993 it had at least 13 major national dailies, of which at least 10 could claim to be “quality” dailies focusing primarily on news. Compared to the British market, which has five quality dailies and six tabloids for a population six times the size, the Czech market looked ripe for a severe shake-out. Indeed, a decade later all of the national papers with the exception of Rudé právo (now just Právo) and Haló noviny had either been bought by foreign concerns or gone out of business (or sometimes one and then the other).233 In addition to adapting quickly to new economic and political conditions, then, the Czech Republic’s newspapers were rapidly hurled into a battle for commercial survival. 3.1. Newspaper discourse in the early 1990s ýulík (2002a, 2002b) describes the mentality of the Czech press as being small-town and collectivist in ethos, saying that they tend to stake out a

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middle ground out of fear of offending social mores. However, he sees this as a matter of character, not a commercial decision. According to ýulík, Czech journalism is reflexively deferential to authority, wanting to follow public opinion and the wishes of the great and the good rather than to lead them. The centrist position, he argues, is a result of this ethos, and it is thus not surprising that most papers take a centrist or moderate position. It would be overly harsh and inaccurate to label these failings as specifically Czech ones, but nonetheless they do apply in many respects.234 Czech journalism in the early 1990s suffered from a lack of continuity and experience. Many of the reporters were young, either chronologically or professionally; very few had worked in a free press before 1989. Compounded with the exigencies of daily deadlines – the constant need to gather facts rapidly and report on them in fields far removed from the journalist’s own sphere of knowledge – these circumstances made for an uneven quality of reporting. Errors in reporting were frequent, from the small but telling (wrong names, dates, and facts given in passing) through the materially significant (reliance on outdated information or faulty memory to make a point) to considerable lapses in judgment (failure to substantiate serious accusations of corruption or incompetence). In the orthography controversy, fundamentals of journalistic practice were occasionally ignored, even in the larger papers. Reporters took press releases from the CLI or elsewhere and republished them under by-lines, altering them slightly.235 These insufficiencies in the media are reflected in the very different way that Czech society at large in the early 1990s conceived of free debate. Letter-writers to newspapers, for example, filled their communiqués with ad hominem argumentation, unsubstantiated allegations presented as fact and conspiracy theories. While newspapers everywhere receive such letters, in the Czech Republic of the early 1990s, they frequently made it into print without commentary or rebuttal (or occasionally even with an approving comment from the editor). In this context, it is worth briefly recapping the major themes in Czech domestic news during 1993–1994, discussed earlier in chapter 2, section 1. In early 1993, the foremost issue was the break-up of the Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, which occurred on 1 January 1993. The newly independent Czech Republic was engaged in protracted negotiations with its eastern neighbour as to who owned what and who owed whom how much. In addition, there was the issue of how – philosophically, ethnically, politically – to define this new, smaller country in which the Czechs now lived.

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The privatization of state enterprises was an ongoing concern. As more and more companies passed into public hands or were sold to foreign investors, the actual impact of forty years of nationalization and state control became more and more evident, and worries increased that Czech industry was being “swallowed” by foreign conglomerates whose motives were primarily to pre-empt competition. The “lustration” (lustrace) campaign (discussed at greater length in chapter 2, section 1.5) meant that all government and state officials heading a department or enterprise were vetted to ensure they had not held an official post in the Communist Party, and had not served as an informant or agent of the State Security (Státní bezpeþnost).236 It saw turnover at the tops of organizations, and resulted in prominent figures – including those from the ranks of former dissidents and anti-communists – being accused of collaboration. Many of them denied it vehemently, and the scandals surrounding lustration continued to resound throughout the early 1990s. All these issues have strands in common with the orthography debate. They highlight questions of national identity, the public and private spheres, and the totalitarian past. With these questions constantly in the air, it is not surprising that Czechs applied them to the seemingly academic matter of spelling, bringing the issue into the contemporary political and social world. 3.2. Physical characteristics of Czech newspapers Czech newspapers in the early 1990s were predominantly tabloid in size, printed with monochrome or two-colour technology. A typical edition of a smaller paper would be eight to sixteen pages; a few papers like Lidové noviny and Mladá fronta dnes were longer than this, with substantial front sections, ever-expanding style and financial supplements and special inserts. Departments and sections were often clearly signalled by headers at the top of the page of the sort: Ze zahraniþí ‘From Abroad’, Z domova ‘From Home’,237 Názory ‘Opinions’ and the self-evident Finance, Ekonomika, Kultura, and Sport. Within these areas there was often a mixture of factual pieces and opinion pieces. The latter were usually marked out by a different typeface (italics or bold), or other graphic design indicators (boxing, offsetting of the author’s name, use of a column name). Editorials were usually printed on a special opinion page along with longer pieces by distin-

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guished or regular commentators. Larger papers often devoted some room every day to letters. With smaller papers this was not always the case; they often ran a letters section only once or twice a week. Newspapers publish six days a week, with no Sunday edition; often the Saturday edition is substantially longer, usually containing some sort of cultural supplement for the weekend. Czech newspapers are sometimes purchased by subscription, but a large percentage are sold daily at newsstands. This fact (and the newspapers’ tabloid format) reflects a reality of Czech life: people pick up the paper at a newsstand on the way to their bus, tram, or metro stop and read it on the way to work. The heavy proportion of daily purchases makes the market volatile and competitive, and means that distribution of a newspaper to a network of newsstands is crucial for a paper’s prosperity and survival. The Czech Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC ýR, www.abccr.cz) has tracked sales of newspapers from 1996 to the present (see Table 28). Their figures show a decline in the sales of quality papers, coinciding with the rise in sales of Blesk and upstart competitors like Super. (The jump in the circulation figures for Lidové noviny came from a revamp to increase sales.) Table 28. Sales of newspapers in 1996–2002 title Blesk HospodáĜské noviny Lidové noviny Mladá fronta dnes Práce Právo Slovo Sport Zemské noviny Super total of these

1/1996 copies sold 165,251 124,793 70,723 335,100 82,266 263,964 64,420 99,460 152,107 0 1,358,084

1/1999 copies sold 255,156 89,134 77,567 349,789 0 229,269 65,228 54,280 127,526 0 1,247,949

1/2002 copies sold 331,516 72,565 106,181 324,159 0 210,989 0 56,929 0 129,746 1,232,085

change +101% -42% +50% -3% -100% -20% -100% -43% -100% – -9%

We can also note the slow, year-on-year decline in sales of nationwide daily papers, amounting to 9 percent over the period 1996–2002.238 It is against this background of dwindling readership that the Czech orthography controversy played itself out.

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In 1993, the republic’s most-read daily was scandal sheet Blesk, with 14 percent of a survey reading it every day. Behind it were, in order: Mladá fronta dnes, Rudé právo, Sport, Špígl, Práce, ZN noviny, ýeský deník, Svobodné slovo, HospodáĜské noviny, Lidové noviny, and Lidová demokracie.239 By 1994, the figure for Blesk had risen to 16 percent, followed by Mladá fronta dnes (15 percent), Rudé právo (11 percent), ZN noviny (6 percent), HospodáĜské noviny (5 percent), Svobodné slovo (4 percent), Práce (4 percent), Lidové noviny (3 percent), and Expres (2 percent).240 3.3. Material by source The material in the corpus gives a revealing picture of differences in how the press treated the stories. An overview of the corpus is given in Table 29. Table 29. Contents of the corpus articles by type 185 opinion pieces 126 factual articles 96 letters to the editor241 66 brief notes 47 interviews 17 satirical pieces 6 book reviews 4 cartoons

viewpoint expressed 221 negative 100 positive 226 neutral (none or unclear)

The articles were not distributed evenly throughout the sources. Some newspapers devoted significant space to the reforms, while others more or less ignored it. Table 30 gives a picture of this distribution (keeping in mind that certain periodicals like Lidová demokracie folded in the scanning period, and other small papers had incomplete runs in the archives). Lidové noviny, the paper of record in the early 1990s, had by far the most substantial coverage of the orthography wars. It was closely followed by the other new independent dailies, both of which were much smaller papers physically as well as in circulation. Mladá fronta dnes, the largest paper in physical terms as well as in circulation, had comparatively modest coverage – certainly compared with the number and depth of articles found in smaller papers.

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Table 30. Articles by source no. 88 57 44 38 32 25 21 19 18 15 14 13 13 12 12 12 12 8 7 6 6 6 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 40

source (description) Lidové noviny (quality daily)* ýeský deník (quality daily)* Telegraf (quality daily)* Mladá fronta dnes (quality daily)* Literární noviny (cultural weekly)* ZemČdČlské noviny/ZN noviny/Zemské noviny (quality daily)* Rudé právo (quality daily)* Svobodné slovo (quality daily)* Práce (quality daily)* Hradecké noviny (regional daily – Hradec Králové) HospodáĜské noviny (quality daily)* Moravoslezský den (regional daily – Ostrava) PlzeĖský deník (regional daily – PlzeĖ) Respekt (cultural weekly)* Haló noviny (down-market national daily) Moravský demokratický deník (regional daily – Brno) Veþerník Praha (regional daily – Prague) Lidová demokracie (quality daily)* ýeskobudČjovické listy (regional daily – ýeské BudČjovice) Mladý svČt (weekly popular cultural magazine)* Svoboda (regional newspaper – Ostrava) Uþitelské noviny (weekly newspaper for teachers)* Severoþeský regionální deník (regional daily – North Bohemia) Blesk (downmarket national daily) BrnČnský veþerník (regional daily – Brno) Expres (downmarket national daily) Puls (monthly popular culture magazine) Reflex (weekly popular news and culture magazine)* Tvar (fortnightly, formerly weekly cultural newspaper)* from sources with fewer than four articles each * = surveyed in full to the extent that available archives permitted

The weeklies and biweeklies also showed considerable variation. Literární noviny devoted substantial space to a series of discussions between prominent linguists and literary figures, and Respekt, which is more

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news-focused, still managed a healthy 18 articles. By contrast, Tvar, a weekly at the time, had only four articles over the period. If we limit our scope to the national quality papers, there were substantial differences between printed sources, both in the number of responses they printed on the subject of orthography and in their content. Table 31 shows the distribution of items by viewpoint (positive, negative, or neutral) in each paper, and then by article type in each newspaper. Table 31. Comparison of viewpoints newspaper Lidové noviny ýeský deník Telegraf Mladá fronta dnes Literární noviny ZN noviny Rudé právo Svobodné slovo Práce HospodáĜské noviny Respekt

positive 32 7 4 7 8 2 0 5 5 3 1

negative 31 36 29 12 22 11 4 9 3 2 4

neither 25 14 11 19 2 12 17 5 10 9 7

total 88 57 44 38 32 25 21 19 18 14 12

The variety of opinions represented tips clearly towards the negative side, with three exceptions. Lidové noviny was evenly balanced (for reasons considered below), while Práce and HospodáĜské noviny each contained several interviews with and articles by the authors of the Rules. Given the relatively small total number of articles in these papers, these pieces tipped the balance in favour of positively-slanted contributions. Otherwise, the balance of opinion ran against the Rules across the political spectrum of the papers – from ýeský deník all the way to Rudé právo. Despite the constant and sometimes personally vituperative politicization of rhetoric in the orthography debates, views on orthography do not seem to have been firmly linked to political orientation – at least inasmuch as the level of indignation was not predictable from the newspaper’s place on the political spectrum. We will see later, however, that the issue did figure in a secondary political context. We will also want to ask what sorts of articles were being written. Were they intended foremost as informative or persuasive pieces? Did the newspapers thus see themselves primarily as conveyers of information about the

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Rules, as fora for discussion, or as shapers of public opinion? For the purpose of Table 32, “persuasive” items include opinion pieces, satirical pieces, cartoons and interviews, all of which serve the primary function of conveying opinion rather than fact. Letters are treated separately from other persuasive texts because they also serve the function of indicating solidarity between reader and paper – a fact that will become important later. I have also distinguished between longer factual articles (labelled “informative” below), and small, single-paragraph items of a factual nature. Table 32. Comparison of article types newspaper Lidové noviny ýeský deník Telegraf Mladá fronta dnes Literární noviny ZN noviny Rudé právo Svobodné slovo Práce HospodáĜské noviny Respekt

persuasive 51 21 14 17 29 8 5 7 10 3 7

letter 24 27 19 2 3 4 1 3 1 2 2

informative 9 7 8 18 0 11 6 5 5 3 2

note 4 2 3 1 0 2 9 4 2 6 1

total 88 57 44 38 32 25 21 19 18 14 12

Some newspapers, such as Rudé právo and HospodáĜské noviny, evidently saw their mission as primarily informative. At the other end of the scale was Literární noviny, which as a cultural review made room for a large number of lengthy commentaries and opinions, but did not attempt to simply inform. Interestingly enough, some of the ordinary newspapers (Lidové noviny, ýeský deník, and Telegraf) also had coverage significantly biased away from straight reporting and towards opinion and analysis. 3.4. The placement of orthographic reform Numbers give only a partial picture of how newspapers treated orthographic reform. Any given piece expresses not only the opinion of its author, but also that of the editorial process. An article is assigned, and if it is a running story, it often falls to a single reporter, whose background knowledge may be shaky at first until he finds his feet with it.242 Opinion pieces

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are chosen from those received, commissioned, or submitted by regular columnists. Letters are chosen from an even larger pool of submissions, and in their number and content can reflect an editorial decision to build a social consensus around a story, display its various incompatible sides, or bury it. In these debates, authors are often rebuked for the headlines or pull quotes chosen for their article, or for leaving out some crucial bit of background or necessary information, when in reality this has little to do with them. Where an article is placed, what headline is written for it, whether it is abridged or not, and so forth, are editorial decisions, designed to fit too much copy into too little space, to stretch material on a thin day, or to pique the reader’s interest. Editors can highlight or downplay submissions in other ways as well. A lengthier letter might be drastically cut – or if well written or particularly provocative, it might end up elevated to the status of opinion piece. Such contributions elicited far livelier discussion and polemics. Sometimes editorial notes or opinions were appended to the article, which served to heighten its authority. And of course its placement in the newspaper is of crucial import. One distinctive approach was found in Lidové noviny. Shortly after the publication of the Rules, this newspaper ran a series of positive articles in its column The Lee Side of Language (Jazykové zákampí), mostly authored by noted linguist Milan Jelínek. Letters and other contributions on this subject were published on this page, which appeared weekly in the so-called Sunday supplement of the Saturday paper. In this way, the orthography debate was deliberately confined to the sphere of culture, art, and philosophical interest – while in other newspapers these contributions were mostly placed on pages devoted to political commentary or domestic news. The dailies Svobodné slovo, Práce, Mladá Fronta, ZN noviny, Lidová demokracie, Rudé právo, and HospodáĜské noviny each printed a few articles acquainting readers with the most important outlines of the new Rules, and sometimes an interview with the Rules’ authors. Readers’ opinions were represented in these pages, but not in large numbers. These newspapers apparently took it as their task to explain to the public what the changes were, but were not particularly interested in starting a dialogue with their readers on this issue. In the case of ZN noviny, this caused a significant rupture between the paper and its readers. Right from the beginning, ZN noviny announced that it would implement the new Rules, even though the responses it received from readers and commentators on the reform were extremely negative.243

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Matters certainly were not helped by the fact that at first ZN noviny treated the Rules as if they were newly approved laws. For example, in a short note on 30 April 1993 we find: THE NEW RULES of Czech Orthography, published by Pansofia, have now come into force, but will not be introduced into schools until the school year 1993–1994.244

Here the term “come into force” has legal overtones. It is picked up in an opinion piece by Š. Dostálová from 18 May 1993, where she writes: The vast majority of the Czech population was rendered illiterate quickly and easily once the new Rules of Czech Orthography came into force.

This categorical approach evidently strengthened its readers’ opposition. Only on 20 May 1993 do we learn in ZN noviny that the Rules are not obligatory, when the paper runs a short interview with Martincová revealingly entitled “The Rules of Czech Orthography Are Not a Law”.245 The most extensive discussion took place in the weekly cultural newspaper Literární noviny. In part it featured an exchange of opinions among linguists, but also among members of the public (albeit mostly representatives of the cultural elite: professors from the Czech Republic and abroad, journalists and authors). Longer letters tended to be printed as opinion pieces, so it is slightly deceptive to speak here of a classical letter format, of which there were only three. Among those who contributed to the debate in Literární noviny were the linguist Alexandr Stich, the cultural commentator Petr Fidelius, literary scholar JiĜí Holý, and poet and novelist Michal Ajvaz. An especially interesting discussion took place in Telegraf and ýeský deník. Both dailies devoted considerably more space to the responses and opinions of their readers than did other papers. ýeský deník even occasionally gave over a full page to letters on the topic; other papers printed far fewer letters, and those in edited form. In both these dailies the vast majority of responses were highly critical, and the papers supported their readers with proclamations that they would continue to operate using the old Rules. In an open letter to readers on 13 May 1993, the editorial board of ýeský deník wrote that: …whether or not these changes that someone (in this instance the highest linguistic organs – although we know many others from past experience) is forcing on us from above do take effect depends on those of us who work with the written word. We firmly believe that the era of blind subservience to any and all directives, even the most senseless ones, is definitively past.

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The actors in spelling reform: Issues and debates

Because large portions of the recent orthographic changes in our opinion violate linguistic norms of use instead of (as is common practice in countries where the language is held in respect) adapting themselves to its longterm development, we refuse to submit to them in our paper.

Telegraf took a position on the new Rules in a short note appended to Antonín Kostlán’s article “A Slap to Czech Culture and Tradition” (Políþek þeské kultuĜe a tradici) on 11 June 1993: The editorial board of TELEGRAF agrees with the conclusions of this article and is minded not to be governed by the new Rules of Czech Orthography. We therefore ask our readers to send us their opinions on this subject. Ivan BednáĜ, Editor-in-Chief.

Further editorial notes on 26 June and 10 July testify to the paper’s decision not only to publicize the opinions of its readers, but also to wield them actively in the hope of having the reforms rejected: Editor’s note: Last week we publicized the opinions of several readers. We thank you for all further opinions. In time we hope to compile them and submit them to the Academy of Sciences. Editor’s note: We are recording all opinions sent to us and thank you for them. They will be of use in a more detailed treatment of the entire situation.

The readers’ opinions vented in ýeský deník and Telegraf were mostly emotional: they called on the papers to continue their campaign, hailed their courage, or chastised them for inconsistency in their rejection of the new forms. But why specifically did these two papers make such a crusade out of their objections to the Rules? One possible answer lies in the fact that at the time, both Telegraf and ýeský deník were fighting for survival. On the front pages of both papers there were ongoing features in which editors and readers travelled around the country, checking the availability of their papers at newsstands and stores. Letters to the editor indignantly protested the unavailability of one or the other paper at a particular newsstand, and hinted that the newsstand owner or distributor might have ulterior political motivations (presumably crypto-communist ones) for refusing to stock a right-wing paper. The papers’ owners and editors consciously or unconsciously used the orthography controversy and other issues of the moment to strengthen the link between readers and the editors, showing in doing so that they could put themselves on the side of their readers and defend their readers’ interests. The contrast was indeed striking. Where many papers confined the dis-

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cussion to the “great and the good”, the give-and-take in ýeský deník and Telegraf sounded lively, spontaneous, and – to judge by the amount of absolute linguistic nonsense appearing in the letters columns – democratic in opening the debate to all and sundry. This was to be the new right-wing press: concerned, helpful, responsive, on the side of its readers. By comparing various papers, I do not mean to imply that these differences were always motivated in full or in part by political reasons. The structure of individual papers played a large role. The existence of a cultural supplement with its own page devoted to language gave Lidové noviny options lacking for smaller newspapers. In other newspapers, news about language was printed on pages marked “domestic news”. It is not surprising, then, that many readers treated the debate as a political controversy. In this way, a parallel arose between the publication of the new Rules and the passage of laws, decisions of government bodies, and so forth. Of course, the ubiquitous idea that the new Rules were obligatory for everyone was also connected with the way previous reforms had been implemented. But in 1993 the physical and linguistic context of reports on orthography clearly influenced the public response to the reforms. 4. Other actors The other actors in the orthography debates only occasionally became the subjects of overt discussion. Educators sometimes singled themselves out as an affected party, but most telling are the ways members of the public characterized their fellow citizens. Their descriptions tended to be negative, steeped in the stereotypes of Holy’s “little Czech” (see chapter 2, section 1.1). The language stands in for the “great Czech nation” as the transmitter of cultural values. Its defence is a bulwark against a slide into barbarism. 4.1. Public concern over declining standards Surely there is scarcely a society on earth where people do not bemoan today’s slipping standards of written and verbal expression when measured against the golden age of their youth (or, even better, some time before they were born). Often it is hard to find consensus as to why this has happened; rarely is it possible to identify it with a single event or factor. People cite permissive mores, rigid educational testing, comprehensive high schools,

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widened educational access, dumbing down, poor school funding, particular teaching methods in vogue, or a variety of other reasons.246 The reform of Czech spelling was a significant omen for linguistic doomsayers. Spelling reform became the symbol, or sometimes the reason, for a perceived decline in the level of linguistic culture and language awareness. A tendency to see Czech history as a series of interruptions (as per Holy 1996) only strengthened this view. It was easy to find exact dates on which to pin changes. The communist putsch of 1948 brought a turn away from the West and a change in institutional values. Totalitarianism, the argument runs, had warped the nation and dumbed down its culture. The CLI had been willing co-operators with the totalitarian regime, and thus their reforms must have served these invidious goals. The year 1989 and the Velvet Revolution brought a second, equally rapid about-face. In 1993, members of the public were divided as to whether it meant an abrupt return to previously cherished cultural values, or a further sharp decline due to increased permissiveness. Spelling reform offered an entry for all sorts of musings on these themes. The simplest expression of this belief is the formulation: “if we continue in this way, in a couple of years we’ll be writing (x) for (y).” Most people used it to express worst-case scenarios: I shudder at the thought that in the future the text of our national anthem might, in the spirit of the rules of orthography, begin with the words Wear Iz My Hoamland!247

In a few instances, the scenarios were beyond the imaginable: I warn you – if things continue in this fashion, soon we will abandon our beautiful Czech language, and the mumbling and mooing of donkeys will pour forth from our mouths.248

Many members of the public railed against a Pragocentric or Bohemian bias in the reforms: If the Czech Language Institute continues this way, in a few years we will have to write in “Common Czech” and go to “coarses witch’d be ’bout Common Czech.”249

In some cases, the writers perceived a linguistic innovation as being “from Prague” when it was actually characteristic of language across the republic. This tendency to blame “the capital” for all unwanted developments in the language is probably a universal one.250 Such detractors were

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frequently Moravians: It [the new Rules] is not orthography, but a Prague dialect that the lord linguists in Prague think must be obligatory for the whole republic. And so they dictate that we should write e.g. kurz, diskuze, šanzon, pulz, rezort, perzonální, renezance, režizér etc. As if they did not know that in fact here in Moravia, in the Brno region, the very best Czech is spoken, which has absolutely nothing in common with any dialect in Bohemia, let alone in Prague.251

As a more recent (17 April 2000) article from Respekt shows, some outside Prague have come to believe that the reforms impose the capital’s speech as standard: Masaryk University sociologist Ivo Možný recalls Moravian reservations about Prague and Bohemia: “It irritates me somewhat when orthography is reformed supposedly according to the spoken form [of the language], by which they automatically mean the way it is spoken in the capital.”

In one example, the criticism ran in the other direction. Written in e.g. shora ‘from above’ and na shledanou ‘good bye’ is pronounced either [sx] or [z×], depending on the dialect of the speaker (Bohemians tend to say the first, Moravians the second). Yet Vlasta Kupková, in the 7 July 1994 issue of Mladý svČt, inveighed against the “debased” pronunciation [z×], and asked why the CLI had not explicitly forbidden it in the new Rules. Not only is this a matter of pronunciation and not orthography, but the pronunciation this writer attacks is not regarded as non-standard.252 Many people were quick to draw the connection between a general decline in standards and the CLI’s evident desire to “cater” to this decline. Complaints about the language competence of students, teachers, and journalists were common. There were diatribes directed against the speech of Czech intellectuals in television, and especially at the use of slang, informal language, and CC dialect features: When I switch on the television, our primary mass medium for information, entertainment and culture, the rules and any problems with them go out the window. […] Czech television has become the bearer of vulgarization of the Czech language.253

Others had specific complaints about the sort of pronunciation they heard in the mass media, typically features of Prague or Central Bohemian speech, like the lowered vowels that one East Bohemian letter-writer commented on:

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Figure 7. Cartoon © Edmund Orián, 26 June 1993 in Telegraf. A teacher berates her pupil, who has just written a dictation: “Those new rules of Czech orthography were practically made for you, weren’t they? You’ve always just written the way you hear things….” Of course, the female presenters toy with me most of all; only through retrospective reconstruction of context do I realize that the “Fellepens” they mention are the Philippines. It would seem easy to decree that they must not pronounce “i” as “e”, or even “e” as “a”; “navarthalass” it would be as difficult as insisting to our marvellous footballers in Hradec Králové that they must not only shoot at the goalposts and the crossbeam.254

The language heard on television and radio was important, because according to the CLI, standard pronunciation is determined in part by the speech of public figures. Reformer ZdenČk Hlavsa, in what might not have been a wise move, went so far as to give examples in the newsmagazine Respekt on 24 May 1993: Standard pronunciation is the sort used by people whose spoken presentations are otherwise practically exemplary… for example, such speakers as the president or the prime minister.

This only fed the flames. Some people jumped on the pronunciation of then-president Havel, finding individual numerous words to object to:255

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I am a lawyer and the Czech language, and often other languages, is the tool of my trade. I suffer quite physically on an almost daily basis from errors in pronunciation and written expression. […] In earlier days I could at least reassure myself that the “comrade” on the television was probably a decorated party member, so that she’d been chosen even despite her incompetence – but what should I think now? Dr. Hlavsa’s position was the last straw in this regard! Although I greatly respect Václav Havel, during his speeches I have to scream at him repeatedly – when he says “dizident” or “v chaozu”. Intervocalic “s” can be read as “z”, but not dissident, or chaos, after all, the genitive case is chaotis. I have had the urge a thousand times to write to the president about this, but my letter would almost certainly never reach his desk.256

Should politicians serve as models of standard pronunciation? Some saw their inclusion as evidence of a connection between politics and linguistics going back to communist times. Politicians from the Communist period were often mocked for their inability to uphold the formal spoken norms of their era: In your periodical, I finally learned from the article “The New Rules of Czech Orthography Are Published” (Respekt no. 20) that this revision had been implemented based on standard pronunciation. This is used by, for example, presidents. I fear that we have apparently chosen as our model for the spelling of the words konkurz and kurz the “standard” pronunciation of former president Antonín Novotný, who liked to speak of “interezted agricultural workers” (not only did I hear this with my own ears, but it was even remarked on quite unfavourably at the time).257

For the most part, those who railed most strongly against this decline in language culture criticized the CLI either for leading the charge away from strict standards or for meekly accepting the public’s growing indifference to them. In their view, the CLI had failed in its task of preserving the purity and usefulness of the nation’s language. Whether this was in fact the CLI’s task was not open to question. It was poet and literary critic Václav Jamek, a strong opponent of the reforms, who captured the elite’s sense of aggravation most succinctly and wittily: …since, my dear norm-creator, I have put myself to the trouble of learning how to use the prepositions s and z correctly with the genitive case, it really annoys me that you have deprived me of all profit from this ability, because, for the sake of someone stupider than myself who could not manage to learn it, you have simply abolished the entire distinction. As so often happens now in our country, I was punished for the fact that I was better.258

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Members of the public did on occasion turn against the aesthetic sensibilities of their fellow citizens. Jan Hlaváþ, writing on 21 June 1993 in ýeský deník, caricatured those who ask for various “exclusions” from the language based on subjective likes and dislikes, and who then base their calls for orthographic change on sentimental appeals to Czech history: Mr. Benda asks despairingly why we do not eradicate “linguistic abuses” from the language once and for all. He suggests erasing from the nation’s subconscious (and presumably from the Dictionary of Standard Czech as well) the word úplata ‘payment’. I’d suggest maybe forbidding the word babiþka ‘grandmother’ – first I don’t like how long it is, then those two “b’s” don’t sound harmonious (I often spray people as I pronounce them), and in addition I have to remember if poor grandmother isn’t in the list of specified words [spelled with 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

A final, pessimistic view of the public and their reactions to reform came from linguists like Sgall, who had long championed a radical spelling reform. Sgall was critical of the new Rules and their cautiousness: It was thus confirmed […] that partial orthographic changes, which do not bring any fundamental advantages, serve only to stir up the atmosphere in our cultural life and elsewhere (the need for “re-education”) and are linked with economic demands as well. It was not necessary right at this moment to moderate the inconsistencies of the orthographic reform of 1957.260

Sgall viewed public opposition to reform as a given, which would have to be dealt with in any situation and which is not necessarily proportional to the changes made. In his view, smaller reforms pointlessly inflamed the public and engendered resistance to the more substantial reform (resolving the problem of 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

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hours spent on mastering spelling rules, and that orthographic simplification was a good way to do this.261 Some teachers envisaged that the time freed up by studying a simplified orthography would leave pupils with more time for their other specializations (chemistry, mathematics) or for increased foreign language study, which was a special worry in the early 1990s. Émigré Jan Vladislav, however, opined that these practical arguments are a smokescreen: These periodically recurring criticisms of orthography as a luxury or privilege accessible only to the elite are not just about the eternal simplifiers [of our language] and their attempts to rationalize what basically has never been rational and never will be. It is also, and perhaps foremost, about pushing into the background a thing that, along with its grammar and orthography, is one of the primary, omnipresent sources of collective memory, which at the same time has basically avoided ideological or political control and manipulation – and is thus about making way for something more easily controlled, more easily manipulated, and thus ideologically more useful.262

A distinct minority opinion – but one seen several times in criticisms of the Rules – was that they did not go far enough. Again, schoolchildren are brought forward as the group poised to gain most from a simplified spelling: I am afraid, however, that Czech deserves a braver incursion into its orthographic conventions, which last saw deeper changes in 1957. It’s a shame that schoolchildren won’t see their orthography made any easier. It would mean more time for developing that slightly (or even much) neglected love for one’s mother tongue.263

Some were more categorical in their view that children would lose out in the current cautious, partial reforms: The changes suggested for Czech orthography simply replace one system to memorize with another. Before, children would bone up on the fact that we write ulice Na poĜíþí, diskuse, ministerstvo zdravotnictví, and fašismus. Now they must cram into their heads that the correct spelling is ulice Na PoĜíþí, diskuze, Ministerstvo zdravotnictví, and fašizmus. Changes like these are of course good for nothing. Czech orthography calls out not for a change of facade, but for fundamental reform.264

Jan VymČtal, writing in HospodáĜské noviny, 29 June 1993, pointed out that, as the Rules are obligatory in primary and secondary schools but not

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in universities, students of chemistry will end up learning nativized spellings (e.g. metan) at school, and then having to re-learn the spellings of these words at university when they meet the internationalized forms (methan) favoured by their professors and existing university textbooks. The other option is, of course, to allow the Rules to dictate all Czech spelling in academia, without any consultation with specialists. The Rules’ authors responded to criticism of this sort by pointing out that the Rules are intended for generalist, not specialist use. Specialists can use whatever spellings they deem suitable, without having to inflict these on the general population. However, VymČtal’s point still stands. Chemical names are used primarily by specialists, but it would be a brave textbook publisher who would forego the Rules and issue a school textbook with different spellings. Once the chemistry commission is overruled in the schools, the rest of the community must either go along with it or brace itself for confusion higher up the educational ladder. Other scientists were more worried about how the new spellings would have an impact on Czech students’ ability to learn foreign languages. J. Koryta wrote in a letter to Lidové noviny on 13 April 1994: Our method of writing primarily borrowed words, especially from the classical languages, grows more and more different from the method used by the English, Germans, and French. It is precisely this method of writing words like chromozóm, metan, diskuze, recenze, and so forth that will seduce them into using such “simplifications” in foreign languages and will mark them as half-literates.

4.3. The national character: Is spelling a national obsession? Some correspondents, regardless of what they thought of the reforms, were dismayed by the tone of debate, and put it down to what they said was the Czechs’ national obsession with orthography: a fixation on the form of expression to the exclusion of its content. This view constructed the national character in a particular way: the Czechs were on the one hand passionate about their language, on the other hand sticklers for pointless detail. Playwright and cultural commentator Karel Steigerwald, writing in Lidové noviny on 20 July 1994, opined that: We are a nation of literati and every change in the rules of Czech orthography excites us exceedingly. […] As if orthography were the main thing

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about language. As if we literati should not primarily be paying attention to precise thoughts, clear style, rich emotion, and vocabulary. For more than forty years, teachers have been inventing trick questions on z and s or on i and y for their dictations, but it disturbs no one that hardly anyone learns at school to master his native language well enough to express his thoughts clearly and to give a transparent picture of his intent or even the depth of his feeling.

Jan Jirák, writing in Lidové noviny on 7 August 1993, went further than Steigerwald, putting the Czech focus on orthography down to a school system that takes the path of least resistance, teaching students about form rather than content. In so doing, it rewards rote learning and elevates formal signs of education, such as the ability to spell, above all others. 5. Conclusions The particular changes recommended for Czech orthography were on the one hand a storm in a teacup, a diversion from the pressing political and social problems of a country in transition. The debate surrounding them, on the other hand, was of considerable significance. It mirrored many of the other issues that Czech society was facing, and became a way of addressing them. One major issue in a transitional society was the very nature of the roles in the debate and how they were defined. In a totalitarian society there had been scant opportunity to publicly debate the role that different institutions and social groups had in planning linguistic reforms. Debates had occurred, but always coded in the language of communist rhetoric and subject to strict control. The 1993 reforms were the first opportunity in two generations for people to declare their allegiance and rally their fellow-thinkers around a cause. The very institution of the newspaper affected the debate as well. The paper’s categories of news, reporting choices and level of desire for dialogue with the public all shaped the way the affair developed. Some newspapers saw the issue as a chance to mobilize their readership, while others tried for a more hands-off approach. The issue could be stylized as belong ing to the cultural sphere or the sphere of hard news. The crusade against the Rules in two of the right-wing papers and the general tendency to treat the matter as a political issue raised the stakes, inflamed tempers and gave the affair a greater public profile than it would otherwise have had.

Chapter 7 Debating linguistics, authority, and legitimacy

Co je psáno, to je dáno. ‘What is written is a given.’ Czech proverb

The issues and debates covered in the previous chapter concerned how the participants in the spelling debates defined themselves and were defined by others. In this chapter, we consider some of the larger issues raised by the debates. We begin with the linguistic arguments for and against reform, as promoted by both the reformers and those outside the reforms. Then we will turn to the larger question of authority over language. We move on to consider the allied matter of legitimacy and how it was constructed and deconstructed during these debates. 1. Linguistic motives for spelling reform One of the best summaries of the official motives for the reform comes from the back cover of the first edition of the Rules: More than a quarter century has passed since the publication of the 1957 Rules of Czech Orthography, which are still in force. Since then, a considerable number of orthographic problems have accumulated, and the public has expected, or even directly demanded solutions to them. The new Rules of Czech Orthography eliminate extraneous exceptions, simplify certain overcomplicated orthographic rules, and eliminate contradictions that exist in the current rules or have arisen in daily language use. In recent years our understanding of Czech pronunciation has deepened, and therefore its codification has changed in various points; this has also influenced decisions on the graphic shape [of words], especially for words of foreign origin.

This cover copy probably dates from the very beginnings of the revision project. Certainly a version of it appears in the informational pamphlet Co pĜinášejí nová (Pravidla þeského pravopisu 1991: 23), which preceded the publication of the Rules by two years. However, its mention of “more than a quarter century” passing was more appropriate to 1985 than to 1993, by

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which time 36 years had passed. It alludes correctly to the fact that the 1957 Rules had created or aggravated certain inconsistencies in the Czech spelling system, and claims that these could be resolved by further minor adjustments. The statement passes over the other pressing, if less lofty, reasons for revising the Rules of Czech Orthography, which come up frequently in the newspaper literature on the subject and are touched on briefly below. The rationale is offered purely in linguistic terms, with a strong functionalist programme. Here we can begin to sketch the ideology underlying functionalist language planning. A good starting point is the obvious assumption that intervention is warranted. How do we know this is so? First, the authors of the Rules tell us that the public indirectly demands intervention, to make the rules more logical and easier to use. Over and over they cite the immense number of queries received at the Language Service, alerting them to the fact that various features needed changing. The Service keeps records of all queries, and these are eloquent testimony to the general public’s desire for a strong authority.265 It would be logical – but false – to ascribe to the orthographic commission the belief that anyone who asks a question about a feature of Czech grammar or orthography would welcome its simplification or modification. Neither did the commission members believe that the Language Service’s query records were representative of all users of the language. These records show that certain professions – for instance, secretaries, teachers, and proofreaders – are overrepresented among the Service’s users, and this is noted in the Language Service’s publications. Functionalism, however, claims a privileged position for the linguist in language regulation: he abides not by what the public says it wants, but by what his observations and analyses show is both needed and feasible. His ability to analyze allows him to be objective in creating a balanced picture of linguistic trends. Second, the authors suggest that advances in linguistics nudge them towards intervention. Linguists now know more about pronunciation than they did before. Their ability to measure and categorize has improved, and there have been new findings about Czech and other languages. These facts alter one’s view of one’s native language. The functionalist planner then uses this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of his language by manipulating and guiding the standard into a closer approximation of his new understanding.

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Third, the authors presuppose that the very existence of problems in orthography nudges linguists towards intervention. This can happen because the existing guidelines are too complex or self-contradictory, or because usage has moved on since the last codification took place and the new state of affairs is not reflected in them. These discrepancies are seen as “problems” which have “accumulated,” and at some point a critical mass is reached. In a functionalist perspective, this is not a situation that we can simply acknowledge as being troublesome and then ignore. Defects in the system show up as functional gaps that impede effective usage, and greater linguistic understanding leads linguists to make measured shifts in the standard language system.266 This is the spirit in which the CLI expected the public to take the new Rules on board. Let us summarize the ideological suppositions so far. There is a branch of linguistics capable of objective, value-neutral description and assessment of language. The language is a matter of concern for regulation to the extent that a variety of it can be codified, or reduced to a series of rules and notations. A better codification is one that is simpler: it contains fewer rules, notations and ambiguities. That codification develops, just as linguistics itself develops, and it is the task of regulators to balance our understanding of the language and our communicative needs in arriving at a codification. Any change in these conditions can unbalance the system, making the need for intervention more urgent. The reliance on descriptive linguistics is a guiding principle of functionalist language planning strategies. Functionalists, as we saw in chapter 4, believed that language planning in the Czech lands had traditionally been guided by the emotional, idiosyncratic, and pseudolinguistic prejudices of a self-appointed elite, and they therefore sought a more objective basis for their own activities as language regulators. Linguistics provided a way out: instead of acting on opinion, language regulators could observe actual language usage and formulate conclusions based on it. Observation is the bedrock on which the 1993 Rules were built, as Martincová noted in an interview in the 5–11 July 1993 issue of the magazine Rozhlas. In it she tried to explain why the commission had decided to reverse the 1957 decision to lengthen many stem-final vowels in words of foreign origin: The criterion is actually current usage, although the opinion of experts does enter into the matter. When we were preparing the new version of the Rules, for a year and a half leading up to the close of the project, we followed selected dailies to see how certain words were written, mainly those where we see variation. [....] Czech has no way of expressing a half-long vowel in

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writing. And pronunciation is in this case somewhere between short and long. In fact, we see a tendency towards shortness, because it is in the position toward the end of a word. And we have attestations that in a number of cases the o was actually written short – it’s enough to see the form citrony [instead of citróny] on street stands. It crops up as well in written documents that have not been proofread.

Functionalists thus did not rely on people’s perceptions of how they use language, or would like to use language; they look for direct, unmediated examples of usage. Expert opinion is then used to interpret the results: to assess what the facts tell us and what the direction of linguistic change is. They observe primarily production of language; the perception of language is too closely bound up with the sorts of subjective, aesthetic judgments that reformers had been trying to escape. In the case above, linguists fell back on three time-tested methods of fact collection. The first was excerption: they turned to common sources of printed language, especially those which are not as thoroughly copy-edited as quality books.267 The second was targeted research: they made use of studies conducted to establish the language’s orthoepic norms (which culminated in the two volumes of Výslovnost spisovné þeštiny [‘The Pronunciation of Standard Czech’], published in 1955 and 1978).268 The third was searching out “mistakes” or “errors” as indirect evidence of the true state of the language, as opposed to the idealized state reflected in standard orthography. Using these three methods, linguists settled on a number of places where difficulties occurred. They then proposed resolutions that would more accurately reflect the state of language usage, minimize differences between the spoken and written norms, and thereby lower barriers to writing that occur when these differences are significant. We have already seen how this preference for objective, linguistic data on production affected the consultation process. Let us stop a moment, though, and consider the psychological effect that an approach like this has on the educated reader. It is not uncommon in England to see signs outside kebab shops and pubs reading: LARGE PIZZA’S ONLY £4.99 ALL BEER’S HALF PRICE BEFORE 5 P.M. – ITS A SCREAM!

Nor is it unheard of to receive communications from the marketing office of a higher education institution offering:

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We will help with all forms of publicity including proofreading printing and it’s distribution.

The only possible conclusion is that a significant portion of the Englishusing population has no idea how to use apostrophes and sprinkles them around either randomly or according to an idiosyncratic personal belief system. However, it is a large step from there to abolishing the apostrophe because certain pizza chefs, bar managers and marketing officers are unable to master it or, for that matter, any other basic elements of punctuation or grammar. Any such move would prompt an outpouring of indignation from self-defined competent language users, who focus their discontent on these obvious examples of “dumbing down”. This is exactly the group that objected most vocally to the 1993 reforms in the Czech Republic. These “competent” users came to feel that they were somehow less linguistically “significant” for orthographic reform than those with a shaky grasp of the standard. This feeling affected their attitudes toward linguists and toward linguistics in general. A further question will then be whether the linguistic methods used were in fact adequate to the task of language regulation, given the deliberate way in which they minimalized the aesthetic dimension of spelling reform.269 Functionalism thus shows us that there is space for reform in Czech orthography. What it assumes, but does not prove, is that such space automatically creates a need for reform. Those favouring a more radical programme of change, like Sgall, have long said that half-reforms are worse than no reforms at all for purely social reasons: each change creates antipathy between the public and linguists and raises barriers to further alterations. To apply Ager’s definition of attitude (2001: 132–134), the more generalized desire for language regulation among Czechs was not accompanied by a strong desire for spelling reform. 1.1. The reaction to replacing The replacement of 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

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culture, and its implicit acceptance (or encouragement) by its guardians. The arguments were based on assertions about how readers perceive the new forms, with production as only a secondary consideration. The first reactions to 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

Others – too many to list – cited its primitiveness, its degeneracy (a very frequent word), its associations with the Cyrillic alphabet (see section 1.2), and its lack of sophistication. Columnist Markéta Borská wrote in Telegraf: A couple of years ago I used to see the legend “touch-typing kurz” on some innovative posters by a “linguistic inventor”. At the time I found I had the desire to take a thick red pen and correct the mistake. Today I would take a red pen with equal relish to the new rules of Czech orthography, because those linguists have legalized that “z”, a fact I can describe only with the (obviously highly subjective) word “yuck”. It looks awful and sounds even worse. […] When every now and then I find myself with a Russian magazine, I freeze motionless over the phonetic transcriptions of foreign words and names into Cyrillic, where “popyoolar rok-an-role groop the Beetlz and Jon Lenon” are playing, sometimes even with “Maikl Jekson singing and dancing”. We can only hope that things here will never get that far. Perhaps.271

In some instances, by accepting the spelling with , 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 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

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unfamiliar 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 (pronounced /z/) in some borrowings in place of original ,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 or , written in Cyrillic 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)

It continued throughout the communist era in almost unchanged form, as we can see in Petr’s (1981: 6–7) report on the mission of the CLI: …the orthography commission now faces the demanding task of compiling a draft of partial corrections to individual points that continue the intentions of the 1957 reforms, primarily to remove some inconsistencies and introduce uniform resolutions to disputed cases (for example, the use of capital letters). In these drafts it will also be necessary to look at the orthographic composition of Slovak and the work of the Slovak orthography commission,

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which has been conducting a detailed study of certain matters of punctuation, capitalization, etc.

This is a twist on the pre-war notion of a “Czechoslovak language” (þeskoslovenský jazyk), which formed a central plank of Masaryk’s Czechoslovakism: the belief that the Czechs and Slovaks were one nation, with one language that had two standard varieties. In the new, communistera thinking, they were to be considered two languages moving in step with each other, and the Czechs would be able to learn from the work of the Slovak academy, which was more interventionist in its spelling reforms. This approach merely continued existing trends in Czech language regulation. Proposals to replace 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 was associated with Western European languages: German, French, English, and Latin. Retaining the spelling with 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

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A thoughtful version of this came from novelist and poet Michal Ajvaz, writing in Literární noviny shortly before the new Rules were published (14 October 1992): The auditory and graphic “body” of a word is not just an indifferent external sign pointing to its meaning, or a scaffolding that carries its own lexical meaning. Lexical meaning is embedded in the character of the signifier, it is anchored in that soil with many delicate roots, and it is not possible to yank the meaning out of it and transport it to a different foundation without changing that meaning.

Less thoughtful, but no less influential, was a rant that appeared in Lidové noviny when the new Rules were first trailed in 1990. JiĜí Tyl wrote: Across the whole of Europe, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, there has descended an iron curtain of transcription from the Greek and Latin languages, that thesaurus… of European thinking. Western orthographies treat them with deserved respect and it was a sign of our belonging to a great European culture that, until the 1950s, we did so as well. In contrast, the Slavs, especially those writing in Cyrillic, do not respect European transcription [sic]. And so our orthography, as a sign of acceptance of Stalinist totalitarianism, was Russified at the orders of [our] academicians.279

Tyl’s historical and linguistic inaccuracies are too numerous to be worth unpacking here,280 but his mythology of western respect for classical civilization and eastern totalitarianism’s indifference to it fit the mood of the times perfectly. It is pleasingly symmetrical and Manichean. The east-west divide combined fruitfully with metaphoric interpretations of spelling reform and language development as journeys (see chapter 8, section 6), and fitted the overall myth of decline that underpinned these debates. Linguists, such as JiĜí Marvan, were equally amenable to these sorts of interpretations.281 The duality also appears in beliefs about time (before and after a turning point: the 1989 revolution) and geography (east and west). First, people asserted that phonetic spelling was characteristic of the pre-1989 order, and a rejection of it should thus be part of the new, post-Soviet society. They also insisted that the Czech lands historically belong in Western, not Eastern Europe, and thus their orthography should gravitate to Romance and Germanic, not Slavonic, models: Czechs belong to Latin culture in their historical development. Glagolitic did not take off here – and given the later fate of Byzantine culture perhaps it is just as well. Today’s reformers of Czech orthography, and of standard

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Czech in general, have apparently never studied Latin… they lack a sense of solidarity with western European languages. This is why they so lightheartedly forsook the heritage of Jungmann and Gebauer.282

Members of the public thus associated the use of 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 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

She not only equates orthography with the language at large, she even manages to rename the Rules of Czech Orthography.284 This stance was not uncommon. For many, the word pravopis ‘orthography’ meant anything connected with correct or appropriate writing or speech; in other words, jazyková kultura ‘language culture’. A classic example is a letter from Michal Babka and Petr Chudoba, which appeared in ZN noviny on 20 May 1993, in which, referring to the Rules, they bemoaned the “loss of sense of expression in such an illogical grammar (v takto nelogické gramatice)”. Some journalists had naive or puristic beliefs about language and what linguists do. For example, Richard Crha, assigned to a popular magazine interview with Hlavsa, admitted frankly (Mladý svČt, 26 February 1993): I learn what is for me an astounding new fact: that language for the most part develops independent of linguists. Instead, they follow how cultivated

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speakers express themselves in the standard, and depending on which tendencies appear in their speech, they either support them or put the brake on them.

Crha’s original belief that language changes at the behest of linguists belongs to the puristic phase of Czech in the late nineteenth century. In one exchange with Hlavsa, Crha draws on a further cliché about linguists: “For example, yesterday on television,” Hlavsa said. “A plug to die for: Sledujte Simpsonovi ‘Watch The Simpsons’ [nominative plural]. Except it should have been Simpsonovy [in the accusative plural].” “So the next day you phone up the station to tell them they’re dunces?” “That too. But more often, we use these unsightly examples in our publications, for the language slot on the radio, and so forth.”

Crha entered the interview with the belief that linguists are purists, whose job it is to correct mistakes and preserve the language, rather than to analyze, educate and influence. This was not an uncommon belief; Crha was simply one of the few journalists to admit it openly. A number of writers simply refused to address the linguistic complexities embodied in orthographic reform. Most frequently criticized were spellings like kurz. As we saw in chapter 2, section 5.2, intervocalic and prevocalic in Czech is pronounced [z] in many borrowings. But for some such words, the pronunciation [z] can only occur in certain forms. Standard pronunciation is: [MWTU] ‘course’ nom. and acc. sg. but =MWT\WMWT\'OMWT\[MWT\WÖMWT\WÖOMWT\'Z? ‘course’ oblique sg. and all pl. cases.

Because the citation (dictionary) form is the nominative singular, people found it incomprehensible that the 1993 Rules changed the spelling to kurz. After all, they said, it is impossible to pronounce [z] there.285 As we saw in chapter 2, section 3.3, though, this mismatch between spelling and pronunciation, called “final devoicing”, is a feature of the Czech morphophonemic writing system. Objecting to the 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-

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amples from student papers to demonstrate what would happen if reforms did away with the distinction between 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.’

Here students had misspelled the words zdraví and síra, when they meant to write: Amoniak je zdraví škodlivý. ‘Ammoniac is harmful to health.’ PĜi vulkanizaci kauþuku se používá síra. ‘In the vulcanization of India rubber, sulphur is used.’

VídeĖský takes to an extreme his own argument that “[c]orrect orthography leads to unambiguousness in the written text”; he will not tolerate any possible confusion, however improbable. However, language, as is well known, tolerates a moderate degree of ambiguity, which is then disambiguated in context. The occasional confusing sentence (and both examples can easily be deciphered from context) need not be an iron-clad rationale for maintaining a spelling distinction that can no longer be heard. 1.4. Using linguistics to challenge the Rules Most lay contributors who mentioned linguistics either misapplied it, as in section 1.3, or set up a dichotomy between linguistics (bad) and traditional education or cultural tradition (good). A few, however, were able to challenge the Rules using the language and terminology of linguistics. Daniela Trávníþková, a student of Czech literature, wrote to Telegraf, saying in effect that the authors of the Rules had misunderstood the concept of linguistic norm. By codifying innovative forms and excluding traditional ones, they had attempted to “push” the norm onward, when in fact a spelling reform should reflect norms rather than lead them.287 Several commented on the problems of making “current usage” a model for the standard language. Vlasta Dufková, writing in Literární noviny on 14 July 1994, noted that: What is interesting is that our orthography tries so stubbornly to hold – or so they say – to a principle as highly slippery as phonetic usage. It thus relies

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on what is historically and geographically the most changeable component of language.

This argument was later echoed in evaluations of the German spelling reform (Sally Johnson 2005: 60). What marks the linguistic naysayers out from the rest of the crowd is their ability to speak the language of the reformers, bringing the aesthetic and historical dimension back into the linguistic discussions of spelling regulation. 1.5. Debates over details A series of letter writers, mostly linguists and teachers, reproached the authors of the Rules for not applying their own principles. They pointed to dozens of situations where similar words are treated differently. These problems sometimes led the correspondents to reject the reforms completely – but more often they served to support the view that the orthographic reform had been approved too quickly and had not been thoroughly thought through.288 The operative word in this debate is nedĤslednost ‘inconsistency’, which crops up in nearly every article. A major inconsistency was, in their eyes, proof of the need for overhauling the theoretical principles of language regulation that the commission had employed: What’s more, the inconsistency is intolerable: either write consistently “phonetically” as in Russian (including the names of classics like GjotČ ‘Goethe’, Gjegel ‘Hegel’), or uphold the classical standard, familiar from German since the days of Luther and humanism.289

The orthographic commission had tried to instantiate in spelling what they perceived to be the current written norm, but the problem is that consensual norms are by their nature not consistent. Seeking consistency on a theoretical point is perhaps a laudable goal, but it is a highly interventionist approach to spelling, much more interventionist than what the orthographic commission proposed. Complaints over matters of consistency often resulted when readers disagreed with the commission’s analysis. For example, in ZN noviny on 27 May 1993, an anonymous letter-writer asked indignantly why he should write dizertace ‘dissertation’ but not dizkuze ‘discussion’. Of course, [z] is the standard pronunciation for the former and [s] is standard in the latter; indeed, under normal speech conditions Czechs never

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realize [z] before a voiceless consonant. But this was not the point. The authors of the Rules had tried to implement a more phonemic spelling system for borrowed words, as opposed to the morphophonemic principle that operates in Czech for native words. They thus essentially decreed: write 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 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

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explanation of shades of meaning, as in entries like berla ‘crosier’ and berle ‘crutches’, linecký ‘Linz/Linzer’, etc.291

To judge by these responses, there were a fair number of printing errors and disputable decisions in the first edition of the Rules. As one author pointed out, this was not a brilliant start for a book designed to serve as a standard spelling manual. Many who read the rules closely enough to object to the details seemed uninterested in the hobgoblins of the reform, and . 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 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

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1.6. Debating the need for simplicity A common theme – backed by contributions from teachers and educators – was the difficulties that pupils had at school. Correspondents recalled their feelings of inadequacy and inferiority from their school days.293 I belong to that part of the population for whom orthographic rules do create problems, and I welcome any simplifications. […] Don’t you think it is more important to understand what a poet meant than whether we continue to write “s” where a majority has long pronounced “z” (and so forth) out of a desire to preserve a former “beauty”?294

Characteristic for this school of thought is the opposition between meaning and form: a surfeit of niggling rules prevents people from expressing themselves adequately; attention to form thus blocks attention to meaning. Pedagogues like Milan Žemliþka were most sympathetic to these problems: Have you ever met people who converse regularly and do it well, thus fulfilling the functions of language as a means of interpersonal communication, but who have not mastered the written form of it without errors – so that they are automatically discriminated against as a result of this “gap” in their educational skills? Isn’t there something unsettling in this fact that the written language has appropriated an autonomous standing for itself and acts according to its own laws?295

Others saw a more sinister motivation in the maintenance of what they thought was a needlessly complex orthography: Our schools still stop at the verbalization of learning materials, at normative, prescriptive methods, at a developed process of classification and sanctions. The Rules of Czech Orthography are a powerful weapon in the hands of teachers as they do battle with pupils. […] A special value is assigned to orthographic rules, and in practice the whole problem moves to a different plane: a small mistake – half a grade; a big one – one grade off. An ideal recipe in a system where the teacher waits for a pupil’s mistake, where the grade (an evaluation in points) opens (or closes off) the path to the next school year or to higher types of schools, etc.296

These contributors hoped that simplifications would eliminate orthographic errors, or at least reduce this gap between intention and product. Like the functionalist reformers, they focused exclusively on the production of written language and the norms of language producers, choosing not to engage with aesthetic questions or the issue of cultural heritage.

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2. Authority and the 1993 reforms A common accusation against the new Rules once they were published was that they had been planned and executed before the events of 1989, and they thus derived their legitimacy from a defunct social and political order. In this view, there were secretive, unaccountable mechanisms that underpinned the Rules’ development and smoothed their path to the necessary permissions for publication and use. These were to be regarded by any true democrat as deeply suspect. To evaluate the legitimacy of the spelling reforms, we will need to consider what it meant to say that “the CLI” undertook these reforms, and consider where the Rules’ authority derived from. 2.1. Private research vs. public institutions In pre-revolutionary days, work carried out at the CLI by its employees would have been viewed as an institutional effort, and any work carrying the CLI’s imprint would have borne its authority. In the years after the revolution, this nostrum disappeared, along with many of the other small certainties of pre-revolutionary life. It was now possible that individuals working within an institution had certain rights, and their individual rights and actions weakened the perception that the institution spoke with one voice. In chapter 5, section 2, I outlined the method by which the institutional weight of the CLI was thrown behind the Rules to bolster their rational legitimacy. How then was this institutional approval reflected in the Rules? The academic edition contains the following hints of it: Facing the title page: “Prepared by an employees’ collective at the Czech Language Institute ASCR”,297 with the names of the nine authors. In the forward: “The authorial collective that prepared the Rules of Czech Orthography in the Czech Language Institute took all these circumstances into account.”298 The final page, which in Czech books contains publication information (the edition page): The Rules of Czech Orthography Prepared by an employees’ collective at the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic299

Signals of institutional authority are more evident in the school edition. The cover has only:

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The Rules of Czech Orthography Czech Language Institute ASCR Pansofia300

The same text is repeated on the title page, with the added line: School edition301

The page opposite the contents contains a brief introduction, with the following statements: “The Rules of Czech Orthography (school edition) are closely connected with the new version of the Rules of Czech Orthography, which was prepared in the Czech Language Institute ASCR. […] The Rules of Czech Orthography (school edition) were prepared by an employees’ collective at the Czech Language Institute ASCR as follows (in alphabetical order):…” On the final page: THE RULES OF CZECH ORTHOGRAPHY SCHOOL EDITION Prepared by an employees’ collective at the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic302

The authority of the CLI and, by extension, the Academy of Sciences, is prominently invoked. The authors obtained the approval of the CLI through accepted channels, but there was some question as to whether the Academy of Sciences should have had input into the matter as well. In 1992 the Presidium of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences considered whether the Academy should take a view on the proposed reforms. Antonín Kostlán said they were told “repeatedly” by CLI director Daneš that the reform amounted to a small group of reformers working on an “interim handbook” in their capacity as private persons. As a result, the Presidium did not proceed with a more substantive discussion, and Kostlán later felt tricked when the CLI attached its imprimatur to the new Rules.303 Evidently, the CLI name and that of the Academy, of which the CLI was an integral part, were in fact later attached to the new handbook, even though the Academy as an institution had not had the chance to discuss the matter. This in itself was a source of grievance to Kostlán, but just as troubling for him was the fact that the copyright for the academic edition rested in the names of the authorial collective. Kostlán saw this discrepancy as evidence that the commission wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They claimed the authority of the Institute and the Academy when it suited them but stressed the private nature of the work the moment institutional road-

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blocks appeared. This interpretation of the nature of copyright was understandable in a country where property and copyright law were in flux and had until recently been far from the public eye. Prior to 1989, editions of the Rules had in fact been copyrighted to the publisher, rather than to individual authors. This state of affairs was reflected in the school edition, which, bewilderingly, is copyrighted twice: once to “Olga Martincová representing the authors” and once to the publisher Pansofia. However, works emanating from the CLI in the early 1990s were copyrighted to individual authors, as is the norm in academic publishing worldwide. Few western academics have trouble accepting at some abstract level the contradictory notions that their research and publication is simultaneously their own and their employer’s. Kostlán’s argument bears consideration, though, as the Rules were not an ordinary academic work; they were to be used nationwide and would be mandatory in schools. Assigning the copyright to individuals could remove responsibility from the CLI and thus weaken the Rules’ claim to authoritativeness. Should the CLI have allowed a fuller discussion of the Rules by the Academy of Sciences? The Czech Language Institute exists as part of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (ASCR). The Academy is a unitary body, funded partially by direct government grant, which carries out its research through institutes in particular fields. The ASCR can set up or dissolve institutes through its supreme body, the Assembly, and also sets the budgets for individual institutes. It has several overlapping mechanisms for reviewing the work of its institutes; these come under the purview of the Council for Science (vČdecká rada) in matters of research policy, or in the case of more practical matters, the Academy’s governing body, the Academy Council and its Presidium.304 The Presidium in particular has members charged with responsibilities in various subject areas; the humanities, for instance, have a member “responsible for conceptual and scientific-organizational issues”, and a member “responsible for coordination of cooperation with institutions in the cultural sphere”.305 The ASCR therefore does have mechanisms through which it can consider issues like spelling reform if it believes that a project is controversial or groundbreaking. Because the ASCR’s founding act and rules accord substantial scholarly freedom to its individual institutes, much would hinge on how these words are interpreted. Even if the Presidium or the Council of Science had intervened in the

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Rules, they almost certainly could not have stopped the commission from pursing the project; orthography is a well-established part of the CLI’s bailiwick and its historical role in shaping standards was unquestionable. However, they might have recommended additional consultation or further research, or they could have required approval from the ASCR before the Academy’s name could be used, thus slowing down the project further. The answer to our question is thus a resounding “perhaps.” The Academy, like the rest of Czech society, was in a state of post-communist flux, and procedures that would earlier have been dictated politically were now up for grabs. A scholar who believed in the maximum freedom of his team or institute under the terms of the Academy’s charter would have denied the right of higher-ups or non-specialists to meddle in linguistic affairs, and this was exactly the position Daneš took.306 Others, who mistrusted the closed nature of the reforms and were worried that the Academy’s name would be attached to them, believed that a degree of outside oversight was warranted. Early in the process, the former view triumphed, but with the public outcry the latter view came to the fore again. These two competing views of authority derive from different types of legitimacy, as identified in chapter 1. In one, authority derives from rational legitimacy: it is hierarchical and cascades down through layers of institutions by established channels. In another, authority derives from charismatic legitimacy: it is independent, and accrues to groups by virtue of the excellence of their ideas. Proponents of the 1993 spelling reform, however, seemed to make use now of the first view, now of the second. 2.2. Public perceptions of linguistic authority The controversy surrounding the Rules highlighted how little people knew about the Czech Language Institute. The CLI had a high public profile compared to many other institutes of the Academy of Sciences; in addition to having their name on dictionaries and spelling manuals, they published a range of other instructional books, as well as appearing on radio and television shows about language. However, it became clear in the case of the debate that most people did not know what this highly visible institution’s mission was, other than to employ linguists. Even journalists like Vlaćka Kuþerová, who covered the orthography controversy regularly for the newspaper Mladá fronta, ascribed more direct power and authority to the CLI than it actually possessed:

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People want to know how to write Czech correctly. And as long as two institutions here – the Ministry and the Academy of Sciences – continue to argue over which of them has the last word, the situation will not improve. There can only be one orthography in the country and one specialist office should be responsible for it – the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences.307

This desire for authority was amply reflected in the public consciousness, where the idea of variation was simply rejected and people looked for a source of linguistic security: People can pronounce words in Prague or anywhere else however they like; nevertheless, we must write the same way everywhere.308

Some people thought the CLI had the power to ban words or constructions from public usage and to decree that others must be used. Others did not go this far, but believed that the CLI’s main purpose should be to crusade for the purity of Czech or some other conservative linguistic agenda: Recently, [non-standard] forms like bysem instead of bych ‘I would’ and bysme instead of bychom ‘we would’ have been multiplying greatly. Should we not legalize them as well, since we can now write tĜech and þtyĜech in the genitive case alongside the correct forms tĜí ‘three’ and þtyĜ ‘four’, and we hear on television v pracech instead of v pracích ‘in the works of…’ on a daily basis? This is precisely what the Czech Language Institute should be fighting. They should be instructing television and radio announcers and daily paper editors on correct orthography and correct pronunciation, because their bad example has a widespread effect. But that is quite exhausting work; it is much easier to give way to vulgarisms.309

People believed that the CLI should be discouraging change rather than accepting (giving way to or permitting) popular non-standard usage (which people often labelled as degeneracy). The use of terms like legalize and responsible betray a belief that the CLI had wider powers than it actually possessed: that it could actually forbid certain usages or somehow force those editors and broadcasters to heed its reprimands. The nature of the CLI’s authority in the language community was not uniform. Some accepted it based on the prestige of its members, others on purely hierarchical grounds, while a third group took the pragmatic stance that simply someone had to be in charge, and it might as well be the CLI. A number of those outside the commission accepted the Rules in a belief that linguists were a better judge of these matters than the public. For example, linguist Jan Balhar, writing in Lidové noviny on 25 September

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1993, said that “Linguists accept the new Rules (if they are silent, then they certainly agree with them); let us therefore trust them.” Others were more explicit in attributing authority to the CLI in particular: The specialists of the Czech Language Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences worked on the new rules for several years before arriving at the current version. The CLI is our foremost workplace for Czech language matters, and has the final word in these matters.310

Mudra and numerous others simply saw a single, national authority in charge of orthography as a necessity to ensure uniformity in schools and some way of rationalizing its development. Their belief in the authority of the CLI was closely linked to the status of its proclamations: did they represent an obligation or a recommendation, and for whom? 3. Obligation or recommendation? As the controversy surrounding the Rules wore on, its authors gradually modified their views on the place the Rules should occupy in society. Numerous interviews that the four primary figures in the commission – Hlavsa, Martincová, Kraus, and Sedláþek – gave to newspapers, and their own occasional contributions, allow us to chart the progress of this shift from harbinger of orthographic change to optional recommendation.311 This change may not represent a fundamental ideological shift, but it does signal a substantial change in emphasis – possibly a normalization of sceptical views of language regulation and a new, emerging stasis in which the presumption will be against orthographic reform rather than for it. Intersecting with this shift are variations in the format of articles, the reporters’ evolving knowledge of the issues, and the changing situation at the CLI. Different article formats conveyed substantially different information to the reader about the new reforms. For newspapers, the favoured format was a summary written by a reporter, or an interview with the commission. Only occasionally did the commission members themselves author articles for the newspapers, and these were rarely of a factual nature. Giving interviews had advantages for both sides; it allowed the papers to obtain information in the form and style they required, demanded less work from the commission members, and put them in the position of authorities who were being consulted for their expertise. The disadvantage was that the discussion was shaped by the inter-

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viewer’s questions rather than the interviewee’s knowledge of the subject area, and the interviewee’s words were filtered through an extra medium. If the reporter found an answer about language norms or the precise legal status of orthographic handbooks boring, irrelevant, or incomprehensible, he could simply omit it from his story. The sometimes simplistic views that come across in interviews do not always match the more nuanced positions that appear when the commission’s members published their own articles in the popular press. As the controversy over the Rules deepened and journalists became more aware of the issues involved, they began to ask more pertinent questions and shape the interviews in ways that brought out these points. An early interview by Jan Hrubý of the magazine Tvorba (5 September 1990) starts with the apparently self-evident statement that “The written face of the language undergoes modifications from time to time”312 and never manages to question why or how this should be. Later on, a 3 June 1993 interview by Agáta Pilátová begins more perceptively by asking, “What in fact are ‘Rules’ and what is the motivation behind their emergence?” More sophisticated questioning elicits answers that are less comprehensible and entertaining for the lay reader, but more accurate and less inflammatory to public opinion. During this period, the leadership of the CLI changed. JiĜí Kraus became first assistant director and then director of the CLI, bringing him to a prominence within the orthographic commission that he had not earlier enjoyed. As earlier noted, Kraus had not been a willing member of the commission, while his predecessor as director, František Daneš, had played a major role in the earlier 1957 reforms and took a generally positive view of the process, if not of every decision taken by the new commission. Kraus proffered a more skeptical analysis of the reform than Daneš had, and emphasized that the new Rules represented one of a range of possibilities. As a scholar of rhetoric and language culture, he focused less on the particular spelling and grammatical points encapsulated in the Rules and more on the social context in which they were embedded. Despite these other factors influencing the presentation, the commission evidently felt an increasing need to rebut allegations that they were forcing changes on the populace. They therefore began to downplay the creative, norm-changing aspect of the Rules, and to emphasize the role of historical forces in language and the status of the linguist as observer and counselor rather than decision-maker. Early interviews with the commission reflected a generally optimistic

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perception that the changes would be widely accepted. In a 5 September 1990 interview, Hlavsa described the changes as having evolved from longrunning discussions on how to spell foreign words: As a result of them we will wait until 1992 to make public the orthographic revisions we have been preparing for some time […] There will be changes in how sounds are marked by letters, in the spelling of foreign words, in when s and z are written, in how capital letters are written and the use of dashes with nouns and compound adjectives.

Hlavsa is quoted using formulations like: “When writing s and z the following principle has been accepted…” and “According to the new rules a long vowel will only be written if it is also pronounced noticeably as long.” Hlavsa – or his interviewer – gives no indication that these reforms are optional for individuals. It is taken as a given that Czechs will write the way the CLI recommends. Similarly, Sedláþek in an interview later that month in Reportér was asked, “Is the simplification of orthography under consideration? What about our feared i and y?”, to which he responded simply that “Some smallscale partial changes are in preparation – in connection with the new edition of the Rules of Czech Orthography.” In early 1993, before the Rules were released, Hlavsa was asked: The Rules represent an obligatory language norm that the next generation of schoolchildren will learn by. How did the new Rules come about, and what new things will they bring us?

He responded as follows: …it is self-evident that after a certain period of time it is necessary to flesh out, change, or update certain generally accepted norms. […] By no means do we want the new Rules to become a whip, of course. They will be obligatory in schools, it’s true, but for adults they should serve more as a set of instructions on how behave oneself in a linguistically cultured fashion. What a person chooses from them is then his own matter. In schools, strict adherence is necessary, because that is where children are taught cultured expression (ýeský deník, 30 January 1993).

The Rules, therefore, are not required, but they will be the arbiter of cultured expression. A similar viewpoint heads the foreword to the academic edition of the Rules (1993: 5):313 The extraordinary attention paid to obeying those rules governing the usage of the language in its written form is a notable component of the Czech cultural tradition. A significant part of our society judges knowledge of or-

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thography as a visible sign of a person’s education; people see in this consistent, overall respect for orthographic principles one of the main preconditions for preserving the values that the language provides to the nation. They therefore expect that orthographic rules will create the conditions necessary for attaining and consolidating this state of affairs. As a result of this, we sometimes hear the opinion that orthographic prescription should be straightforward and should not admit multiple possibilities. However, the development and differentiation of forms of written communication, especially scholarly and artistic ones, leads unavoidably to the conclusion that orthography too should play a role in the stylistic differentiation of written texts. For this reason, we treat orthographic rules as a set of recommendations for sophisticated written expression, from which it is permissible to deviate in special instances, should the writer deem it necessary and justified.

The emphasis in Hlavsa’s own statement follows this closely:314 the Rules represent merely a recommendation, but one that appropriates for itself values like sophistication and refinement (vytĜíbenost), and therefore deviation from the Rules is not encouraged. The forward stresses the value that the Czech cultural tradition attaches to orthographic uniformity. While it is permissible to disregard this uniformity, the authors opine that writers should do so only in certain instances.315 CLI director Daneš backed this line in a slightly softer form in an interview with the weekly news journal Respekt (24 May 1993): “We start with the fact that every sensible person recognizes that it is good to have a single way of writing,” explains Professor Ladislav [sic] Daneš, director of the Czech Language Institute ASCR. It has become an unwritten tradition that the Academy publishes the Rules and that people are guided by them. According to Professor Daneš, the Rules are foremost an aid for language users and it is a matter for each individual whether he is guided by them or not. “There is no language police; no one can be tried for not respecting the rules. He can, however, be ‘condemned’ by society.” A definite requirement is only set for schools – when the ministry of education determines what they will use to teach.

The original viewpoint, then, assumes that changes recommended and publicized in a certain way automatically accrue authority and command obedience. If the changes are well designed, the public will accept them and shun those who reject them. In May, after the Rules had already appeared and controversy had erupted, Martincová put forth the following view:

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The new Rules of Czech Orthography are not a law; they merely represent a recommendation from the Czech Language Institute as to how to write more simply. (ZN noviny, 20 May 1993)

This is a clear shift to a more defensive position, which gives no cultural weight to the spellings in the new Rules and instead emphasizes the lack of legal status for the Rules outside the educational sphere. In the first of a series of three articles published in June 1993, entitled Proþ se mČní Pravidla ‘Why the Rules are Changing,’ Martincová and Kraus elaborated on this statement, saying [emphasis original]: No less fundamental a question is how authoritative the new Rules are. In opposition to the view that the Rules must be mechanically obeyed and that they simply give orders in an authoritative fashion is the explanation that the Rules are a recommendation – and it is in this sense that they should be understood.

Hlavsa echoed this in a letter to Lidové noviny on 3 July of that year: The opinion has now been heard in educated society that Czech language culture has had enough of orders and prohibitions (the new Rules therefore only make recommendations), and that we must regard as standard anything that is in the real language norm, which is governed by the way educated speakers express themselves. The Prague Linguistic School, whose contribution is still highly regarded the world over, took a similar position toward purism (now in its new, anti-Bolshevik garb). What we should be discussing instead today is the relationship between that norm and the extent to which interventions in it are justified.

Always somewhat less conciliatory than Martincová and Kraus, Hlavsa here picked up their theme of optionality, while still insisting on the correctness of his approach and labeling his opponents as purists (a matter we will take up in section 5.3). By 1994, when the controversy had been running for nearly a year and a half, Kraus formulated the position as follows in Mladý svČt on 26 August: One notably new aspect to the Rules has escaped many people: an attempt at tolerance. In the introduction we wrote that we recommend a certain norm, but if someone feels it is warranted, he can write according to older usage. When, for example, I am publishing the papers of Professor Patoþka, then – even as a supporter of the new Rules and the new way of writing – I would probably write filosofie [and not filozofie]. As a linguist, I am at the same time interested to see which forms of borrowed words convention will eventually favour.316

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Kraus bases his interpretation on the same text as Hlavsa – the forward to the academic edition of the Rules – but he emphasizes entirely different points. It is true, as Kraus states, that the Rules claimed to be a set of recommendations, but this sentence in the forward is hedged around with warnings and suggestions that the Rules really should be obeyed by most writers in most circumstances. Hlavsa’s vision of a virtually mandatory new norm was giving way, under the pressure of public opinion and the scepticism of the CLI’s new head, to an interpretation that downplayed prescriptivism and highlighted the Rules’ optional nature. At the same time, the criterion of unity for the written norm, which formed an integral part of the debate earlier, became restricted to the discussion over schools. For the rest of the population, the decision of what to write where had landed firmly in the hands of the writer. 3.1. The Ministry and the certificate of approval Much of the authority ascribed to the Rules derives from the fact that one edition is used compulsorily in schools. Orthographic manuals have special weight in the Czech context, where the formal side of language instruction has historically dominated. Knowing where to capitalize and how to spell and punctuate properly was traditionally the focus of much of the instruction in Czech language and literature, and this was reflected in the subject matter and grading of school work and university entrance exams. Previous editions of the school version of the Rules had always been accompanied by a notice of the Ministry of Education’s schvalovací doložka ‘certificate of approval’, which stated that the book had been approved for use in schools. This certificate could be obtained prior to publication and advertised on the cover, which was the case with the 1993 Rules. The very existence of the certificate attached to the school edition became an impulse for the constant revision of the Rules. Petr, writing in 1981 in his capacity as director of the CLI, said that a new edition was imperative precisely because of the certificate (1981: 7): …it is necessary for certain differences between the Dictionary of Standard Czech for Schools and the Public (1978) and the school edition of the Rules (1958 and following) to be eliminated, especially in matters of morphology. Because the dictionary does not have the certificate of approval of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Socialist Republic, in cases where morphological information differs (and from the point of view of codifying the

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standard norm), what is given in the school edition of the Rules is considered to be “correct”. This fact is especially important for the situation in schools, where in this connection we find unclear points and doubts as to how to proceed in disputed cases. For the information of our readers, we must add that the Dictionary of Standard Czech (1978) was discussed and approved by the orthography commission of the scholarly board for linguistics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. The commission ruled that all new morphological features in the Dictionary (as opposed to the Rules) would be included in the next edition of the school Rules of Czech Orthography. It thus understood partial reforms of individual points as a further step to realizing the intentions of the 1957 reform. For various reasons, however, no such edition of the school Rules so amended has yet been published. In this way a discrepancy has arisen in various individual places between these two codificatory handbooks. The differences, as we have already mentioned, almost exclusively concern the morphological norm and do not touch on orthography in the strictest sense.

A handbook like the Rules of Czech Orthography, which is the only work of its sort to have the approval certificate, is thus pushed into a state of permanent revision. As other books come out which are not, strictly speaking, textbooks but represent the “latest thinking” of the linguistic elite on orthographic, orthoepic and grammatical practice, the educational establishment is left in an uncomfortable situation. Procedurally, it must be led instead by the older, out-of-date Rules, even while the CLI itself may be trumpeting the virtues of the newer work. This resolves itself into increasing pressure from the Ministry of Education and other organs on the CLI to produce a new version of the Rules incorporating these developments. The generally negative reaction to the 1993 school Rules left the Ministry of Education with egg on its face and a feeling that damage control was needed. An early sign of this was an interview with Ivan Pilip, then deputy minister for education, that appeared in Telegraf on 22 July 1993. The interview, conducted by the paper’s editor, František Kostlán,317 hinted that the Ministry was re-evaluating its previous commitment to the Rules. Pilip pointed out that the certification system was a leftover from the communist era, when it had served as a de facto censorship mechanism for school texts. In the post-communist period, Pilip noted, obtaining a certificate had become relatively simple. All a publisher had to do was submit

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two letters of recommendation from scholars in the field along with the work itself, and approval was more or less automatic.318 Only egregiously unsuitable books, he claimed, were weeded out by this process, and that the existence of a certificate for a book was no proof that it was mandated for school use (Rudé právo, 23 July 1993 and Telegraf, 22 July 1993). He therefore suggested re-evaluating the status of approved textbooks [emphasis original]: In the first place, during the approval process there should be more expert evaluations to hand, and in some cases there should be broader discussion of individual issues. In the second place, this approval should be two-tiered. The basic tier would be for approved textbooks; this means that they would be able to be used as a matter of course in schools, because they do not veer off into extreme or unfounded positions, and linguistically and editorially they stay within the norm. A further type of textbook would be recommended. In conformity with existing standards, the Ministry would recommend such a book for a particular instructional subject at a particular level, noting that although it is not strictly required to be used, its contents have met educational standards in advance and can also serve indirectly as an orientation point for further texts in this subject. If I were to relate this system to the new Rules of Czech Orthography under discussion, then (although I do not wish to anticipate any possible directives) I would assume they would fall into the first group – approved teaching aids.319

In proposing an overhaul of the current system, Pilip cast aspersions on it and set the stage for the negotiations that eventually produced the Addendum. Only after society at large had discussed the general direction in which the language was moving, said Pilip, could it reach a consensus and regard the Rules as properly recommended for school use. In the meanwhile, he said, the Ministry would issue a statement formalizing its view that the Rules were not obligatory for use in schools. This explanation, while ingenious, was an attempt to escape from a plan the Ministry now found uncomfortable. The Ministry had in fact certified the new Rules for use from the fall of 1993, with the provision that they would coexist for a year with the old Rules. In the intervening year, textbooks written or revised according to the new Rules would receive their certificates, and from the fall of 1994 the certificate for the old Rules would be superseded. The new Rules and books based on them would then be the only approved works in schools. This view is attested in many of the early articles on the Rules, in the words of both the Rules’ authors and those of Ministry spokesmen.

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Saying that certified works were merely options was, in the case of the Rules, splitting hairs. True, an approved maths or chemistry textbook might be only one of several available. But schools were not authorized to use books unless they had the schvalovací doložka, and if only one manual of orthography was approved, then it was de facto a mandatory book. Given the strict criteria for grading orthographic errors adhered to for all written work in Czech schools, teachers’ representatives naturally pushed for a single standard text for this area. Why did the Ministry react in such varied ways over the course of the entire affair? It would be too simplistic to say that this was a power struggle. While the Ministry clearly wanted to influence the direction of discussion later on, its functionaries never attempted to set the content of the Rules themselves, and they seemed content to let a greater linguistic authority handle matters. Even Deputy Minister Bartošek, speaking deep in the midst of the crisis of the summer of 1994, when distrust of the CLI was at its height, was still able to say: “I think that it is up to linguists to decide as to how orthography develops” (ýeský deník, 26 July 1994). The order of publication contributed to the Ministry’s woes. Due to hitches at Academia, the school Rules appeared in print six months before the academic Rules, whereas during the previous major reform in 1957– 1958, the academic Rules had appeared substantially in advance of the school version. The situation in 1993 meant that the Ministry’s name and authority became inextricably linked with the controversial new Rules, leaving ministers with little room for manoeuvre as the public furore mounted. Much of the Ministry’s subsequent conduct stems from the fact that they were conducting in public the sort of backstage negotiations that would normally have occurred before publication. 3.2. Authority, obligation, and grammar As we saw in the previous section, parallel to revisions in the language’s spelling conventions have been revisions to the status of particular forms and grammatical endings. These may first see the light of day in places other than authorized spelling handbooks (see chapter 2, section 6). For most reference works – grammars, for example – their only real legitimacy comes from the names attached to them: authors, publishing house, reviewers, and publications where the reviews appear. Standard Czech has long made do with a limited number of published

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grammars. With the Havránek-Jedliþka and the Styblík grammars, which reigned throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the authors were held in general high esteem, the publisher was the nation’s foremost educational house, the reviews acclaimed the manuals’ contribution, and the books were approved for school use. This winning combination trumped any possible competitors.320 The situation grew more complex in the 1980s as more works appeared, including the unwieldy but detailed three-volume Mluvnice þeštiny, widely known as the “Academy Grammar”.321 Still, in the 1980s the market was artificially suppressed by the limited number of prestigious publishing houses and restrictions on publication and authorship,322 and any increase in choice pales in comparison with the explosion of new books after 1989. As regards grammar, the CLI itself does not see the Rules as more authoritative than certain other works, but does recognize that the public takes precisely this view. Martincová, when asked about the codification process for morphology, offered the following explanation (personal interview): Individual linguistic handbooks have varying normative or even codificatory force. When a descriptive grammar comes out – such as Havránek and Jedliþka’s Concise Grammar – schools teach according to it. The problem is that word forms here are in a different context from orthography. Even if a grammar captures developments in morphology, it’s not seen the same way as when it is presented in an orthographic manual. The 1958 Rules did not correspond to the current morphological norm of the language. In dictionaries – specifically the Dictionary of Standard Czech for Schools and the Public, which came out in 1978 – there was an attempt to interpret, or “codify”, morphological shifts observed over a longer period of time. In the meantime more handbooks, like Styblík’s, were coming out, where they tried to depict shifts in codification or what was happening in Czech morphology – but once again, not across the entire range of features. Later the three-volume Grammar of Czech came out, which gives detailed descriptions. Developments are depicted there with a large number of examples, but since the authors were afraid a nationwide discussion would ensue, they proclaimed incessantly that it was not a codificatory grammar, and that it was just a grammar describing the norm of standard Czech. But if the grammar is perceived by users as a prescription, what’s the difference?

The paradox of the Czech linguistic situation is that the public has a strong desire for definitive, codificatory works, but particularly conservative ones that enshrine differences between Standard Czech and their spoken codes. Such manuals fully reflect the forms found in older literary works and taught at an earlier period and give clear, unambiguous advice. The peculiar provenance of SC strengthens the hand of those who would

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resist change to it. Because it did not arise from an organic, spoken dialect, it is less susceptible to arguments promoting change on the basis of evolution in the spoken language. The users of the standard language seem to accept that a conservative description will coexist with much looser actual norms in written discourse; the conservative grammar book legitimizes the values of heritage and continuity and need not necessarily be accepted as a model.323 In Czech, conservative works often therefore claim to be normative and codificatory, while accommodationist works more often claim to be non-prescriptive. When an accommodationist work claims codificatory force, as happened with the Rules, it overturns these expectations of continuity and tradition. 3.3. Rejecting linguistic regulation Even if they disagreed with the reforms or how they had been formulated, most correspondents accepted the existence of a language regulator. However, some rejected the idea that language should be formally regulated.324 I admit that I belong to the younger generation, which does not remember the spellings filosofie ‘philosophy’ and these ‘thesis’, and since my school days I have written filozofie and teze. However, when I began to notice linguistic differences more, I understood the reason that leads many educated people to retain the original form of the language. […] [T]he public, and especially those who work with the language, do not feel any great need for new alternatives and radical changes like renezance ‘renaissance’, režizér ‘director’, or pluralizmus ‘pluralism’. The public know what will happen if the new rules are accepted. It would therefore be useful, before any new negotiations about the language begin again, to explain to the public what will happen if no new rules come into effect. Maybe the Czech language would suffer no more from this than from bringing in the spelling režizér.325

Their opposition to formal regulation was often strengthened by the (incorrect) assumption that the new Rules were obligatory for all citizens. As we saw in chapter 6, section 3, this assumption was often suggested by the way the newspapers themselves reacted to the Rules. I really don’t know why one dark morning I should start to write (and also pronounce) diskuze ‘discussion’ or renezance ‘renaissance’ instead of the traditional forms of these words. Maybe so that it will be more familiar to the majority of viewers of idiotic action films?326

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Even commentators like Petr Fidelius, who knew the new Rules had no legal force, saw the recommendations as an attempt to impose a new norm: At the current time, there exists a contradiction in the area of foreign words: an official institution (the Rules of Czech Orthography) has tried to prescribe a single spelling where in reality a dual spelling prevails, in other words, where usage varies. It is a damaging approach (it introduces needless tension into the practice of writing) and a pointless one (there is at present no chance that it will be accepted voluntarily by the whole linguistic collective, and the possibilities for coercion are in today’s climate weaker than ever before).327

Some milder protests against linguistic regulation pointed to the constant orthographic change affecting certain words. For a majority of people, the protesters said, language regulation complicated writing rather than simplifying it. This constant alteration of norms, sometimes of the sort “here and then there” (from galerie to galérie and back) is most often justified by the dogma of simplification. The Czech language is too demanding; back in the nineteenth century we evidently bit off more than we could chew. Thus the specialists fret over how to simplify our language, so the people will make fewer mistakes. And it is simplified, but the people continue to make mistakes […]. So, through gradual simplification further and further complications are created, and forsooth, nothing is made simpler: instead of leaving our good old complication alone and getting to grips with it somehow, we have to constantly relearn from complication to complication, sometimes several times in the course of our lives.328

These protestations cast doubt on the entire process of reform and the way it was implemented. 3.4. Stressing optionality The fact that the Rules were optional outside the school classroom was often used as a foil by their authors, but others took up this argument as well, both for and against the Rules. As Milan Žemliþka, who generally favoured them, pointed out in a column in Severoþeský regionální deník (17 December 1994): The key to understanding the point of this book [the Rules] are words in the forward to the academic (hardcover) edition on p. 5: “…we understand orthographic rules to be a set of recommendations for sophisticated written

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expression, from which it is permissible to deviate in special instances, should the writer deem it necessary and justified.” It is thus evident that different stylistic needs permit us varied forms of expression. And this is a good thing.329

Žemliþka focused on the permission explicitly granted in the Rules themselves to deviate from them, but others (especially opponents of the reforms) saw the Rules as harmless simply because the CLI had no authority to promulgate them outside of primary and secondary education. Jan Skoumal, writing in Lidové noviny on 17 July 1993, claimed he was not averse to seeing the new Rules as mandatory for schools, but in every other sphere, people were perfectly entitled to ask the question, “but is it required?”: A reasonable teacher should tell her schoolchildren: “If you obey these rules, you will get A’s, but most of all, your writing won’t bother a majority of people, and that’s the main thing. In time, of course, you’ll realize that many books, and not only older ones, deviate from these rules, and that even today, many people write slightly differently than we teach you. Orthographic rules, after all, are not laws, and are not obligatory outside school. Count also on the fact that before you graduate, these rules will nonetheless change.”

Those who led the charge against the Rules frequently pointed to society’s acquiescent view of the Rules. Antonín Kostlán (personal interview) described it as a deferential outlook that should, but has not, been adequately challenged: … [T]his great authority is a development that took root, I would say, in the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties. At that time, everyone in this country knew what the Rules were, because they met them in the course of their school career. […] The obligatory nature of that entire handbook was unquestionable. For the ordinary person, what was in those Rules was a given. I would say that this particular form of graphic fabrication is the greatest authority in society. It only pretends to be scholarly. It has the authority of being a single solitary manual, whoever prepares it and wherever they do it. It has often occurred to me how interesting it is that here, in these circumstances, no other group of authors has published Rules which would be graphically identical… Because anyone has the right to do so.

The authors of the Rules were conscious of this as well. Martincová recalled (personal interview):

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I used to teach at the social science faculty, so I had journalists in my classes. I always had to explain to them that there is a difference between a legal statute and a communicative norm of linguistic behaviour, and therefore between the norms that linguistic handbooks create. And they had never met this [idea] before. All they knew was that in school they’d learned that this is the only correct way to do it and this is how it has to be. This was why they equated orthographical manuals with legal statutes. For example, to explain the difference between observing an orthographic norm and observing legal statutes, I used to point out to them that they won’t go to prison for writing babiþka with y instead of i. (I should add here that explaining to all users of the language, and not just to students, that the Rules of Czech Orthography are not a description of the entirety of Czech, is also a superhuman task.)

The Rules that had achieved this stupendous level of authority in the public mind were those editions descended from the 1957 revisions, which were the product of a centralized, totalitarian society. As we have seen, some people automatically accepted the 1993 Rules as the inheritor of that mantle, while others clung to the authority of the previous version and refused, for a variety of reasons, to allow the older version to be superseded. 4. Consultation, dissemination, and legitimacy What role did the consultation and dissemination exercises play in shaping the Rules and the public reactions to them? Outside consultation made only a limited contribution to the shaping of the Rule; its primary purpose was apparently to build consensus around the existing proposals. The consultation exercises with the most direct effect on the Rules were those conducted closer to home among linguists; consultation with non-linguists played at best a peripheral role. Non-linguists, on the other hand, were the primary targets of dissemination exercises, where members of the CLI explained the new Rules to them through newspaper articles, interviews, and meetings. The 1988 white book and its morphological questionnaire represented a serious attempt at consultation. However, as it was sent only to around 30 respondents, it was evidently viewed strictly as a consultation with experts at particular institutions: Given the seriousness [of the task], research into the opinions of the professional public (staff of Czech language departments in arts and education faculties, teachers of Czech in high schools and primary schools, specialists from educational research institutes) was conducted as to the

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state of current morphological codification and of possible or necessary developments. (Martincová 1993–1994: 146)

This comes through quite clearly in the reports of the responses. Martincová’s article reported that 11 universities and 10 schools had responded. When asked if this meant that a total of 21 responses had been received, she replied (personal interview): No, there were many more, probably 600 or 700 sheets or forms that came back. What’s more, I didn’t include in that number any persons who were not from schools. I said before that they had photocopied it and sent it back to us, for instance, from natural sciences departments and so forth. And those weren’t included in that figure either.

Why did Martincová not cite the larger number in her article? The value of the survey’s responses came not from their collective bulk, but from their affiliation. In other words, any given individual’s contribution had weight not because he deigned to respond as a person, but because he represented an institution that had authority in these matters, and whose participation had been deemed crucial for the creation of an elite consensus. Including answers from non-Bohemists in the figures would have opened up the commission to charges of selectivity. Only certain other teachers and professors had had the opportunity to respond, and this was doubly true of those completely outside a school or academic environment. After all, to receive responses from 21 Czech language departments was significant, given that only 30 questionnaires had gone out in total to all publishers and educational institutions. But a total of several hundred responses was not particularly meaningful measured against the whole of educated Czech society, most of which had not had the opportunity to contribute. The survey was thus played as a show of solidarity by the Czechlanguage teaching establishment, rather than as a mass consultation. This approach fits with the character of the school edition of the Rules. Although it is the edition that members of the public are most likely to buy and use, its primary purpose is as a textbook, and the contributions of authority figures are thus valued over those of members of the public. Furthermore, much of the 1988 questionnaire was about morphology, and morphology is not central to spelling reform. Of the two published versions of the Rules, the academic edition is the more “prestigious” and “definitive”, and it contains very little morphological information at all. It is only the school edition that gives regular information on conjugation and declension. What the CLI was really seeking information on here was the

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extent to which reforms introduced in existing grammar handbooks should be reflected in the Rules.330 Later communications from the CLI, such as the 1991 publication of Co pĜinášejí nová Pravidla (‘What the New Rules Bring’), were primarily there to explain why the changes were taking place and how they had been drawn up. In all probability, they were not actually asking for feedback for the upcoming reforms; the orthographic questionnaire might possibly have been of use in future revisions, but seemed to have little or no impact on the final version of the 1993 Rules, which were essentially identical to the ones in the brochure. In this sense, the consultations were more like the informational lectures given by members of the CLI; they were meant to persuade people to a reform whose shape was already more or less fixed. Other attempts at taking the public pulse had an indirect, linguistic character. School pupils and university students were included, as reported in Martincová (1993–1994), but as mentioned in chapter 5, section 1.2, they were not actually asked for their opinions. Martincová recalled (personal interview): We prepared to take a sounding among pupils. We asked teachers to do it for us – of course only in the upper grades. And we also did research into knowledge of orthographic and morphological features by having students take a test. We did this research in Brno, Hradec Králové, Prague and I can’t remember if we did it in PlzeĖ as well. We drew our inspiration in this matter from Styblík’s research in the 1970s. We checked whether any attitudes towards or knowledge about particular features had changed since then. And it turned out that it was the same old problematic features: the results were not very different from Styblík’s.

An article about this test appeared in Mladá fronta dnes on 22 July 1994. It consisted of a lengthy dictation and a gap-filling exercise, which together covered exhaustively many of the difficult points mentioned in chapter 2. Students were asked to take down sentences like the following, which primarily tests the spelling of foreign words (difficult points are underlined): Kybernetika se zabývá teorií Ĝízení a sdČlování i v živých organismech. ‘Cybernetics is concerned with the theory of control and conveyance in living organisms as well.’

The gap-filling exercise contained sentences like the one below, which tests the writing of and in foreign words: Dnes nastala rene…ance jízdních kol. ‘Today a renaissance of bicycles has come about.’

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Students were then asked to justify the spellings they had chosen to fill the gaps. The vast majority of sentences, however, only tested traditional bugbears of Czech orthography that were not affected by the upcoming reforms, such as where to write vs. or 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

According to the article’s author, Vlaćka Kuþerová, the outcome did not encourage complacency: It showed unambiguously that children have not mastered orthography both because it is complicated and because teachers do not have enough time to practice it in lessons due to the large amount of other material. […] More than 500 pupils in Year 8 primary-school classes did so poorly on a trickfilled dictation that they would have received a fail for it. Even a majority of future teachers of Czech were not sure of the correct spellings. Schoolchildren most frequently made mistakes in deciding where to write “y” in specified words.332

She also notes that a majority of schoolchildren spelled the word kurzu (‘course’ gen. sg.) with a , even though at the time the only acceptable spelling was with . 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.

Consultation and dissemination had thus followed traditional lines in the run-up to the 1993 reforms. True consultation had been limited to a group

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of professional linguists and pedagogues. Attempts at informing the public were generally well received in the media, but did not convince people that these reforms were necessary or desirable. Why did the orthographic commission believe that the public would simply swallow a reform of this sort without the opportunity to register their views and influence the outcome? The answer to this lies partially in differing perceptions of what the publication of the Rules represented. From the commission’s point of view, previous reforms had always been partial and tentative, and the publication of a codificatory handbook had merely been the first step towards reform. All their publicity information about the reform seems to have assumed that a first published version could not hope to anticipate every possible problem. Once the Rules had been published and worked their way into common use, any issues arising would hopefully be referred to the CLI, examined, resolved and the solutions incorporated into future “tweaks” to the Rules over the next twenty to thirty years as these problems were ironed out. For instance, the 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.

4.1. Dreaming up the Rules Given the limited opportunities for consultation, it is not surprising that members of the public felt they had been insufficiently included in the process of reform. They did not understand when, where and under what conditions the reforms arose, and how they could have been implemented

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without extensive public consultation, especially among specialists.333 The operative verb is vymyslet si ‘think up, dream up, invent’, which many authors use to describe how the Rules were created. People attributed this to a communist-era mindset focused on hierarchy and secrecy, as we saw in the previous section: Whose fault is it? Historically that of the specialists from the Czech Language Institute, who dreamt up “corrections” and, in the spirit of the old days, did not consult about them with the public – and today that of the Ministry of Education, which one day acknowledges the new Rules, only to repudiate them the next.334

Others simply wanted the process opened up, regardless of why it had been closed in the past. Writing in ZN noviny on 25 July 1994, Alena Hromádková, chair of the Democratic Union political party, opined: Our celebrated structuralists are only concerned with the frequency of appearance of pronunciations, but there are historical and comparative perspectives, which are more demanding to research – and this they overlook. So they dreamt up the Rules without wider discussion or acceptance. It is scandalous for one group to force through its particular protected interests… they have contempt for the particular experience of those strata [of society] that are more educated, value the language more and have a greater feeling for it.

Detractors pointed to instances where the new Rules flew in the face of established consultation processes, often in particular fields.335 For example, an article by Jan VymČtal in HospodáĜské noviny, 29 June 1993, pointed out that that there is a commission for organic chemistry nomenclature, which convenes under one of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences. It has issued recommendations on the standard spelling of terms in the field since 1968 in accordance with guidelines laid down by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The commission recommended a return to etymological spellings for many chemical terms, which was gradually implemented in subsequent years. However, the 1993 Rules unilaterally recommended the more accommodationist spellings of the 1957 reforms: And now the new Rules come out, which do not respect extant rules for the writing of chemical names, with far-reaching consequences in this particular instance. In this matter, they represent a step backwards.

VymČtal regarded the Rules as unsanctioned meddling in his field that would have a deleterious impact on education. Others, like émigré linguist

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JiĜí Marvan, writing in Literární noviny on 21 October 1993, generalized this to a view of all of society: A second, far more serious mistake is the premise of irrevocability: that loads of damage was done; that we cannot return the murdered to life or property to the robbed; that Bolshevism is a fait accompli that we must now meekly and humbly tolerate, or even see through to completion (e.g. the spellings of kurz or marazmus from 1993). A nationwide conference of Bohemists that took place in August in Olomouc did not even hint in its programme that anything could be done about it.

Towards the end of the controversy, there were moves to look forward to the next reforms with an eye to making them more inclusive. According to OldĜich Uliþný, head of the Czech language department at Charles University, …the Linguistic Association of the Czech Republic has begun assembling a codificatory commission or board, which would enable all language and linguistic professionals, including writers, newspapermen, lawyers, politicians, specialist journalists and other educated cultural activists interested in the standard language, to voice their views on proposed projects. However, even its own codificatory activity must be entrusted to a team of linguistic Bohemists representing workplaces from across the republic. We must keep in mind that the codification of standard Czech affects collective values, awareness, sentiments and value orientations of all Czech speakers in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and abroad.336

Uliþný’s proposal included many of the groups whose members had protested vehemently against the new Rules. It is thus unclear whether a commission with such diverse representation could fulfil any function other than vetoing proposed changes. 4.2. Promoting ease of adoption A number of articles relied on the phrase þasem si na to zvykneme ‘in time we’ll get used to it’ to justify a more tolerant approach to the new Rules. Proponents of reforms pointed to the relatively low frequency of words affected by them, and to what they perceived of as the harmlessness of the 1957 reform. No one these days, they contended, would think to write these instead of the current spelling teze ‘thesis’, proving that nativized spellings do catch on after a while. At the time [in 1957] we grumbled a lot, of course in private, but finally we

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got used to it. Even my colleague [JiĜí] Marvan got used to it, and today he uncomplainingly writes lingvista instead of linguista, teorie and teze instead of theorie and these, fantazie and demokratizace instead of fantasie and demokratisace; the only things he cannot make his peace with are kurz, krize and prezident. […] The author Karel Pecka certainly has the right, at his age, to write as he is accustomed and feels to be correct, but he may well end up like Václav Vladivoj Tomek with his w’s.337

Nineteenth-century Czech historian Tomek makes at least three appearances in the debates as a symbol of unreconstructed linguistic conservatism. After the spelling reforms of the 1840s (see chapter 3, section 3.4), in which the spellings of for /v/ and 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

Others asked critics to remember that orthographic reform had a 600year history in Czech, citing the introduction of accent marks in the early fifteenth century, and nineteenth-century reforms that changed the way Czechs wrote /j/, KÖand /'L/ from , and to , and (see chapter 3, sections 1.2 and 3.4): Where did the fall begin? With the use of diacritic accents instead of letter

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combinations? With the synthetic reform of 1842? With the debut of the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1929? […] Fundamentally, Czech orthography is unusually stable today. When I see the hue and cry caused by the recent Rules, I cannot imagine at all what kind of earthquake and apoplectic fits would have been caused by a reform of the sort that Danish survived quite healthily in 1948 (eliminating capital letters with nouns and introducing the letter å). Implicit demands for the complete inalterability of orthography run contrary to the spirit of the language, and short equations like “every change means a further decline” (the age-old cry of all eulogists for times gone by) betray a certain – shall we say – limitation in one’s historical perspective.339

Such criticisms rarely came from the lay public. They required more of a sense of perspective on orthographic reform than the average non-specialist could be expected to have, and thus they tended to be the product of teachers and specialists in language and literature. 5. Conclusions The climate in which the new Rules appeared was not an auspicious one. Old authorities were suspect, and new ones were not firmly established. No one was sure what it meant to say that “the CLI” had produced a work, or how to evaluate that claim. Issues surrounding copyright and honoraria for authors muddied the water even further. The Ministry’s approval certificate, formerly a clear stamp of recommendation, was now questioned by none other than Ministry officials. As the bureaucratic and autocratic structures of communism disappeared, the sources of control and legitimacy they had represented disappeared as well. Were the Rules then the product of a legitimate, considered process in an authoritative institution? Or were they the product of a small group of individuals, using outdated linguistic theories to pursue their own agendas, and lacking both legitimacy and authority? In one perspective, the changes that occurred after the Velvet Revolution – copyright issues, publishers, and technicalities at the Ministry – were superficial phenomena that do not affect the underlying legitimacy and authority of the CLI, which remains more or less unchanged from pre-revolutionary days. No special steps therefore needed to be taken to shore up or bolster the rational legitimacy of the reforms. In another perspective, any inheritance from communist rule was now irrelevant. Legitimacy needed to be earned from the ground up. The authors of the Rules would have to build consensus, turning specifically to those

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professions – journalists, writers, teachers, politicians, university faculty – who work with words for a living, as well as to those in the wider language community who are interested, to seek their opinions, and put suggestions to them. This approach would build consensus for the Rules’ traditional legitimacy and develop the charismatic legitimacy of their propagators. We can see aspects of both these views in the actions of the Rules’ authors and the responses of the public to the reforms. 5.1. Arguments against reform Those who objected to the Rules did so for a variety of reasons and with varying degrees of intensity. First, some authors were categorically opposed to the specific changes proposed. They used words like prznČní ‘violation’ to express their disgust with the new reforms, and advanced arguments about literary tradition and the heritage of the Czech language, not to mention linguistic and etymological claims of varying reputability. Their objections stemmed from the apparently accommodationist, lenient direction of the reforms. Second, there were those who disagreed with some particular decision or point in the new Rules. Sometimes they took that point as emblematic of the entire reform.340 A third group thought the reforms did not go far enough. They wondered whether it was worth the bother of a reform if it did not remove what they considered to be crucial stumbling blocks in Czech orthography.341 Fourth were those whose primary complaint was not the substance of the Rules, but rather the way in which they were drawn up and implemented. Some people cast doubts on the motives of the Institute, others criticized the consultation process that produced them, and still others rejoiced in the bureaucratic snafu of the summer of 1994, when the Ministry of Education suddenly reversed its decision to start using the new Rules in schools that autumn. 5.2. Arguments in favour of reform Many of the articles presenting a positive view of the reforms were interviews with the members of the orthographic commission, pieces by them or articles by other linguists closely connected with the CLI. Still, a fair num-

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ber of citizens were happy to see some sort of simplification of the orthographic system no matter what the details were, or believed that the principle of accepting whatever the CLI had decided was far better than the alternative of having no linguistic authority at all. If many of the opponents of the reform stylized their contributions as “calls to arms” in response to the new Rules, the defenders were in turn primarily responding to the critics, not directly to the Rules. They had a variety of motives, but most of them were practical in orientation. They pointed to the problems people had learning the current orthography as well as to current pressures in education. Sometimes they asked readers to step back from the details of the reforms to get a broader perspective. Such contributions frequently focused on how few words were actually affected by the reform or on the place of these reforms in the Czech historical context. Some cited the authority of the CLI as a reason for simply accepting the reforms, but more often than not, those who favoured the new Rules avoided defending how they had been compiled, publicized, or consulted. More than one writer noted that complaining about orthography seemed to be a sort of displacement activity for the other ills of society. In a letter to Lidové noviny on 29 August 1990, Pavel Sántay had already written: Rather than having erudite debates over our piety towards the classical languages of European education, surely it is more important to strive to ensure that the prezident is always a president, a worthy figure and the head of a sovereign state, not a puppet in the hands of foreign powers; that poezie is always poetry, not a palette of soulless one-dimensional ditties; that filozofie is philosophy, not a degraded and abused ideological weapon; that the univerzita is a university producing truly educated men, who will respect classical European culture and will lead the rest to respect it as well. Then arguments over “s” and “z” will be groundless and we will no longer have to fear demogracy, because we will already have democracy.342

5.3. Linguistic purism and Czech society Accusations of purism and knife-grinding were rife in these debates, but were the reactions to Czech spelling reform really puristic interventions? Certainly they had much in common with linguistic purism. They used many of the metaphors associated with puristic thought and described in Thomas (1991); they appealed to the same notions of threat and defence noted in purism and detailed in studies of other languages, such as Ager (1999) and Schiffman (1996). On another level, though, the debate was

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conducted on decidedly non-purist grounds. The “purists” were primarily defenders of foreign-looking words and of cultural connections to the West, rather than “Czech-first” nationalists. A public outcry, however, was not the only effect. Part of the conservative backlash against the Rules consisted of denying the right of any institution or person to regulate the language. This is a reversal on the Czech puristic position at the beginning of the twentieth century, when conserving the standard language frequently went hand in hand with agitating for greater central regulation of it (by suitably learned and conservative linguists, it was assumed). We are looking, then, at a fundamental shift in Czech purism. Early in the twentieth century, it was propagandistic, future-oriented, activist, and collectivist, attempting to create a more perfect instrument for the nation. Late twentieth-century Czech purism turned nostalgic, conservative, passive, and individualistic. It looked back to a (possibly non-existent) time during the interwar republic when connections with the past were truer and language represented values more clearly, and it regarded the transmission of this tradition as an inheritance that individuals need to defend actively. Schiffman (1996: 62) identifies this nostalgia for a mythical time when the language was unblemished as a common feature of the belief system associated with purism. This nostalgia had, of course, been well represented in Czech purism, but always with the focus on the more distant Humanist Czech of the sixteenth century, with modern Czechs being exhorted to return to this state of purity through reformist activism. Replacing the sixteenth century with the interwar republic shifted the emphasis from innovation to conservatism: this new Arcadia was close enough that in order to effect a return to it, all that was needed was to clamp down and forbid any further deformations to the standard. In this context, we can also note the changing targets of purism. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, foreignisms (particularly from German) were perceived as the greatest threat to purity. However, by the late twentieth century, we find purists actually defending the original foreign spellings of borrowed words against “nativization”. The shift we might have expected to see – from a campaign against Germanisms to one against Russianisms – never came to pass. Why did this campaign fail to materialize? Before 1989, the ubiquitous repressive apparatus of the pro-Soviet regime, which was highly sensitized to anti-Russian sentiment, undoubtedly played a role. However, this does not explain the absence of a campaign against Russianisms even after 1989.

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In fact, the answer is much simpler: Russian had only limited impact on the Czech language during the communist interregnum. Despite the close ties with the Soviet Union in communist times, there was not much contact between speakers of the two languages. The Russians and Czechs share no linguistic borders. Travel between the two states was expensive and administratively complex, and thus not all that common. Although there were Russian military bases in Czechoslovakia, the local population had only limited contact with their inhabitants. All students studied Russian at school, but the language had no official status and once out of school, no one had much occasion to use it. The Czech attitude towards Russian after 1989 was thus different from its attitude towards German before World War II (see chapter 3) and is reflected in the relatively low number of Russian loan words entering the language. Of far more concern were the communist clichés and bureaucratese, which were the subject of much recrimination, and were perceived to be Soviet impositions on the Czech language. Purism thus turned from criticizing “overt” Russianisms to warning against what we can call “covert” Russianisms, discerning in the trend to nativize foreign spellings the hidden hand of Soviet-style linguistic manipulation. I characterize this as a sort of linguistic “allergic reaction”. A language community over-sensitized to the presence of foreign elements essentially went into attack mode against long-established native processes, perceiving them in its supersensitive state as an intruder that must be rejected. 5.4. Summary The debates over linguistics, authority, and legitimacy reflect many of the more general issues confronting Czech society at the beginning of the 1990s. The Czechs were just coming out of a long period of totalitarianism, and it is not surprising to see them grappling with this legacy in many areas of national life. The orthography controversy was part of a larger societal debate on which of the surviving structures of the communist era could be of service, and which needed to be scrapped and rethought from the ground up. Social change also made its way into the debate. Czechs were coming out of a period of isolation from the west, and were being exposed to forty years of development at once. Calls for change and reform at all levels of

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society, not least the educational system, were countered by warnings of disruption and anarchy. Many of the contributions reflect people’s anxieties over changes in the educational system and societal mores. The issue of the Czechs’ place in Europe was neatly symbolized in the debate over nativization of foreign words, said to be characteristic of the east, and preservation of Latinate spellings, said to be characteristic of the west.343 This argument served for some as a proxy for larger questions: should the Czechs identify with Europe and claim its goals and needs as their own, or remain apart from the Europe of Germany, France, and Britain?344 The year 1993 also saw the dissolution of the Czechoslovak state into the independent Czech and Slovak republics, and the papers were full of musings about nationhood and Czech identity. This goes some way toward explaining the underlying strain of patriotism in many of the contributions. Czechs identify their nationhood strongly with their language; it was the revival of Czech in the nineteenth century that defined them, and this link persists. Orthography came to symbolize the care taken over the language and its special status as bearer of national identity. “Care” was interpreted either as “preservation” – the rejection of change as a sign of the timelessness of cultural values – or as “moulding and shaping” – the careful, planned alteration of the language by sympathetic, knowledgeable masters. In both cases, the underlying question stems from what Milan Kundera (1968) and Václav Havel (2003 [1969]) referred to almost forty years ago as “the fate of the Czechs” (þeský údČl): what is the purpose and destiny of a small nation amidst giants? The roots of the controversy ran deep into the history of the spelling reform and choices made by the orthography commission at the turn of the 1990s. They began the reform in a top-down, non-consultative manner, and expected it to result in a nationwide shift to the new spellings. As history brought one era to a close and opened another, the commission’s expectations and principles shifted, but not far or fast enough to forestall the inevitable collision with a far less obedient and passive public. Arguing over spelling did not resolve any of these questions. However, as an exercise in public democracy and self-expression, the orthography controversy was a success. People were able to vent their opinions on a matter both close to their hearts and symbolic of larger problems in society, and, gratifyingly to many of them, found their concerns were listened to and at least partially addressed in the end.

Chapter 8 Metaphors and the conceptualization of language

… in the position we take towards these reforms, we involuntarily betray something about our innate view of the world at large. Maita Arnautová, Literární noviny, 14 July 1994

The citations from Czech newspapers on the subject of orthographic reform are full of metaphors for and about language. These are treated separately from the overt issues the authors raise, for two reasons. First, metaphoric usage lends itself to analysis using a set of established linguistic tools, explained below. These contribute to our understanding of how the metaphors are used, and constitute a separate contribution to the field of metaphor analysis in a comparative context. Second, if we buy in at least partially to the cognitive theory of metaphor outlined below, then metaphoric usage will play quite a different role in creating discourse than overt argument does. The latter tries to make an intellectual case that persuades; the former appeals to innate or deeply embedded ways of understanding and perceiving, and can persuade without reference to argument. 1. The place of metaphors The field of metaphor studies has grown tremendously in recent years, and now has at least two clear branches. One branch, continuing a traditional view of metaphor within the context of philosophy of language or of literary studies, sees metaphor primarily as a rhetorical device. The other – a newer view – takes a cognitive perspective, seeing metaphors in language as a reflection of a method of understanding the world around us. The implications of these two views are quite different. If a metaphor is primarily a conscious creation, designed to produce a particular effect, then our analysis of it will focus on its effect on the reader/listener – it does not necessarily tell us much about the creators of metaphors, or if it does, then it is simply showing us whatever they wanted us to see or believe about them. Researchers taking this view are most interested in metaphors that stick out: those that are interesting, or unusual, or arresting. They regard so-

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called “dead” metaphors (i.e. the task in front of you meaning the task in your future) as less interesting, or even trivial. If, on the other hand, metaphor reflects a way of understanding through comparison, then it is precisely these “dead” metaphors, which appear so often and in everyone’s speech, that help us grasp how our minds are structured. Brilliant and unique comparisons are, by contrast, of less interest, as they are idiosyncratic. It follows that, in this view, the researcher’s primary concern is what metaphors tell us about the mind of the speaker/writer. The data from this study suggest that there is room for both views in a study of metaphor that focuses on a cultural issue. The cognitive approach lays the basic groundwork for how we use metaphors, revealing preconceptions and logical suppositions that underlie the argument. However, their creative use often extends beyond the basic cognitive networks of metaphors, activating and contributing to cultural scripts. 1.1. Rhetoric- and philosophy-based views of metaphor The traditional view of metaphor stretches back to Aristotle, and more recent exponents of it like Kittay (who comes at it from a philosophical perspective) take as their starting point that a metaphor is fundamentally a linguistic signpost: a figure of speech that attracts attention by virtue of its unusualness. Kittay (1987), for example, does not deny that metaphors may have some cognitive basis. However, she says that little enough is known about the linguistic expression of metaphor, and that elucidating this linguistic basis for metaphor should precede an extensive investigation of the cognitive basis for metaphor. In such a view of metaphor, so-called “dead” metaphors are degenerate cases; their power is far less than “fresh” or “live” metaphors, although scholars like Kittay nonetheless admit them as being members of the category of metaphor. In fact, the Czech debates on orthography were full of conscious references to metaphor, and to analyses of other scholars’ uses of metaphor. This is to be expected in the circumstances; in a debate that involved some of the nation’s most prominent authors, translators, and critics, few of them could pass up the chance to subject each others’ texts to close analysis. Several examples of this genre were splashed across the pages of the prestigious literary weekly Literární noviny in 1993–1994. Among the

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heavyweight participants in these duels were: the former dissident and critic Karel Palek, who goes by the pen name Petr Fidelius, and is the author of the acclaimed ěeþ komunistické moci (‘The Language of Communist Power’); Alexandr Stich, professor of the history of Czech at Charles University; JiĜí Holý, at the time a researcher in Czech literature at the Academy of Sciences and now professor at Charles University; poet and novelist Michal Ajvaz; émigré linguist and professor JiĜí Marvan. For instance, in a lengthy contribution spread across two issues (25 March and 1 April 1993), Fidelius subjected Stich’s use of words such as pĜirozenost ‘naturalness’, regulovat ‘regulate’, vyvíjet ‘develop’, and zákonitost ‘regularity’ to an analysis of metaphorical content and implications. In an article the following year (15 September 1994), he dissected Holý’s use of battle imagery (in an 18 August piece), to which Holý posted a response on 29 September defending and modifying some of his original metaphors. Metaphoric language was used in all of these pieces on at least two levels. It was a didactic device, to explain and clarify as well as to influence opinion. But it was also itself the subject of explanation and dissection, as people of varying opinions and persuasions tried to show how language was being employed in these debates. These rarefied discussions, though, reached only a select and highly educated audience. Literární noviny, while influential among the nation’s elite, is not widely read.345 In mass-market publications, this reflective, interpretive approach to metaphor was by and large lacking. 1.2. Cognitive views of metaphor The cognitive school of metaphor began from the belief that metaphors are fundamental to our way of understanding and thinking. In this view, there is a hierarchy of “natural comprehensibility” for human beings, which is rooted in the here and now of our physical bodies, and proceeds in everwidening circles outward to the less physical, the less personal, and the more abstract. Among the more naturally comprehensible elements are: location, movement, the human body, items in the physical world, and everyday personal interaction. Among those less naturally comprehensible are: time, social constructs, emotions, and abstract qualities or values.346 In a garden-variety metaphor found in speech or literature, one element displaces another, creating an implicit “equation” between the replacer and the replacee. Lakoff and Johnson said that this “surface” equation in the

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text reflected a deeper propensity to understand one item in terms of another, which we can call a conceptual metaphor, following Kövecses (2002: 4–6).347 These two linked elements are the source and the target. Lakoff and Johnson write them in the form THE TARGET IS THE SOURCE, which has become a more or less standard format for conveying conceptual metaphors (see e.g. Kövecses 2002: 6–9). A typical metaphor uses a more naturally comprehensible element (the source) to stand for a less naturally comprehensible one (the target). When we say Now you’ve got that behind you, we use space (in front of – behind) to explain time (prior – after). The metaphor underlying this replacement reads: THE PAST IS BEHIND. This metaphor fits the hierarchy described above: time is less naturally comprehensible than the relationship of one’s physical body to its environment. A time expression therefore forms the target, while an expression of physical position forms the source. We probably would not use a time metaphor to explain a physical position. As expected, the sentence *Please write your answers in the booklet prior to you on the table is infelicitous. Metaphors, then, unlike mathematical equations, are not commutative – they possess an inbuilt directionality rooted in human perception and the human condition.348 This directionality is evidence for a cognitive basis for metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson found that conceptual metaphors often “clustered” around various themes. They can be connected around the source, the target, or the common path of the metaphor. For example, instead of saying Now that you’ve got that behind you…, we could have said, Now that you’ve wrapped that up…. Instead of basing our metaphor on spatial relations, we have based it on a common physical activity: wrapping up a package to make it “finished”. In notational terms, we have changed the source, but retained the same target. Instead of THE PAST IS BEHIND, the new metaphor reads THE PAST IS A WRAPPED PACKAGE. Both metaphors are connected by their target; the way the two sources relate the target to our personal experience illuminates different ways of perceiving the past. The same source can serve two different targets. For example, if I say, I’m behind in my work, I do not mean that I am physically in the back of it, nor that I am in the past, but that I have not progressed as much as I would have liked. Here the source invokes a different picture: I have an ideal self who is facing away from me, toward the future. He came from my direction; I am behind him because he passed this way some time ago. The metaphor is LACK OF PROGRESS IS BEHIND. It is not identical to THE PAST

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IS BEHIND, nor does it allow us to equate lack of progress with the past. But there is a clear connection between them in that both rely on the same physical direction to clarify a more abstract concept. We can also identify a metaphor in sentences like You’ve got your whole life in front of you, which comes out as: THE FUTURE IS AHEAD. Although this shares no elements with THE PAST IS BEHIND, it is nonetheless related to it. Both use basic orientation as the source for a metaphor for time. Whether you choose to draw up a deeper-level metaphor such as TIME IS PHYSICAL ORIENTATION depends on how useful you feel it is. By linking metaphors via shared sources, shared targets and “higher-order” metaphors as demonstrated above, we can identify larger groups of metaphors called networks. If metaphors arise from common human patterns of thought, we would expect them to be universal and largely identical across languages. The original work on the cognitive origins of metaphor was done on the basis of English by Anglophone scholars, and promoted this universality without ever citing other languages.349 More recent research has shown that distinct differences exist among the metaphoric networks of individual languages, and the question now is what this diversity means for a cognitive theory of metaphor. Some scholars, like Kövecses, emphasize the commonalities across languages, and treat the diversity of metaphoric usage as a naturally occurring variation that is not particularly crucial for the hypothesis as a whole. Studies have emphasized the similarities between such disparate languages as English and Chinese (Yu 1998). However, other studies show a wider variation in the scope and availability of metaphors, particularly as regards e.g. emotion. If there is substantial variation in the metaphors available across languages (and across cultures using the same language, such as British and American English), then where do conceptual metaphors originate? If they originate as a function of human cognition, then why are they not identical from language to language? If some are culture- or language-specific, then presumably only the deepest-level schemas (space – time) come from the cognitive realm, while all specific conceptual metaphors reside in the way a language or a linguistic community interprets cognitive relations.

1.3. Reconciling cognitive metaphor and culture Unlike many cognitive studies of metaphors, the current study is based on

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metaphors found in a corpus of thematically cohesive texts. As such, it offers scope for learning not just about individual metaphors in a language, but about their interaction with culture and society.350 A promising approach is offered by Nerlich, Hamilton and Rowe (2002).351 In examining how a recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) was depicted in the press, they argue that to discuss the relevance of metaphors in a social context, more than the cognitive approach is needed: Analysing FMD as a social and cultural phenomenon allows us to go beyond the single-sentence analysis method, which still prevails in cognitive linguistics, and focus instead on metaphors as part of stereotypical narratives and as used in the context of wider semantic and historical fields of imagery. We argue that metaphors are not only cognitive but also cultural and social phenomena. They tap into a nation’s cultural imagination, they reinforce cultural stereotypes, they naturalise social representations and they shape social policy.

In the analysis that Nerlich et al. offer for foot-and-mouth disease, the metaphors arise cognitively, but are interpreted culturally. Essentially, cultural factors determine which metaphors prosper, and what their effect is. A crucial role here is played by cultural “scripts” like those proposed in Lakoff (1991). Legends and fairy tales are typical scripts of this sort.352 In an analysis of the (first) Gulf War, Lakoff demonstrates that while the metaphors used are largely universal ones, the cultural scripts that tie them together, and the entailments that make these ties possible, are distinctly American, and differ from the entailments and scripts of the Arab world. A similar tack was taken by Musolff, who identifies a number of common metaphorical domains in the discussions of the European Union found in the UK and German press. Musolff argues that the ways these metaphors are used both reflect national attitudes towards the EU and influence them as well (2000: 4–5). Part of our task will therefore be to determine whether there is anything specifically “Czech” about these metaphoric networks and how they tie into the real-world events. 1.4. Metonymy In contrast to a metaphor, which conceives of one item in terms of a conceptually different one, a metonym substitutes an item for another that is closely related to it. Common conceptual metonyms are written in the form

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THE TARGET FOR THE SOURCE, following Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 35– 40): THE PART FOR THE WHOLE (‘He got a by-line in yesterday’s paper’); THE INSTITUTION FOR THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE (‘The Arts Faculty turned down his request’); THE PLACE FOR THE INSTITUTION (‘Washington issued another denial tonight’); THE PLACE FOR THE EVENT (‘Remember the Alamo’). Metonymy and metaphor often apply within the same expression. 1.5. Working principles The analysis that follows is based on the following suppositions: – Metaphors have a cognitive basis. – They shape the way we handle abstractions, events, and concepts. – Metaphoric structures allow us to impose complex entailments and conclusions from one sphere of reference onto another. – By imposing these entailments and conclusions, we change the way the target sphere is perceived. In this way, conceptual metaphor contributes to rhetoric. – Creative, intentional use of metaphor, as well as the deliberate analysis of metaphor, has an impact on the arguments presented and thus also contributes to the rhetoric of a particular discourse. – Commonly accepted cultural scripts or myths about a nation’s origin, history, etc. affect how metaphors are used, and either contribute to or hinder their prosperity and popularity. 2. The metaphorical patterning of language In collecting metaphors from my sources, I focused on the sphere of language. Interestingly enough, this has not been a subject of substantial interest for scholars of metaphor – certainly compared to spheres like the emotions, which have been well-studied.353 Terms like language (Czech jazyk) have multiple meanings. Often this polysemy results from metaphoric or metonymic operations. In Czech, the

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basic meaning is that of a physical organ in the mouth (tongue), which refers by extension to a system of communication (Saussure’s langue) and an instance of communication (Saussure’s parole), which is an example of part-for-whole metonymy. For example, the admonition Watch your language!/Pozor na jazyk! means not “watch which linguistic system you use!” but “watch which words you use and what information you convey!” We can also identify a further bifurcation between generic and specific language. If we say Language changes over time/ýasem se jazyk mČní and The language has changed over time/Jazyk se þasem zmČnil, we interpret the word language/jazyk in two different ways. Language changes over time refers to human language, all language systems, whereas The language has changed over time refers to one particular language, in this case study usually meaning ‘the Czech language (þeský jazyk, þeština), the native language (mateĜský jazyk, mateĜština)’.354 language

‘linguistic system’

‘generic system (human language)’

‘discourse’

‘specific system (our language)’

‘standard language’

‘our standard language’

Figure 8. Meanings of language

When considering metaphors for language, then, we will have to be careful which part of the scheme in Figure 8 we are dealing with. Often, as it turns out, when we talk about language (either generic or specific) we mean ‘the standard language’ or ‘our standard language’. These end up in the bottom row in Figure 8. This distinction may have more significance for Czech because of the existence of a spoken norm that hews closely to the standard written language and differs substantially from the native dialects of the vast majority of speakers of the language (see chapter 2, section 4). As we will see, the contributions to the orthography debate drew on all these meanings. Once we have articulated these possible interpretations of the concept language, the next step is to consider what other concepts played a crucial role in this debate. I focused on three others: orthography,

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regulation, and discussion. Language and orthography are abstractions whose meanings can be readily accessed through metaphor; regulation and discussion are processes subject to metaphorical interpretation. Orthography (Czech pravopis) refers to the system of symbols used to convey language in written form. In Czech it is a broader term and a more commonly used one than the scholarly-sounding English word; pravopis is a calque from Greek composed of native roots: pravo- ‘correct, right’ + -pis ‘write’. Pravopis is both the principles of spelling as well as the spelling of individual words; it includes punctuation and capitalization. For many a Czech native speaker, there is apparently an element to pravopis that a native speaker of English would never associate with orthography. Pravopis becomes associated with correctness in the language in general, and in the popular mind comes to subsume matters of both grammar and language culture. This is not part of the standard definition of orthography, and I have marked its elements with an asterisk in Figure 9: orthography ‘system of writing’ ‘*grammar’

‘*correctness’ ‘*language culture’

‘spelling’ ‘*the standard language’

Figure 9. Meanings of orthography

Language regulation (Czech jazyková regulace) is a concept with a long history in Czech, but the term itself is relatively new and, like its English equivalent, has no common currency beyond linguistics. The traditional popular term, as we saw in chapters 3 and 4, was (vy)tĜíbení jazyka ‘language refinement’, with the nineteenth-century term brusiþství ‘whetting’ acquiring pejorative overtones. The Prague School saw regulation occurring in the context of overall language cultivation (péþe o jazyk) or language culture (jazyková kultura), and in place of correctness (správnost) spoke of functionality (funkþnost), the appropriateness of a particular expression for the given communicative situation. When ordinary educated Czechs talk about language regulation, then, the word regulace rarely comes up; they discuss language cultivation, language culture, reform (reforma), modification (úprava), acceptance into the standard (zespisovnČní355), or among linguists, the setting or defining of a

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norm (stanovení/urþení normy). All these words are far more common than regulace and were widely used in the 1993 debates. In identifying metaphors, I interpret regulation to mean any of these sorts of activities, i.e. any activity that changes or intends to change the standard form of a language, written or spoken. Discussion is the most self-explanatory of the concepts. As people commented on language, orthography and regulation, a number of remarks were inevitably directed towards the very existence of a national exchange of views on the subject: people had opinions on how it was being handled, whether the tone and subject matter were appropriate and what effect they might have on the outcome of the reforms. To sum up: Language is a system for communication (generic or specific), or an instance of communication; Orthography is a system of expressing language through written signs; Regulation is the attempt to control the way a language is used; Discussion is the exchange of views about language, often taking place in the context of a discussion about regulation. These are dry, technical definitions, but the debate itself was far from dry and technical. Some of this was due to bombast, outrageous language and parody, but not all. Even if we think we know what the relationship is between language, orthography, regulation, and discussion, the metaphors employed can create a different, more emotionally charged picture. 3. Data from the corpus The “metaphor corpus” is based on the general newspaper corpus. It contains 650 examples of metaphor, metonymy, and simile grouped around the four concepts language, orthography, regulation, and discussion. These are the majority of examples retrievable from the newspaper corpus, with a few important exceptions. Some “dead metaphors” occurred so frequently that, in the interest of efficiency, I collected only a few tokens of them. Larger samples would not have been useful for the analysis, and would only have served in the end to swell the statistics. These metaphoric uses of words were common: – bouĜlivý ‘stormy’, used of discussions; – jednoduchý ‘simple’, zjednodušení ‘simplification’, zjednodušování ‘simplifying’ are used in discussions of orthography

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and reform, although there is no straightforward way of defining what constitutes a “simple” orthography or a “simplification”; – obrození ‘resurrection, revival’, obrozenec ‘revivalist’ are frequently met in reference to the národní obrození ‘National Revival’, the renaissance of Czech in the nineteenth century, and no longer really carry the literal meaning ‘return to life’; – platný ‘valid, in force’, platnost ‘validity’, platit ‘be in force’ are applied to laws and official regulations and appear in a vast majority of articles about the Rules; – prznČní jazyka, zprznČní jazyka ‘defilement of the language’, coming from a verb meaning ‘defile, violate’; – pĜirozený ‘natural’, pĜirozenost ‘naturalness’ is extremely frequent in these articles, especially as concerns the notion of language; – Ĝídit ‘to drive, direct’ can be used for vehicles, but used in its figurative sense it is extremely common in this corpus and elsewhere. – zdomácnČlý ‘nativized’, zdomácnČt ‘become adapted, gain currency’, zdomácnit ‘adapt, acclimatize’. All these words have the root -dom- ‘home’ but were not counted. – In addition, when a single article repeated a metaphor several times, I often collected only a single token, unless further tokens offered interesting developments on the metaphor. 4. Metaphors for language I recorded 192 metaphors and similes featuring language. The source domains of these metaphors provide varying degrees of information. Some are quite specific, offering what Kövecses calls “a relatively rich knowledge structure for the target” (2002: 33). These structural metaphors include: LANGUAGE IS A PERSON; LANGUAGE IS A PLANT; LANGUAGE IS AN ANIMAL; LANGUAGE IS A MONSTER; LANGUAGE IS A TOOL; LANGUAGE IS NATURE OR A NATURAL FORCE; LANGUAGE IS A BUILDING; LANGUAGE IS THE EARTH, THE LAND; LANGUAGE IS A JUNGLE; LANGUAGE IS RAW MATERIAL, CLAY; THE NATIVE LANGUAGE IS A MACHINE. Others map a less concrete entity onto a more concrete one, without being too specific about exactly what that more concrete entity is. These are what Lakoff and Johnson call ontological metaphors:

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LANGUAGE IS A TREASURED INHERITANCE; LANGUAGE IS A SACRED OBJECT; LANGUAGE IS A CLOSED PLACE; LANGUAGE IS CLARITY; LANGUAGE IS A THREE-DIMENSIONAL OBJECT. A third type of metaphor relates the target domain to a source domain of basic spatial concepts. Lakoff and Johnson term it the orientational metaphor. This is poorly represented for language, with the exception of the notion of transfer or movement from x to y: LANGUAGE IS MOVING FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER; THE NATIVE LANGUAGE IS HOME. This treatment focuses on one relatively rich set of metaphors for language, those concerning the metaphor LANGUAGE IS A PERSON. 4.1. Language is a person Ninety-eight examples concerned the personification of language. Personhood is a rich structural metaphor; it allows us to ascribe to the language all the characteristics we know and associate with human beings. Some of these characteristics are expressly reflected in the metaphors themselves, as seen in the following examples. Language is alive and Language deserves respect: The linguist’s approach is foremost respect and humility before that wonderfully alive organism: our mother tongue. (Milan Žemliþka in Lidové noviny, 1 April 1994)356

Language has a spirit: The implied demands for absolute immutability of orthography go against the spirit of the language. (František Fröhlich in Literární noviny, 3 March 1994)357

Language has a body and We have a relationship to language: …we must return feeling to its deadened body, find an echo of its blood pulse and once again find in ourselves an emotional and ethical relationship to the language… (ZbynČk Srb in Jihoþeská pravda, 6 March 1991)358

Language has a voice: It would be an interesting reaction to this experiment in muzzling the Czech language by the great and the good of our culture… (Karel Pecka in Lidové noviny, 17 March 1994)359

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Language behaves: Borrowed words always act like foreign bodies and languages have to cope with them somehow. In principle, languages resolve this situation in their orthography and pronunciation in three ways… (František Daneš in Vesmír, 1 September 1993)360

Language was born: …although however surprisingly viable the little child proved to be, his “unnatural” birth brought with it a series of problems… (Petr Fidelius in Literární noviny, 1 April 1994)361

Language grows up: Our linguists still seem to share the feelings of the Revivalists: that Czech has not yet broken free from its diapers and needs ever more improvements. (JEŠ in ZN noviny, 27 May 1993)361

Language can die and Language sleeps: Having read the new Rules [of Czech Orthography] I feel the urge to call out: “The Czech language has not died; it is merely sleeping!” (Jaroslav Šajtar in Reflex, 6 December 1993)362

Language can be injured: Let us return to before the moment when the Bolshevik violence against our language began... (JiĜí Šváb in Lidové noviny, 5 June 1993)363

Language has emotions: O God, how low I have sunk, weeps the Czech language. (Jaroslav Bašus in Telegraf, 10 July 1993)364

The data offers further evidence that LANGUAGE IS A PERSON because: Language is alive, Language has a fate, Language has a lineage, Language has a family, Language can have corrective training, Language is beautiful/ugly… What is the point of employing such metaphors? Metaphoric expressions in which LANGUAGE IS A PERSON are most often used to show disapproval of regulation. Once we assign human qualities to a language, it acquires rights and privileges of its own; it must be treated differently from a mere thing. This point usually goes unsaid, but it is nonetheless a logical conclusion of accepting the metaphor. An unexpressed but necessary assumption of this sort is called an entailment, and this metaphoric network is rich in such entailments. For example:

Metaphors for orthography

– – – – – –

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Violence against a defenceless living being should not be tolerated. Actions that make a person cry are cruel. Actions that might cause a person’s death are evil. Someone that we respect and have a relationship with deserves to be treated as an equal to us. Any person has rights to grow and develop as he desires. Attempts to forcibly change or dominate another person are wrong.

These entailments suggest, therefore, that we cannot simply study language and make changes to it. Practical concerns aside, the conceptual metaphor LANGUAGE IS A PERSON tells us that it is immoral to do so, and that our interference will have negative consequences. (Those who generally favour regulation are more likely to employ the conceptual metaphor LANGUAGE IS A PLANT, as it allows regulators to invoke the idea of cultivation or gardening as a way to work with nature.366) 5. Metaphors for orthography For orthography, the dominant conceptual metaphor (89 of 96 attestations) is ORTHOGRAPHIC RULES ARE LAWS. Like LANGUAGE IS A PERSON, this metaphor is structural in nature; it relates the prescriptions that govern our everyday activities to those that regulate our use of the standard language. As mentioned earlier, the Czech words platný ‘valid, in force’, platnost ‘validity’, platit ‘be in force’ are applied to laws and official regulations and appear in a vast majority of articles about the Rules. Alongside the oftrepeated headline Nová Pravidla þeského pravopisu…nabyla již platnost ‘The new Rules of Czech Orthography have now come into force’ there are numerous examples of this sort: And so there arose a comical power-sharing between the Academic Rules of Czech Orthography from November 1993, which are in effect everywhere, and the School Rules of Czech Orthography from 1957, which from September this year will again be in effect in schools. (Petr Karban, ýTK, in Expres, 21 July 1994)367

But there are numerous other instances where individual metaphoric expressions draw on this idea of legality. Some use the word zákon ‘law’ either to point out the similarities or to deny them:

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…if something is codified, then it is in force and has the form of a law, albeit a senseless and incomprehensible one… (Michal Bauer in Tvar, 23 January 1997)368 After all, the Rules of Czech Orthography…are not a law whose violation is punishable. […] After all, the only punishment we can expect is mockery and mistrust. (Jan Jirák, Lidové noviny, 7 August 1993)369

Others use the word uzákonit ‘legalize, enact’ or the verbal noun uzákonČní ‘legalization, enactment’: I would come to the conclusion that there are few modifications here, that for the most part they are necessary changes that just legalize what part of society put into practice a long time ago. (Jan Balhar, Lidové noviny, 25 September 1993)370

Some accepted the Rules’ de facto status as laws, but then questioned why they did not have the same status as other laws: It is a misfortune that the rules have a traditional authority in this country: they have become a law that schools, offices and the press obediently follow. What bad luck that the president cannot veto this law; what bad luck that he cannot dissolve the Czech Language Institute and call new elections for it. (Tomáš NČmeþek, Mladý svČt, 4 August 1994)371

In several instances, the Rules were compared to traffic laws: If the Highway Code had more than one resolution for individual situations, we’d soon be massacring each other out on the roads. (ZdenČk HeĜman in Svobodné slovo, 20 July 1994)372

References to laws and legality invoked a range of entailments of the metaphor. For example, laws forbid, enable, and permit, among others. Orthographic rules forbid: …the authors of the Rules claim for themselves the right to forbid those who don’t share their conception of the language to write as they wish… (Michal Ajvaz in Literární noviny, 14 October 1992)373

Orthographic rules force: With the publication of the new Rules, the standardization of a formerly forbidden form [of the infinitives moct, péct] is complete. It will simplify things for us especially in oral discourse, where we had been forced to express ourselves bookishly, against our will. (Milan Jelínek in Lidové noviny, 10 June 1993)374

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Language is a living organism and no expert force-fed in the hatchery of Bolshevism to meet Bolshevik exigencies has the right independently to make decisions about it and to force his decisions on anyone else as the single possible canon. (Jan Beneš in ýeský deník, 20 May 1993)375

Rules can be fine-tuned: Let’s not be afraid! The new Rules of Czech Orthography will be finetuned, as all our laws are. (Marie Hanušová in Telegraf 28 July 1993)376

Rules impose obligations: …the Rules were created by someone and solemnly presented to the people – understandably with the obligation to respect them unconditionally. (Šárka Dostálová in ZN noviny, 18 May 1993)377

Rules cause over-regimentation: Prime Minister and Civic Democratic Party chairman Václav Klaus yesterday declared himself to be against excessive regimentation of the language. (Unsigned, probably ýTK wire service, in ZN noviny, 22 July 1994)378

Rules can permit: In the depths of my soul I still hope (perhaps in vain) that it will be admissible to write “the old way” as well for some time to come. (Opinion signed “BOD” in Nová svoboda, 5 January 1991)379

As compared to the LANGUAGE IS A PERSON metaphor, the ORTHOGRAPHIC RULES ARE LAWS metaphor invokes an ideology that does not militate so strongly in one direction. While a great majority of the contributions using this metaphor were against the new Rules, a number of those for it also invoked it, often because they thought laws are an appropriate model for orthographic rules or simply accepted as a fact that it had to be so. This metaphor is an underlying trope in the orthography debate, one that subtly influenced the argument on both sides. The belief that orthographic rules had some magical power over an entire society may have been bolstered by the deformations of the communist era, when the distinctions between programmes, laws, rules and recommendations were less important than the authority of the people issuing them.

6. Metaphors for regulation A plurality of metaphors retrieved – 303 out of 650 – concerned the target

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domain language regulation. They covered a variety of source domains: Ontological metaphors: REGULATION IS A CLEANSING OR WIPING CLEAN; REGULATION IS VIOLENCE; REGULATION IS SIMPLICITY; REGULATION IS LIGHTNESS; REGULATION IS DARKNESS; REGULATION IS DEFORMATION; REGULATION IS BOWING/GIVING WAY/BENDING; REGULATION IS CHAOS. Structural metaphors (various): REGULATION IS A PATH/JOURNEY; REGULATION IS A WAVE; REGULATION IS A NATURAL CATASTROPHE; REGULATION IS A DIVIDER OR A BARRIER; REGULATION IS MANUFACTURING; REGULATION IS GUARDING OR WATCHING. Structural metaphors (political and social phenomena): REGULATION IS A BATTLE; REGULATION IS RELIGION; REGULATION IS DICTATORSHIP; REGULATION IS AN INVADING ARMY; REGULATION IS AN ATTACK; REGULATION IS A COURT CASE; REGULATION IS A DESECRATION. Structural metaphors (science and technology): REGULATION IS SCIENCE; REGULATION IS ENGINEERING; REGULATION IS MATHEMATICS; REGULATION IS A LABORATORY EXPERIMENT; REGULATION IS RATIONALITY; REGULATION IS SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY; REGULATION IS HOME IMPROVEMENTS; REGULATION IS TRANSPLANTATION. By far the most fruitful metaphor was REGULATION IS A PATH/JOURNEY, with 124 attestations, in which an abstract process (regulation) is rendered as movement through space (path/journey). Some examples used the word cesta ‘path, journey’; other nouns included smČr ‘direction’, krok ‘step’ pochod ‘march’ linie ‘line (of movement)’, and návrat ‘return’. A multitude of verbs set regulation in motion, among them: jít ‘go’, vést, zavést ‘to lead’, dostat se ‘to find one’s way’, dostoupit, postoupit ‘to proceed’, probČhnout ‘to run through/past’, blížit se, sbližovat se, pĜiblížit se ‘to approach, to come close’, vzdalovat ‘to distance’, posouvat se ‘to shift (oneself)’, odsouvat ‘to shove away’, hnát ‘to chase, drive (a creature)’, vhánČt ‘to drive into’, spouštČt ‘descend’, vydávat se ve stopách ‘to set off in the tracks of’, vyjít vstĜíc ‘meet partway’, and vymanit se ‘escape’. Twenty-eight examples simply referred to the process as a journey, either disparagingly or approvingly: The creators chose the third and worst path: they proclaimed an example of what up till now was non-standard Czech as a model, at times the only correct one. (Tomáš NČmeþek in Mladý svČt, 4 August 1994)380

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The fact that Czech orthography stopped halfway along the path in 1957 was not the fault of linguists, but in fact of those incompetent Bolshevik interventions… (Alexandr Stich in Literární noviny, 13 September 1990)381

Simple equations like these are vastly outnumbered by examples in which the journey has a metaphoric goal as well as a metaphoric process. Many metaphoric expressions recast the tension between East (old-fashioned, poor, dirigiste) and West (modern, wealthy, respectful of tradition), with the Czechs being on a path between the two. In theory, this metaphor could focus on the Czechs travelling west, and thus warn them to abandon Eastern ways. In actuality, none of the examples see this happening; they all point, alarmed, to the way that despite political moves towards Western Europe, the Czechs are moving away from it culturally (21 examples):382 With the introduction of “kurz” and “izmus” we are shifting unambiguously towards the East and ignoring the spelling of foreign words in Western countries. (Margit Herrmanová, Lidové noviny, 25 September 1993)383

Only in three examples was the movement toward the west phrased positively, and in each case it was positioned as a return: If we want to return to western culture, then let us take their language culture as a starting point. (Vladimír Lišþák in Telegraf, 19 June 1993)384

A further sort of journey threatens a move away from civilization and has at its endpoint primitivism or barbarism (14 examples): In the linguistic sphere as well, using the model of Rádyjo and Soviet linguistics, our collaborationist Czech scientific society set off many years ago quite systematically along a path to implement primitivism in our legal norms, in this case infiltrating communist newspeak into grammatical rules. (Radek Hlavsa in ýeský deník, 22 May 1993)385

Primitivism and barbarism are, of course, closely connected in the postcommunist mindset with the ideals of the communist regime. The path metaphor is especially tempting here for another reason, as during the communist regime, recommended courses of action were often depicted as a path or journey towards the creation of communism or socialism. This gives the metaphor a special resonance in the Czech context (5 examples): I greatly welcome and respect the decision of ýeský deník not to submit to further creeping Bolshevization of the language on its path towards a rupture with the traditions of European civilization. (Jan Beneš in ýeský deník, 20 May 1993)386

It also opens up all sorts of possibilities for caricaturing orthographic

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reform, as in the following example, in which the phrase jít s pokrokem ‘go along with progress’ conjures up a well-worn slogan for those who chose to cooperate with the communist regime: Meanwhile, how can we forget the old rhetorical figure of “the whole people”, to whom in reality only some belong – that is, those who go along with progress! (Petr Fidelius in Literární noviny, 16 December 1993)387

Paths of reform often lead downwards, calling on the orientational metaphor DOWN IS BAD, and making use of words like pád ‘fall’, prohloubit/prohlubovat ‘deepen’, nízký ‘low’, úpadkovost ‘decadence’, pokleslý ‘degenerate, trashy’ (12 examples). I call for a return to before that pernicious moment when the descent from learning into somewhere in hell first began. (JiĜí Šváb in Lidové noviny, 5 June 1993)388

A number of them hint that the path has an undesirable end, without informing us exactly what it is: Besides, there is the question of how far to go in the direction already taken. Is it appropriate to go only as far as [the spelling] ingoust [for inkoust], or should we go as far as bijologije [for biologie]? It is a path without end and not a pretty one, on which there is no need to set off at all. (Ivo Horák in Lidové noviny, 4 December 1993)389

Over and over, we meet the statement that the goal of regulation was to bring the written standard closer to the spoken language: The argument that written discourse should come closer to spoken does not seem like a valid one to me… (J. Holcová in ýeský deník, 25 May 1993)390

This is a conceptual shortcut; strictly speaking, written language cannot be brought “closer” to a different mode of expression. In this instance, the authors are querying whether written standards should be adapted to reflect the phonological pattern of the contemporary language more closely. The path metaphor here allows us to create the following picture (or pseudoschema) quickly and easily:

Written language

Spoken language PATH TO

Figure 10. The path metaphor: written to spoken

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It makes the identification between the two seem more radical, and vastly oversimplifies what the effects of the reform are likely to be. A more satisfactory account appears in the following example: Taken strictly, the existing orthographic norm is further than halfway to total phonetization… And so we could go on in this way. (JiĜí Wackermann in ýeský deník, 10 June 1993)391

Here it may not be entirely clear what the author means by “phonetization”, but at least the use of this pseudo-scientific term openly raises the question instead of burying it in an oversimplified metaphor. A last variation on the path metaphor is when a journey’s explicit goal is to meet someone or something: …whether it was the need to show proof of some sort of activity that led these specialists garlanded with titles to this decision, or whether the decisive factor was their eagerness to meet partway the very section of the population whose poor knowledge of Czech prevents them from garnering proper esteem among intellectuals. (Petr Zavoral in ýeský deník, 27 July 1994)392

The phrase jít vstĜíc, literally ‘go towards’, appears frequently in this context, often in its secondary meaning ‘placate, appease’. It almost always occurs in the image: linguists (or the standard they control) going towards the less-educated (or their demands, or their level of mastery). All the path metaphors erase or conceal interesting conceptual differences between place and time. Regulation is a process occurring over time; it has a history. By giving this history a physical space, the metaphors open the possibility of return along the path. Nothing is irrevocable; we can return to the past; we can revisit places we have already passed through. This is one reason why the path metaphors are so attractive for those who want to abandon reforms. They suggest that all we need to do is backtrack, as if that were actually possible, and we will be able to restore the previous standard or the previous status quo. 7. Metaphors for discussion Of the 59 examples of discussion (of the Rules) or reaction (to the Rules) as a metaphor, half present it as a fight or a battle. The remaining are equally negative in their assessment, proposing:

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DISCUSSION IS DARKNESS; DISCUSSION IS A FIRE; DISCUSSION IS AN AVALANCHE; DISCUSSION IS A STORM; REACTION IS POISONOUS; REACTION IS A WAVE. These are all varieties of natural catastrophes or causes of harm and injury, with the exception of darkness, which has its own raft of negative associations generated from the metaphors LIGHT IS KNOWLEDGE and DARKNESS IS IGNORANCE. Three further metaphors (DISCUSSION IS A PLAY; DISCUSSION IS A DANCE; DISCUSSION IS A GAME) seem on the face of it not to have these negative associations, but in context only the negative characteristics of these concepts are invoked: games, plays, and dances emphasize artifice, formality, arcane rules, and unnecessary fuss: How will we write? A new game by the old rules (Headline for Eva Kašáková in Veþerník Praha, 21 July 1994)393 …a conservative fundamentally cannot win against the world – his only victory comes when he loses slowly. (Richard Štencl in Respekt, 8 August 1994)394 The dance around the Rules will cost us millions (Headline for Petr Karban in Expres, 21 July 1994)395 …I am sometimes taken aback by the fervour with which defenders and opponents of reform take to the stage. (Rudolf BattČk in ýeský deník, 8 October 1994)396

The metaphors DISCUSSION IS A FIGHT and DISCUSSION IS A BATTLE parallel those found for regulation: REGULATION IS VIOLENCE, REGULATION IS AN INVADING ARMY, REGULATION IS AN ATTACK, and REGULATION IS A BATTLE. The difference, of course, is that those denigrating regulation tended to be opponents of reform, while those denigrating discussion often supported the reform, or at least a more positive approach to the reform. The authors of the Rules themselves even used these metaphors, emphasizing the extent to which they felt personally injured by the tone and thrust of the arguments: The wartime edition of the Rules from 1941 was not attacked too much, mainly because it was not an appropriate time for assaults on Czech orthography. (Miloslav Sedláþek in Lidové noviny, 13 August 1994)397

Opponents of the reform, however, also characterized the reformers’ behaviour as violent. For example, Maita Arnautová, writing in Lidové noviny on 14 July 1994, argued that the counterarguments advanced by

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reformers were equally personal: When you timidly hint to them that you might have had something to say on the matter as well, because after all it’s your language too, they immediately bash you on the head with some “connotation” or other and that’s the end of it.398

A specific subset of references concerned the tahanice kolem Pravidel ‘the tussles over the Rules’. This almost always referred to the tug-of-war between the CLI and the Ministry of Education over the validity of the school edition. For example, a series of interviews with members of the public in Hradecké noviny entitled The tussles over orthography do no one any good399 quoted one person as saying: “I simply did not like the tussles over the modifications to the rules of orthography.”400 The expression pravopisná válka ‘the orthography war’ became a cliché of newspaper headlines in 1993–1994, to the extent that journalists began to comment on it facetiously: Well come on, in the silly season every war’s a good war, especially if it’s not bloody, like the ones in Bosnia or Rwanda. (Dobromil DvoĜák in Moravský demokratický deník, 25 July 1994)401

Opponents of the new Rules, like OldĜich Uliþný (writing in ZN noviny on 16 August 1994) justified their attack as self-defence: When last year we found ourselves presented with the new Rules of Czech Orthography as a done deal, we had the choice of either nodding it through, or doing battle.402

The metaphors DISCUSSION IS A FIGHT and DISCUSSION IS A BATTLE were among the most evenly balanced, in that they were used equally by both sides. Their contribution to the debate was to give it two well-worn names, and to identify the debate in the public mind with a particular series of images. Instead of being simply a discussion, it involved two sides engaged in a struggle, physical damage, and a “winner” and “loser”. The images were catchy enough that words like válka ‘war’ and boj ‘battle’ often replaced the less colourful diskuse ‘discussion’ in newspaper headlines: About two wars on Czech territory “A fierce battle rages” A fight for the language’s existence A linguist’s attack A truce on the Rules Both promises and threats accompany the battle over the rights to publish

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the Addendum and the Rules Boxing with orthography Do you get along with the new orthography? From orthographic battles to language culture? In defence of the mother tongue Long live the Czech furor orthographicus The battle over “new Czech” continues The end of orthographic battles (?) The fracas over orthography helps no one The orthographic war has for the time ended in compromise The war over the Rules

The imagery was even extended to matters concerning other sorts of language regulation, as well as to reforms in other countries: Feminism and a couple of slaps Germany fights over orthography again403

8. Metaphoric networks crossing domains In the preceding sections, we focused on metaphoric networks connected by target domain. However, there are a number of pervasive networks that cross domains, linking to deeper, culturally significant concepts and metaphors. For example, the metaphor LANGUAGE IS A TOOL combines readily with metaphors for regulation, including REGULATION IS SCIENCE, REGULATION IS TECHNOLOGY, REGULATION IS MANUFACTURING, and others. The metaphor LANGUAGE IS A TOOL appears twelve times in the corpus: Yes, we understand that language is alive, malleable, develops and moulds itself like a piece of clay spinning on a potter’s wheel. (Milena Tuþná and Robert Malota in Lidová demokracie, 25 May 1993)404

This particular metaphor is quite resonant in Czech – much more so than in English – because it has a long history of use on all sides of the debate. Its three most powerful instantiations – the whetstone, the tool of human communication, and the engineer of human souls – are as familiar to the Czech public, and as likely to be invoked in appropriate contexts as is the English metaphor of the “silent spring” in ecological or environmental contexts. Nerlich observes that metaphors like these are incredibly resilient: Metaphors like silent spring seem to have a semantic dynamics that is based

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on the one hand on their intrinsic or textual semantic potential and on the other on their extrinsic or contextual use in various social, political, cultural and economic circumstances over time. This dynamic adaptability and polyphonic potential is also grounded in the metaphor’s appeal to various audiences at one and the same time (see Kroll 2001) and over time. (…) Over time the title becomes gradually dissociated from the book and takes on its own semantic dynamics, but echoes of the book’s content survive with the title and are themselves adapted to changing circumstances. This is important if a metaphor is to survive in and reverberate with popular imagination. (Nerlich 2003)

The earliest of the three Czech metaphors concerns the word brus, or whetstone. There is a Czech tradition of seeing language as a tool that can be sharpened or honed for better use, and images of the knife, the whetstone, and the knife-grinder are deeply ingrained in the Czech consciousness.405 In the twentieth century, the functionalists challenged this view by talking about language as a “tool for human communication” (nástroj lidského dorozumívání), a conception popularized by Havránek. This term can be seen as a direct reaction to the puristic imagery of the knife-grinder (purist), the knife (language) and the whetstone (primer), which focuses on the ability of the grinder to produce a finer, keener product. By de-emphasizing the shape of the tool and focusing on its purpose, the functionalists reoriented the debate around the question of what language does (i.e. its function), as opposed to what it is (i.e. its form). In other words, a knife need not be good simply because it has an excellent knife-like form; we judge it by how well it cuts. In the end, then, the tool for human communication is a direct response to the imagery of purism. It appears in the corpus a number of times, often sarcastically or with a slight disparaging tone (here with metonymy: THE WORD FOR THE LANGUAGE): The written word in the school is also something slightly different from an expression of one’s own thoughts and a tool of communication with others. (Vladimír Václavík in Lidové noviny, 3 August 1994)406

There is a further subtext to the idea of language usage, one that arrived on the scene with communism and the ideology of socialist realism. In the 1930s, Stalin drew a parallel between scientific engineers and “engineers of the human soul”. Zhdanov and Gorkii, addressing the Writers’ Congress in 1934, applied this term to writers, exhorting them to take up the new Partyapproved line and adhere to the newly-minted artistic movement of social-

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ist realism, or art in the service of socialist goals. After the communist putsch of 1948, socialist realism became the official artistic movement of Czechoslovakia as well. The movement came to be associated with artistic banality, adherence to sterile, conservative, unsubtle forms and a neglect of the creative side of artistic writing. Faithfulness to a political manifesto was seen as more important than the artistic creation itself; an exemplary piece of socialist realist literature might be quite a poor novel or story indeed. What Berlin (2000: 17–18) wrote about Soviet Russia is equally valid for Communist Czechoslovakia: The ‘engineer of human souls’, to use Stalin’s phrase, knows best; he does what he does not simply in order to do his best for his nation, but in the name of the nation itself, in the name of what the nation would be doing itself if only it had attained to this level of historical understanding.

Linguists too work with language, and were frequently said to wield socialist terminology to produce a product that serves its pragmatic purpose but is not aesthetically pleasing. In addition, their actions are often perceived as high-handed, taken in the name of the masses without any consultation with them. The engineer of human souls metaphor is thus easy to apply to linguists, and this is in fact what happens in the orthography debate. Consequently, the science and tool metaphors are double-edged; while they invoke views of dispassionate and useful study, they also directly recall language purism and totalitarianism: REGULATION IS ENGINEERING I cannot escape the impression that they [i.e. these changes] would not have come about if this sort of activity did not have a long tradition here and did not at the same time evoke in its participants a sense of the importance of their engineering, which will influence the writing of millions of people. (Ivo Horák in Lidové noviny, 4 December 1993)407 In the newest rules, at least, the attempt at linguistic engineering hits you right between the eyes. (Martin Daneš in ýeský deník, 12 May 1993)408

REGULATION IS AN EXPERIMENT They love to death experimenting on live organisms – just try and see what will happen if all borrowed words pronounced more or less long are also written with a long vowel… (Maita Arnautová in Literární noviny, 14 July 1994)409

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REGULATION IS MANUFACTURING No loss if scholarly workplaces that churn out rules of “orthography” like these become defunct. (Vladimír Soukup in ýeský deník, 3 June 1993)410

REGULATION IS AMATEUR REPAIR Hansen asserts that he knows sixth-form students who prefer to read Ibsen in English, because after a hundred years of linguistic tinkering, his Norse sounds archaic and foreign to them. (ZbynČk Petráþek in Respekt, 11 August 1997)411

Through the use of existing metaphors and the creation of new ones, the people who engaged in this debate over orthography were constructing alternative ways of looking at the conflict. A typical non-metaphoric understanding of the relationship between regulation and language would be as follows: Regulation acts on language to produce regulated language: LANGUAGE

REGULATION

REGULATED LANGUAGE

Figure 11. Non-metaphoric links

Adding the metaphors to it, we come up with: Å positive connotations Æ (TOOL OF COMMUNICATION)

SCIENCE (REGULATION)

TOOL

IMPROVED TOOL

(PROGRESS)

(LANGUAGE)

MANUFACTURING, ENGINEERING

(“PROGRESS”) EXPERIMENT

(WHETSTONE)

HOME REPAIRS

(ENGINEER OF SOULS)

DEFORMED TOOL Å negative connotations Æ

Figure 12. Metaphoric links

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Science (seen also as manufacturing, engineering, or experiments) acts on the tool (language) to produce either an improved tool or a deformed tool. Pre-existing metaphors in the culture (the engineer of human souls, the whetstone, the tool of communication) contribute to the end result. While the tool of communication has positive associations and suggests an improved product, the engineer of souls and the whetstone have negative associations for most Czechs, and lead them to conclude the tool has been damaged or deformed. Likewise, those believing in true scientific progress see the process leading to an improved linguistic tool. However, those inclined to view reform as the sort of false scientific “progress” the communists espoused perceive the resulting tool to be inadequate or unsatisfactory. The common understanding of metaphors is that they provide alternate ways of explaining and viewing complex relationships. In this particular context, they have an additional function. Almost no one takes a completely neutral view of language regulation, saying that its effects are neither good nor bad. Instead, everyone has an opinion. They like the results, or they detest them. Metaphorical language allows them to justify their views, and to invoke certain traditional images in support of these views. This particular metaphoric network calls on metaphors specific to Czech culture, using them as rhetorical weapons, and building associations to promote a view of language change and the people who were engaged in it. In the English tradition, science metaphors are largely positive ones. On the face of it, then, this metaphoric network could have been favourable to the linguists involved, allowing them to associate their own social science methods with those employed by natural scientists. Entailments of science, engineering, and technology are: a world run according to a series of laws that we discover through experimentation; precision of construction; improvement in one’s comfort; and progress. The latter also provides a link to other metaphors we explored: progress is a spatial metaphor linked to the idea of position on a path. These entailments are not absent from Czech culture, and the Czech linguists did employ them in explaining their methods and views about language change. However, they were swamped by other, negative associations of these phrases. Communist propaganda had heavily emphasized technology, engineering, and progress, and thus their products had come to be tainted by totalitarian politicization: technika ‘technology’ was seen as dehumanization, inženýrství ‘engineering’ as social tinkering, and pokrok ‘progress’ as the destruction of traditional cultural values.

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9. Conclusion Metaphors have played a variety of roles in the arguments presented here. We can identify their influence on the logic of a debate, their political significance, and the extent of their cultural specificity. As we have seen, metaphors can serve the logic of a debate, providing short cuts for lengthy explanations. However, no substitution is a perfect match, and the structure that metaphors impose can have a subtle or not-sosubtle impact on the debate. In some instances (the written language is approaching the spoken one) metaphor oversimplified the situation and allowed the introduction of tangentially related observations in support of an argument (politicians don’t know how to speak correctly these days; all you hear these days on the radio is Prague dialect). In other cases (the scientist wields a tool) the metaphor added levels of complexity that were not there before, implicitly relating the issue to previous debates (a good scientist, like Mathesius, or a misguided scientist, like Marr?). Metaphors could be pressed into political service as well, explicitly employed in the service of various angles of the debate. In the debate over orthography, metaphoric language by and large served the purposes of the objectors, not the defenders. When the authors of the Rules and their colleagues tried to use metaphoric language, more often than not they saw their metaphors turned back against them as examples of leftover communist-era discourse. Metaphors turned out to be a powerful weapon in the orthography wars: they mobilized opinion against the proposed changes, labeled the reformers as crypto-communists, reduced the arguments to simpler, more black-and-white questions, and entailed sometimes implausible solutions. Metaphors in these debates enjoyed varying degrees of cultural specificity. They were sometimes universal (REGULATION IS A PATH), but frequently language-specific, or with culture-specific entailments (LANGUAGE IS A TOOL) that determine how they are used and what their impact is. This situation is far from unique to the Czech spelling debates, although each political issue will have its own specific features. In their analysis of the foot-and-mouth epidemic, Nerlich, Hamilton, and Rowe (2002) concluded: In sum, metaphors help us to assume much needed imaginary control of a threatening world, a world that sometimes thwarts easy understanding. In this respect metaphors are indispensable to politicians, to the public and also to journalists when writing about phenomena such as FMD.

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The rhetoric in the Czech orthography debates headed in the opposite direction, but for the same reason. Here, the metaphors often served to reinforce the perception that matters were out of control, not under control. Along with metaphors for war, battle, fights, putsches, terrorism, etc. as detailed earlier, the words pravopis, pravopisný ‘orthography, orthographic’ were paired in headlines with words like chaos, zmatek ‘confusion’, barbarské poþiny ‘barbarous acts’ loterie ‘lottery’, na levaþku ‘from bad to worse’, žerty ‘jokes’, apríl ‘April Fool’, vášnČ ‘passions’. A debate and a ministerial cock-up became, in newspaper language, chaos, confusion and a downward spiral. Differences in national scripts undoubtedly played a large role here. Nerlich, Hamilton, and Rowe note that once the war metaphor was established, reference began to be made to existing wars: the Gulf War, the Falklands, and Bosnia. Interestingly enough, they do not mention the war that has perhaps more than any other shaped British cultural identity: the Second World War. It is omnipresent on British television – not a week goes by without a WWII nostalgia-fest – and is one of the most popular periods studied in British schools for A-level history exams. Tabloid papers rehash the “British” victory every time Germany comes into the news. A cultural script for war in Britain would be heavily based on this most feted of conflicts, and it is indeed a script for victory. A Czech script for war or any conflict must be based on their perennial status as pawns between great powers. Conflict in the Czech context brings a tug-of-war between others; the Czech is caught in the middle and cannot benefit from it. Famous Czech fictional accounts of the Second World War (Škvorecký’s The Cowards, Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains, Grosman’s The Shop on Main Street) do not treat war as a march towards victory; instead, the Czech (or Slovak) is caught between two masters and may perish in the confusion. Newspapers were able to use this script to offer sympathy for the poor reader, reinforcing their solidarity with him and hopefully securing his interest in their publication in the process. As they portrayed it, the ordinary person was yet again caught in a battle not of his own making, this time between the CLI and the Ministry. The battleground was his mother tongue. If fitting the facts to this script involved a slight distortion of the truth – ignoring the optionality of the Rules and exaggerating the confusion – this distortion came from the script, not from a deliberate falsification. The impact of metaphors in the orthography debate is thus multi-leveled. Universal conceptual metaphors had a strong impact on how

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arguments were made and perceived, while cultural entailments and cultural scripts played a role in which ones were emphasized, which were successful, and how the debate itself ran.

Chapter 9 Conclusions I pulled out a brochure that stood closer to the volume bound in purple velvet, and leafed through it: as I had feared, I found on its pages far more letters from the other city: there were entire words and sentence fragments. With trepidation I reached for the volume next to the mysterious purple book. When I opened it, I felt as if I had pushed aside a flat stone and was watching the teeming beetles underneath. The pages were almost entirely covered with the bold black letters from the other side of the border; only isolated islands of Latin letters remained. Sickness overwhelmed me and I slammed the book shut. Now I knew for certain what had happened to me: the foreign writing was spreading through my library, growing on it like a fungus. I quickly pulled out the infectious purple book and ran round the room with it, looking for a place to hide it. Could my library, suppurating with this incomprehensible writing, ever recover? Michal Ajvaz, Druhé mČsto (‘The Other City’), 2005 [1993]: 164

An account of spelling reform that rests solely on a close reading of corpus planning or on an evaluation of the implementation process will fall short of explaining why a change is or is not successful, or even why a change is proposed at all. It appears that spelling reform and the reactions to it constitute merely surface manifestations of deeply held beliefs and entrenched myths about language overall and a single language in point. Spelling is a deceptively simple subject; everyone is an expert, and it is thus an easy, highly visible target for public reaction. In examining the public reactions to reform, we need to return to Cooper’s original questions and apply them more stringently, not only to the reformers (the “subject”) and the reforms (the “direct object”), but also to the populace as a whole (the “indirect object”, who serve as the beneficiaries or the affected party) and to the social situation in the places where the language is used (the “prepositional object” or location). 1.

Participants, beneficiaries, and victims of reform

The content of any given reform may be incidental to the reactions it evokes. What emerges from our study is the tremendous influence of peo-

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ple’s training and their societal roles in shaping their reaction to reform proposals. For Czech and other languages that have undergone spelling reform in recent times, we can return to our scheme of actors outlined in chapter 5, section 1, and look at the benefits and costs that accrued – or were perceived to accrue – to these groups. I. Linguists stand to benefit from spelling reform in that public discussion of it raises the profile of their profession and individually makes them instant experts on a subject of national controversy. They can also be negatively affected by it if they feel a reform casts their profession in a bad light. In the debates around Czech spelling reform, both these effects were felt. Linguists were in great demand as commentators, interpreters of the new Rules, and occasionally as named opponents of it. Suddenly they were the focus of national attention. On the other hand, the picture of linguists in the press was not in general a positive one. They were portrayed as manipulators of language – the “engineers of human souls” – regardless of the actual stances of individual linguists towards the reforms. Ia. Reformers are perhaps the most obvious beneficiaries of spelling reform. It provides them with employment and (under certain circumstances) can mean substantial financial gain for them and a source of income for their employer. It brings them heightened media attention. Of course, a reform that is not well accepted can blight the career of such a linguist. The linguists who formed the Czech orthographic commission within the CLI in the short term saw personal and professional benefit from the actual creation of the Rules. They received salary bonuses and engaged in a high-profile activity that was meant to reinforce the status of their employer. However, the long-term result of the brouhaha around the Rules did not redound to their benefit. Both in print and in person, those connected with the reforms spoke of the tremendous stress of defending their personal integrity and the worth of their work day after day to a largely hostile press and public. In retrospect, the reformers seem to have looked primarily at the short-term benefits and what they felt was the overarching benefit to society of their work. They did not seem to have anticipated the personal costs of the reform process. II. Implementers often see themselves as benefiting by spelling reform. Their benefit consists in an improvement in their working conditions, sometimes very specific: they will not have to spend as much time teaching this particular difficult point, or will not have to turn to the dictionary as often for a certain matter. Unlike in group I, the cost/benefit analysis is not

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Conclusions

an either/or scenario: there is inevitably a price for implementing the reforms, which involves preparation and re-training. They justify their opinions by analysing whether the benefits will outweigh the costs or vice versa. Many in this group, especially teachers, cautiously welcomed the Czech reforms, at least at first. As the controversy wore on, more inconsistencies in the Rules were exposed and new variants and stylistic differentiations appeared in the Addendum. These decreased the benefits this group would see from the Rules and increased the cost of implementing them, and gradually the voices of individual teachers and language users began to be raised against the new Rules. IIa. Officials as a sub-group are less likely to see benefits accrue to themselves. Many of them take the process of reform as a given, but see primarily its possible costs for them in terms of dealing with the public response, mediating between feuding groups of reformers, and handling the media. The benefits they experience, if any, are limited to satisfying certain constituencies who favour reform – and, if their detractors are to be believed, to the increased influence and favours gained from nodding through contracts and agreements favourable to certain parties. The Czech officials were caught in an unenviable situation, with few benefits on offer and many costs. Their attempts to “spin” the controversy were designed to deflect attention from the government’s role in approving these reforms and to minimize their impact. III. Proficient users and those who label themselves primarily as such tend not to perceive much benefit from reform. It may offer them the small psychological boost of an opportunity to vent one’s spleen, but by and large they are conscious of its costs to them. As people with greater internalization of the existing state of affairs, they discern the difficulties involved in adjusting to it. The benefits they find in any reform tend to be by proxy, if they choose to align themselves with some other group. The Czechs who presented themselves as belonging to this group were the most vociferous opponents of the reform. Very few of them saw any benefits to themselves from the new Rules. Many perceived spelling reform as a process designed to damage the nation’s cultural elite; in other words, not only was it not beneficial, but even deliberately harmful. IIIa. Discipline-based specialists see both benefit and cost in spelling reform. Benefit comes in the form of simplification of their procedures with the introduction of a firm standard. Cost accrues through the simple fact that reforms may only have a partial impact on the field and thus fixed

Participants, beneficiaries, and victims of reform

295

practices may in fact be destabilized. Discipline-based specialists tend to see themselves as members of an international community, and changes that remove similarities between Czech and foreign nomenclature apparently increase the difficulty of access to the outside world, imposing a high cost on the field. The belief that having similar spellings to words in foreign languages will increase access to these languages is ideological in nature. In the Czech debates, the lack of consultation with discipline-based specialists outside of language pedagogy became an issue. Members of individual disciplines were easily able to find fault with the rules that concerned their particular fields. Costs were thus perceived as higher than benefits. IIIb. The press and other media can become players in this debate, and can use it to promote their own agenda (increased circulation, increased national profile, promotion of the views of their editors or publishers). They are thus primarily beneficiaries of orthography controversies. That is not to say that there are no costs to the media. In the course of the reform, they become obvious targets for the wrath of the reading or viewing public, and of course experience their own costs in retooling and retraining. The experience of the Czech press was varied. Certain right-leaning papers benefitted from running campaigns against the new orthography. In rejecting the reforms outright, they also minimized their costs. Opposing the Rules outright was thus an excellent option from a cost-benefit point of view. Some newspapers on the left incurred costs in switching over, and failed by and large to reap the benefits of increased reader interest. Instead, they incurred the wrath of their public by moving quickly to adopt the reforms. Fast adoption was thus the least palatable option. The broad middle ground took cautious, equivocating stances in which some changes were adopted immediately while the more controversial ones were kicked into the long grass. This approach spread costs over the long term and minimized immediate negative impact. For a paper unwilling to take a strong negative stance, this was clearly the method of choice. IV. Non-proficient users are frequently held out as the primary beneficiaries of spelling reform, but often these arguments are simply proposed for them, rather than stated by them, and so the benefits and costs for this group are a matter of debate. There is an assumption that a wholesale reduction in exceptions to spelling rules means a faster, easier route to literacy and increased feelings of confidence about one’s native intuition, as the number of places where spellings correspond closely to pronunciation

296

Conclusions

should increase and the time devoted to spelling instruction concomitantly decreases. However, there is no evidence from the Czech context to support this claim. Even if we take it as a self-evident truth, none of the reforms proposed represent the sort of sweeping simplification that seems likely to save much time or effort; they have been small amendments. The benefit to this group can thus only seem substantial if we take a long view over a century or more of reform, or if we rely on anecdotal evidence that every tiny adjustment has an important psychological benefit. The costs to this group are the same as for other groups in terms of retraining and relearning, although it has been assumed that this group will object less because they will see the obvious benefits for them. This ideology relies on people accepting the pronouncements of professional linguists as to their needs and abilities. IVa. School pupils are a prime target of orthographic reform, one of whose stated aims is to make sure that as many of this group become proficient users as quickly and easily as possible. As noted above, this benefit seems to be based on a theoretical sweeping reform, and it is harder to make a case for it in any of the cautious, partial reforms that have been implemented. This ideology assumes that these benefits will accrue over the long term: the students of the present are expected to perceive benefit which may actually only accrue to their great-grandchildren. The costs involve the upheaval in the school system and the need to negotiate one’s way in later life through books representing an older norm, which could prove confusing (although this is an ideological position as well; the differences may well not hinder reading skills). The value of this typology, like any other, will be ascertained through testing on other language situations to see how well it applies. 2.

Conclusions on authority, legitimacy, and reform

External realities – the location of a reform in a particular social context, at a particular point in history and a particular era – can have a powerful influence on the course of reform, even if they are apparently unrelated to the reform’s subject matter. As was shown in the Czech case study, a society that accepts reform at one juncture may suddenly reject it at another. A track record of manipulation does seem to be important for future reforms. Azeri seems, after an unstable history involving numerous script reforms, to be entirely willing to consider a further one. Russian and Ger-

Conclusions on authority, legitimacy, and reform

297

man have a history of both resisting reform and yet creating centralized bodies that propose and attempt to implement such reforms. Norwegian and Czech, along with a number of other languages referred to in this study, such as Dutch, have a history of repeated intervention and reform, but there is evidence that it is becoming harder to impose reforms on an increasingly fractious public. Why has the public grown increasingly dissatisfied with spelling reform? In the Czech case, as well as several others, mass literacy and democracy apparently undermined the authority of small appointed groups, and this shift is most noticeable in the formerly routine matter of orthographic reform. Gradually such groups are losing their reforming function and retaining only their status as “guardians of the language” – essentially as figureheads whose only power is to reinforce the existing order. Like politicians in a democracy, their popularity varies in inverse proportion to their propensity and ability to upset the orthographic status quo. Their ability to approve and indicate change in the lexicon seems, by all accounts, to continue unabated, as many of these bodies are still responsible for highly regarded dictionaries, but it would not be surprising if this were the next area to come under sustained public attack. In the Norwegian and German examples, this slow movement from reformism to skepticism is visible throughout the twentieth century, whereas in Russian and Czech, the process was less visible due to a lengthy interval of totalitarian rule. Totalitarianism proved to be a congenial environment for reformist activities, primarily because it offered opportunities to implement reforms quickly and effectively through a system of political pressure. By putting the unquestioned might of the state behind reforms, totalitarian control tended to hide the arbitrary basis of linguistic authority in these societies. After this control ceased, there was a strong backlash against any regulation that was seen to be part of the old structures. Since the collapse of communism, the connections between political dogma and regulation have come to the foreground in the debates over orthographic reform in the Czech Republic and, to a lesser extent, in Russia. This reaction has been strong and bitter in the Czech Republic, and is a legacy of the close identification between Marxist doctrine and the dominant linguistic school of thought, Prague School Functionalism, as well as the (sometimes overstated) tendency of Czechoslovakia’s communist rulers to promote a sort of pro-Russian “pan-Slavism” in orthography. An anti-reform position, however, is not an inevitable result of the collapse of totalitarianism. In the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and

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Conclusions

Lithuania, regulation in all spheres is now more active than ever. The newly independent states have appropriated old structures from the communist period and made them symbols of renascent national pride,412 typically directed either overtly or covertly against Russian residents of the republics. Indeed, all three countries are conducting standardization activities at an accelerating pace. Here, the specific political and social exigencies of having a large Russian minority have, as in Azerbaijan, prompted the populace to coalesce around the idea of a standard language, and, by extension, of an orthography, as a national symbol, resulting in the strengthening and extension of regulatory power. 3.

Conclusions on language ideological debates

Arguments for and against orthographic reform can also be found in the language itself. I have argued that metaphorical conceptions of language, both generalized and language-specific, have played a role in shaping the Czech debate on orthographic reform. The cross-linguistic metaphors and scripts may prove useful in further analyses of why language reform takes off or breaks down; those metaphors and scripts specific to Czech may suggest patterns for analysis of other languages, and may help to explain apparently divergent results of reform in otherwise similar languages. The ideological debates we have identified about spelling reform revealed that the discussion was rarely about the particulars of which letter was to be written where. Instead, many participants in these debates were intent on making more global points about the regulation of an activity as simultaneously public and private as writing. In the course of the debates, we can trace the evolving normalization of particular viewpoints on language. All the participants saw language as a tool of one or another sort, but the views of this tool varied greatly. Through the 1920s and 1930s we saw the normalization of functionalist views of language regulation. According to functionalists, language was a tool of human understanding, and language regulation came to be construed as simply a second-order tool that increased language’s effectiveness by making standard written discourse easier to produce. Easiness meant more one-to-one correspondence with correlating items in spoken codes, a code for which was often the word clarity. By the 1960s, scholars were simply debating the merits or drawbacks of particular changes or types of changes,

Conclusions on language ideological debates

299

while taking for granted the linguistic correctness of this approach. Within the linguistic community, public views and attitudes on language regulation were considered extra-linguistic and were advanced more apologetically. The aesthetic component of language regulation was thus sidelined. The new stasis favoured continued active regulation. It adjusted the standard language and orthography based on linguistic evaluations of its ease of production. But other views of language also came forward in these debates. Those who viewed the Czech language as a repository of the nation’s essential characteristics – a distillation of the characteristics of “the great Czech nation” – looked askance at regulation, which for them constituted tampering. The 1993 debates were the first in almost a hundred years in which this primarily aesthetic view gained greater currency. That does not mean that it had not been present earlier. Even in the 1950s, more conservative functionalists had appealed to the patriotic element in heading off what they believed to be overly radical reforms. But it was first in 1993 that we can see the language reformers themselves being brought around to the conclusion that the patriotic, aesthetic component of orthography was a more powerful force than they had imagined. Their various attempts to soft-pedal the reforms and make them more inclusive are evidence of movement on this account. By the mid-1990s, this more sceptical view of orthographic reform has moved into the linguistic mainstream. In a few cases, language, and especially the written language, was viewed negatively: as a means of controlling and directing expression. These people saw the highly regulated Czech language as the weapon of the “little Czech”: envious of those harder-working or more talented, too lazy to look at content, the “little Czech” was fixated on form and reflexively conformist in his views. In this view, spelling reform was one of an arsenal of tools that suppressed or deformed discourse. Debates on the nature of the public and private sphere also contained ideological assumptions about language use as a public and private act. In the early 1990s, we can watch Czech society through the prism of these debates as it grapples with the relegitimization of the private sphere after forty years of communism. At the time, private authorship and private publishing were evolving as concepts in the Czech community, with significant consequences for their understanding of authority and legitimacy. Under the communists, “private” had come to mean “unofficial, under the table, informal”. Now that meaning was changing. Authors working for

300

Conclusions

a government institution were, it turns out, private individuals, and the publishers of their works could be private presses. No one seemed entirely sure how private authorship would mesh with the public status of linguistic and educational institutions, or what they should think about public-private partnerships for publishing. The 1993 spelling reform was thus a publicprivate hybrid that served as a testing ground for some of the debates on private property that were convulsing the new republic. The re-emergence of the private sphere also meant changes for the definition of the public sphere. The media were formerly public in both ownership and reach: belonging to the state, they operated on a highly visible stage. Their redefinition as private enterprises entailed difficult decisions about whether they had to, or wanted to, respect reforms aimed at least partially at them. The positions Czechs took on these issues were thus part of wider debates and carried with them assumptions about the nature of public and private enterprise. As seen through the prism of spelling reform, the outcome of language regulation thus proves to be only partially dependent on the activities of the regulators themselves. Reasonable or irrational, consistent or idiosyncratic, spelling reforms and their creators exist in social and linguistic contexts that in the end, determine their fate more surely than anything in the reform itself.

Notes

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

According to www.wallonie.com (last accessed 22 August 2003). Even examples of radical change are arguably a product of regulation rather than creation. In the mid-twentieth century Soviet Union, Cyrillic-based scripts were imposed on a multitude of languages that had previously used Arabic and other scripts. Although adapting a completely new alphabet to these languages has much in common with the creation of new writing systems, these languages nonetheless had established writing traditions, and the script changes had to make concessions to existing spelling conventions. Comprehensive definitions and examples can be found in Kaplan and Baldauf (1997: 28–43). Because of the imprecision in the term alphabet he prefers signary. Often the term orthography contrasts with a more general term, such as Russian ɩɢɫɚɧɢɟ ‘writing’, Czech psaní ‘writing’. For Norwegian, the widespread but relatively minor differences between the two written codes, Bokmål and Nynorsk, and their status as predominantly written codes contribute to a blurring of the boundaries between grammatical/lexical regulation and orthographic regulation. Jahr and Janicki (1995: 28) point out triplets like sjølv, sjøl, selv ‘self’, where the third form stands out as clearly different both orthographically and phonologically (phonetically), but the first two differ primarily on the grounds of orthography. Omdal (1995: 91) cites battles over forms such as solen/sola ‘the sun’, kastet/kasta ‘threw’, where a multipurpose grammatical ending -a that is identified with a single letter is seen as a sign of excessive permissiveness within the Bokmål norm. Haugen (1966) offers numerous examples of proposed reforms, stretching back a century, that involve a mixture of purely orthographic, grammatical, and lexical alterations. The term orthography or spelling thus appears in Norwegian far outside its generally accepted context, even among linguists. Linn (2004) describes a debate surrounding an article written in an older variety of Nynorsk called Høgnorsk. The official Norwegian language planning journal rejected the article, in part on these grounds, and in the furore surrounding the affair there was repeated reference to the author’s orthography – this despite the fact that use of Høgnorsk implied various differences in morphology and lexicon as well. Hallaråker (2001), in a review of the status of Nynorsk, consistently refers to language reform as “spelling reform”, regardless of what actual changes took place. Cooper’s scheme is elaborated in outline format (1989: 98); I am following the condensed format, emphasis and punctuation given in Ager (2001: 7). The singling out of education, for instance, strikes me as a particularly North American distinction. The United Kingdom, like many other countries, has a

302

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

Notes Ministry of Education on the same level as any other government agency; its agenda is driven by the same short-term centralized imperatives as other ministries, and it controls the school curriculum tightly through a web of financial directives and assessment structures administered either centrally, through outsourcing, or via quangos (quasi-non-governmental organizations), just as any other ministry does. The only sense in which it differs from other ministries is in the manifold opportunities it has to take decisions influencing how English is taught to the young. A model allotting an independent place to education seems more suited to the (relatively rare) situation of e.g. the United States or Canada, where states and localities exercise far more control over curricula than the federal governments do. A permanent language commission first came into existence in Norway in the early 1950s. It was the brainchild of officials at the Ministry of Church and Education, under whose aegis it met. Acting on the advice of the cabinet, the King appointed its members from university and school teachers, the press, the State Broadcasting System, the Society of Authors, and the major dictionary publishers. Some members were to be nominated directly by the Ministry; others would come from the organizations themselves. In an original proposal, its charter directed it to work for the unification of the two standards, and dictated that members be chosen who would be amenable to this task. This mandate came in for sharp criticism, and was later abandoned; in its final version, the commission was to be evenly divided between users of Bokmål and Nynorsk, with the Ministry’s ability to make appointments reduced (Haugen 1966: 176–192). Based on the websites of these organizations: http://www.academie-francaise.fr/, http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dglf/garde.htm (last accessed 19 June 2006). Found at http://www.eki.ee/knn/kns2.htm . The Norsk språkråd implements language policy for schools and the government. It is empowered by the ministry of education, for example, to approve all word lists for school teaching, it sets binding orthographic and other language standards for the publication of textbooks (læreboknormalen), and its founding act enjoins the Council to author language legislation to be acted upon by Parliament (see http://www.sprakrad.no) Some of Cooper’s associated points – opportunities and incentives to take the planned behaviour on board or to reject it – will be treated elsewhere below. We are used to thinking of Peter the Great as someone who got his way once he set his mind to it, but in the matter of language he was at least partially pragmatic. His original proposal eliminated (depending on how one counts it) at least fifteen letters, but eventually he caved to pressure from advisers and readmitted some of them. In his final version of 1710, the letters were reinstated (see Pekarskii 1862: 644–645). At first, Peter decreed that this new font was to be used for all printed works, but there was substantial

Notes

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

303

resistance to this in religious quarters; he thus backed off and allowed religious publications to continue using their traditional font. In practice, religious writers continued to use many of the old letters as well. Ager (2001: 125–126) proposes that our opinions can be categorized into attitudes, beliefs and values about language, and that only the first group is accessible through ordinary study; we can only infer or surmise the existence of values and beliefs through what we learn about attitudes. An excellent example of this is the heightened profile of the Latvian language planning agency in the much-trailed language purification campaigns of the early 1990s (Druviete 1997). See, for example, Steven Johnson (1998). Population data from www.ethnologue.com . Numerous complaints to this effect and reassurances from those working on the new Azeri computer standards were to be found on www.latin.az, the nation’s official Latinization site. However, these were removed by mid-2006. Two cogent summaries of script reform in the Soviet Union are Haarman 1992 and Institut iazykoznaniia Akademii nauk SSSR 1982. From http://www.azer.com . See, for example, the reminiscences of Anar (2000). Anar, at the time of writing head of the Azerbaijani Writers’ Union, recounted his mother’s account of the events surrounding the Cyrillicization of Azeri orthography. According to her, Anar’s father Rasul Reza had also served as head of that same union in 1939, and that year was ordered by the first secretary of the Azerbaijani Communist Party to prepare the way for Cyrillicization, supposedly on Stalin’s direct orders. Reza decided to go along with it, because he feared that any reprisals from Stalin would unleash far more unhappiness on the country. Azeri’s new Latin alphabet was not identical to those of the “first Latin” period. It had fewer characters specific to Azeri, and more use of diacritics in their place. Of the 32 characters in the new alphabet, six were different from the “first Latin” characters representing those sounds. The “second Latin” alphabet dropped the apostrophe, used to represent a glottal stop. It also apparently tried to introduce a new character for /æ/, but within half a year, Azeris had reverted to using the old for this purpose, which had remained constant through the “first Latin” and Cyrillic periods. The price of this bit of nationalism is that Azeri Latin contains one character not used in Turkish, rendering Turkish fonts and keyboards unfit for use. The text of this is available on the official Azerbaijani Latinization site at www.latin.az. It is published in Azeri Latin and in Russian; I cite in translation from the latter. Aliev continues by noting that “[l]anguage develops according to its own inner laws, but alongside this, broad possibilities created for research and application can spur a more intensive and complete development.” Here, as else-

304

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

Notes where, Aliev, a former Soviet KGB official and Politburo member, leans heavily on the clichés of the Soviet era. There is mention of language as a “priceless national achievement” of the Azerbaijani nation which each Azerbaijani must “treasure like the apple of his eye” and of the part the language plays in affirming the nation’s ancient provenance and glorious future. Aliev hastens to note the assured place of Azeri as one of the most perfect languages in the world, and the frequency with which it is compared to French in the richness of its cultural heritage. The popularist-nationalist flavour of these decrees is evident. Not only do they command the use of Azeri in numerous spheres where it is not currently used, but they also direct the Cabinet of Ministers to draw up a law “defining measures to be taken against the introduction into the Republic of Azerbaijan secret or open propaganda against the state language, the opposition to the use and development of the Azerbaijani language, attempts to limit its rights, [and] impediments to the use of the Latin script.” The switch in the electronic media is proceeding apace, but is still not complete. For example, the site of Azerbaijan News Service, the leading independent broadcast news provider, is still primarily in Cyrillic, with only the occasional Latin-script word or heading (see www.ans-dx.com, last accessed 5 June 2006). Since then, standards have been recommended. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1468569.stm In fact, a 1992 law declared Turkish to be the state language, a fact that Aliev, ten years later, decried as being “anti-constitutional” and “against the will of the people”. Once Aliev returned to power, this law was repealed. See the pages of the Lithuanian Parliament, under whose aegis the Commission operates: http://www3.lrs.lt (last accessed 19 June 2006) In 1946, the commissars were renamed ministers, their bailiwicks became ministries, and this body became the Council of Ministers. The text of the 1964 reforms is available on the site www.gramma.ru . Public reaction is entertainingly documented in a collection of these letters, published shortly after the incident. See Bukchina (1969). In addition to the corpus planning angle, there is a strong status planning component to this as well. Norwegians have the right to send and receive correspondence with official bodies in either variety, and the proportion of documents produced in each variety cannot be less than 25 percent. See http://www.sprakrad.no/policy.htm, last accessed 6 June 2006. For example, research conducted during the building of the Czech National Corpus showed that in certain scholarly disciplines, publication in Czech had effectively ceased by the early 1990s. Standard written Czech had thus lost certain functional spheres of usage, although it continues to be used, of course, in teaching and oral discourse. Sally Johnson (2005: 45–84) considers some of the tensions encountered in

Notes

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

305

the orthographic reforms and how scholars later evaluated the decisions that had been taken. Interestingly, the EU is invoked several times in this document, with the guiding focus on its commitment to the “preservation of a culturally and linguistically diverse Europe”. According to the Estonian Education Minister, Estonia can best contribute to this state of affairs by protecting and developing its national language (4). Through their example of standardization, Milroy and Milroy define ideology as an unachievable striving for an ideal, implicitly opposing it to e.g. reform, which is concerned with specific proposals and how they are implemented (1999: 19). This definition differs in many respects from the one adopted here, but the example is clearly valid for both definitions. Since then, émigré presses have passed gradually into the hands of the socalled “third wave” of Russian emigration, who were born in Soviet times and employ the new orthography as a matter of course. From www10.brinkster.com/Petrograd/, last accessed 5 March 2004. In PiĢha, Petr, PamČĢ a nadČje: Z povČsti ýech a Moravy, p. 365. PiĢha, who was Minister of Education in 1992–1994, produced this book retelling popular Czech legends and fables in 2003. For more about him, see chapter 5. A search on this phrase in Czech (srdce Evropy) retrieved 68,200 responses in Google, many from travel agencies and news articles. A search on the English phrase reveals that the Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, and others (including the Swiss) are also eager to claim this title (www.google.com, 27 July 2004). 2001 census figures from the Czech Statistical Office (www.czso.cz, accessed 23 July 2004). Population statistics from 1996, the closest available to the period discussed in this book, are not greatly different from the most recent census, although a comparison between them shows a slight overall drop in the population, as well as a decline in city populations over the period and a growth in the suburban belt around the republic’s major towns (cf. http://www.envir.ee/programmid/pharecd/soes/czech/cr97-htm/a111tab0. htm, last accessed 20 March 2003). The Czech Statistical Office cites figures primarily by the current divisions into kraje, or regions, which do not exactly correspond to the traditional tripartite ethno-geographic division of the country. For this rough estimate, I assigned the Vysoþina region entirely to Moravia, which slightly inflates Moravia’s population and under-represents the population of Bohemia. These measures, of course, show location of residence, rather than a person’s sense of cultural and regional affiliation. A resident of Prague originally from East Moravia would still consider himself Moravian, and despite the fact that his speech has largely accommodated to Prague norms, he might well proclaim that he continues to speak Moravian. There have been attempts in recent years to outline a standard written form of Moravian. The more humorous efforts are widely read and cited as a badge of

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46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

Notes local difference, while the occasional more earnest attempt falls on deaf ears. On the jocular side, http://www.olomouc.com/hanactina/ offers lessons in Haná (North Moravian) and http://morce.slovniky.org/ provides a MoravianBohemian (Czech?) dictionary. Šustek’s agitation for a codified Moravian standard (1998) does not seem to have caught on, although it drew a stinging response from Stich (2000). The adjective þeský means both ‘Czech’ and ‘Bohemian’, just as the ethnonym ýech means both ‘a Czech’ and ‘a Bohemian’, so no distinction is possible. A site sponsored by Czech Radio (http://www.romove.cz/cz/clanek/18884, last accessed 23 July 2004) estimates the number of Romany in the republic at 250,000–300,000, or under 3 percent of the population. Neustupný and Nekvapil also comment on this discrepancy and arrive at a similar actual population figure for the Romany (2006: 37). Religion, often a significant determiner of ethnic allegiance, plays a confusing role in the Czech context. Holy (1996: 41–42) points out that although a majority of Czechs are at least nominally Catholic, many of the iconic figures of Czech culture were either Protestant or are known for their opposition to the established Catholic church. Religion thus fails to provide strong, unambiguous symbols around which national sentiment can coalesce. A cogent discussion of this period is found in Veþerník (1999: 399–401). Ivan Klíma’s autobiographical hero in Love and Garbage recounts his adventures sweeping the streets of Prague, while Václav Havel’s Ferdinand VanČk in The Audience draws on the author’s memories of his time working in a brewery. The gynecologist as hat-check girl comes from the film of Michal Viewegh’s The Wonderful Years that Sucked, while the stoker is perhaps the most widespread of all clichés of this sort (and was the profession of Karel Palek, a.k.a. Petr Fidelius, a contributor to the orthography debates; see his publisher’s biography at www.i-triada.net/fidelius.htm). Pedagogue OndĜej Hausenblas, who has devoted his career to studying the teaching of Czech in the country’s schools, has repeatedly called attention to the excessive focus on the mastery of memorized material (a good summary appeared in Lidové noviny on 16 May 1991 under the title “Škola jako choroba” (“School as an Illness”). Leff (1996: 119) notes: “Ideological content and the heavy communist emphasis on technical subjects (less sensitive ideologically and necessary for the building of socialism) severely stunted study of the social sciences and humanities […].” The Law on Ex-Judicial Rehabilitation (1991/87) can be found on the site of the Interior Ministry: http://mvcr.iol.cz/sbirka/1991/sb019-91.pdf. Kotrba (1994) provides a detailed summary of privatization and its interaction with other economic activities. Various handbooks on the period review the

Notes

55.

56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

307

privatization process; see especially Leff (1997: 189–196), Shepherd (2000: 79–95). Shepherd (2000: 105–106, 188–189) details the case of Jaroslav Lizner, who was head of the Finance Ministry’s voucher privatization section, as well as head of the Central Securities Register and was thus entrusted with the safekeeping of all details regarding share ownership. Lizner was arrested in October 1994 and subsequently tried and sentenced for receiving 8.3 million Czech crowns – approximately US $300,000 – as a bribe in the privatization of a dairy firm. His arrest and trial prompted speculation of widespread corruption in the privatization effort, which Lizner subsequently confirmed anecdotally. To make a long story short, over 70 percent of small investors handed their shares over to cleverly structured investment firms, and saw no profit or very limited gain from the venture. The rest invested directly in the new private companies, and many thus saw their shares plummet in value during the asset-stripping scams of the mid-to-late 1990s. Few ended up worse off than before, but the experience provoked a wave of disillusionment with the government’s policies. Václav Klaus, who led the privatization effort and served as both finance minister and prime minister in the first half of the 1990s, admitted in an interview in the news magazine Mladý svČt (15 November 2000) that the effect of privatization was not the mass expansion of the stock-owning class he had predicted, and that the government had not foreseen the public backlash that would come when privatization failed to live up to their expectations. The text of lustration law 451/1991 Sb. can be found on the Czech parliament’s site: http://www.psp.cz/docs/laws/fs/451.html. According to Valis (2003), 300,000 people were lustrated, but only a hundred or so can be shown to have lost their jobs as a result. Jobs were renamed or reclassified to accommodate a lustrated individual, and individuals so labelled may have avoided certain sorts of promotions or job applications, so the effects were undoubtedly greater than this minuscule figure suggests. Even today the existence of a checkpoint halfway across “their” country seems to have resonance for Czechs; witness the tragicomic border scenes in Alice Nellis’s 2002 film Výlet. The tone of regret is elegantly captured in a “pro-con” article in Podnikatelský týdeník Profit (6 January 2003) featuring Czech politicians Václav Havel and Petr Uhl arguing as to whether or not the split was inevitable. Although they disagreed, neither saw the split nor the way it had been done as a positive development. (See www.profit.cz). Slovaks showed significantly less enthusiasm for democracy, tended to ascribe far more functions to the state than Czechs, and were even less convinced than their western neighbours that government reflected their needs and wishes.

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Notes

62. The collapse, when it came, was slow and at the time of their survey had not begun. 63. Slavonic and Slavic are synonyms. The former is preferred in Britain and many Commonwealth countries, while the latter is used in America and, increasingly, in Canada. 64. In the days of the federation, news programmes were traditionally fronted by two moderators, Czech and Slovak, with reporters speaking in either language; Slovak films and programmes were shown without subtitling or dubbing. Slovak politicians and lecturers spoke and published in the Czech lands, and did so in their native language. These days, political speeches are sometimes translated, although the tradition of passive bilingualism survives in academia. 65. Although the modern day countries of Poland and the Czech Republic share a lengthy frontier, most of the border regions were, with the exception of Silesia, German-speaking until the end of the Second World War, and there was thus no direct Czech-Polish linguistic contact in these areas. 66. The information here represents, to a large extent, the “received view” of the Czech language situation. Information on the interaction between dialects and the standard is available in numerous sources, although most of them constitute assertions of fact rather than being based on evidence. Among the works of the best-known Czech scholars are Chloupek (1987), Daneš (1969), ýermák (1987, 1993, 1997), Havránek (1979a, 1979b), Horálek (1992), Hronek (1972), Jedliþka (1963), Jelínek (1979), Mathesius (1932), and the numerous contributions of Sgall and his collaborators; see espec. Sgall (1981, 1990); Sgall and Hronek (1992); Sgall, Hronek, Stich, and Horecký (1992); and a major evidence-based study by Sgall’s students, Kravþišinová and BednáĜová (1968). The views of Western scholars are best represented by Hammer’s studies of code switching (1985, 1993), Kuþera’s studies of aesthetic judgments of CC and SC varieties (1955, 1958, 1961, 1973), and Townsend’s description of Spoken Prague Czech (1990). 67. These new “hybrid” genres have not as yet been the subject of much study. See, however, ýmejrková (1997), Gammelgaard (1997), Bermel (2000). 68. This openness of the short vowel is most noticeable in Central Bohemian speech; the vowel approaches /i/ in other parts of Bohemia and in Moravia. 69. The fact that /u/ has two graphic representations is a historical accident. Although the grapheme is used to indicate /uÖ/ in words of recent foreign origin such as skútr ‘scooter’, it primarily represents the reflex of old Czech /u/. In many varieties of the spoken language, this vowel later developed to /ou/ (and onward from there to e.g. /oÖ/ in some Moravian dialects), but the older form is retained in SC in word-initial position. The grapheme represents the reflex of old Czech /oÖ/, which in most dialects of Czech first became a diphthong /uo/ and finally a monophthong /uÖ/, and it was this stage

Notes

70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

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that is preserved in SC. In SC, then, this vowel is identical in pronunciation to the pre-existing /u/ written . Historically, the four vowel letters , , , 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

310

78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88.

89.

90.

Notes and the various suggestions for reform that were put forth is given in Cvrþek (2006: 49–53). The complexity of the issue is laid out in its full glory in Sgall (1994: 270–278, 283). The use of the preposition s in the meaning ‘down from, off of’ has in fact been made optional in recent versions of the Rules of Czech Orthography, which permit its replacement by z, formerly only ‘from, out of’. In this table, dialect forms are given as “proposed written forms” for easier comparability. A 1992 poll claimed that these hypercorrections “bothered many” of those who wrote in (Dokulil and Sgall 1992: 171). However, the authors adduce no figures, and the survey’s results, which depended on people writing in response to a question, are not reliable. Or /c/ in some Silesian dialects. For the small class of verbs ending in –ci, the CC ending -ct, however, was not admitted to SC. The CC form is given in a common transcription to facilitate comparison. A sustained argument in favour of this reform is given in Starý (1992). It is here we learn, for instance, that the genitive case of Zeus is Dia, following the ancient Greek model. This example captures the archaizing flavour of Czech classical names. The introduction of this alternative form in reflects a frequent tendency in Czech for borrowings in , 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

Notes

91.

92.

93. 94. 95.

96.

97.

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changes. A further article on the presidential veto contained four words out of 364 where the 1993 Rules would have required changes – but all were tokens of the quite foreseeable word prezident.) For example, many university (small-d) departments renamed themselves “institutes” in the 1990s without really changing their status as subunits within the still largely independent faculties. Are some institutes more “capital” than others? And what about the “research centres” that are now becoming more popular, largely along the same lines? There is ample evidence from other Slavonic languages that the alternations found in SC represent an older state of affairs. Compare, for example, Russian 1 sg. ɭɦɪɭ [W¥OTW? vs. 2 sg. ɭɦɪɺɲɶ [W¥OT,Q5] ‘die’ and 1 sg. ɩɟɤɭ [R,+¥MW] vs. 2 sg. ɩɟɱɟɲɶ [R,+¥V5Q5] ‘bake’. The change in the infinitive is discussed in chapter 2, section 6.3. See section 6 for a discussion of this. Another objection sometimes raised to the codification of forms like sází is the following. Czech has a common rule that to form the imperative, you remove the –í from the third-person plural non-past form and add the imperative endings. Thus prosit (prosí) has pros! proste!, trpČt (trpí) has trp! trpte! and sázet (sázejí) has sázej! sázejte! This line of reasoning is facile on the face of it, as it relies on arguments about the structure and relation of forms and how to make them more transparent, rather than on what is actually said, used, or felt to be correct. However, it does point out that “simplifying” one corner of a system often “complicates” other parts of it, making this instance of regulation in effect a zero-sum game. As if this were not complex enough, words like ofenzíva ‘offence’, where the same issue crops up but where the possible long vowel is in the suffix, have three possible variants: ofenzíva – ofenziva – ofensiva. This suggests a more classical definition of ‘marked’ and ‘basic’ as in Table 17. In other words, it is a typical result of a reform produced under extreme time pressure by a large, heterogeneous committee – precisely what the Rules’ planners had sought to avoid. Petr Sgall, who was in the group that produced the Addendum, stressed that under the circumstances, it would have been hard to achieve a better result. The real problem, he stressed, came from the fact that the original reform itself was deeply flawed: “Among its fundamental errors was the fact that it retracted changes made earlier (in vowel length) and that it proclaimed as obligatory even features that were hard for the professional community to accept (filozofie,-izmus). The Addendum could only temper these mistakes so as to find an acceptable compromise; it could not exclude features that the reform had already ‘permitted’. Therefore, it could only multiply the number of doublets, and so it was necessary to mark which variants would have preference in schools” (personal communication).

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Notes

98. Borovský was a prominent mid-nineteenth century satirist and Czech patriot (cited in Tešnar [2000: 250]). 99. I use the term Czech lands (þeské zemČ) to mean the homelands of the Czechspeaking Bohemians, Moravians, and Silesians, which throughout history have almost always formed some recognizable administrative unit as well. In general, it includes what was the predominantly German-speaking (until 1946) periphery of the kingdom, called the Sudetenland (Sudety), which has historically belonged to the Czech crown and which traditionally had a substantial Czech-speaking minority population. 100. Jelínek (1971: 19). Like many puristic campaigns, the results of this one were mixed. Modern Czechs do still wipe their mouths with ubrousky ‘napkins’, but only after eating their knedlíky ‘dumplings’. 101. Certain texts in Glagolitic, the original alphabet created by Constantine and Methodius for use in the Slavonic mission to Moravia in 863, contain numerous telltale signs of the mission’s Czech origins, and there are even some later texts in what appear to be Old Czech using the Glagolitic alphabet. However, these cease by the end of the eleventh century and there does not appear to be any obvious continuity between them and the Czech language texts using Latin letters that start to appear a century later. See Horálek (1992: 366). 102. The fact that a substantial body of texts employing similar language and conventions appears almost out of nowhere led Havránek to speculate that there was a significant written tradition preceding this period, but that its works did not survive. 103. I use the terms digraph, digraphic here throughout, although strictly speaking these terms refer only to pairs of characters, when these systems sometimes invoke trigraphs (groups of three characters) as well. 104. Czechs traditionally distinguish two common inventories of digraphs, an “older” and a “younger” set, that appear in texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Although more precise than what preceded them, neither set fully distinguishes all the phonemes of Czech – the “older” set conflates voiced and unvoiced sibilants ([U] and =\]; [5] and [