Jazyk Jesliček F. Bridelia

• Authors: Kosek Pavel

Title variants

EN

THE LANGUAGE OF THE JESLIČKY BY FRIDRICH BRIDELIUS

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The language of the new hymns collected in Jesličky by Fridrich Bridelius draws on the tradition of the highly developed Czech language of the late 16th century. This is clearly visible in the range of effects produced by the sound shifts experienced by Czech during the Early Modern era, enabling a degree of stylistic differentiation (ý > ej, ú- > ou-, é > í and prosthetic v-). The morphology and syntactic structure of the new hymns includes some of the changes which affected spoken Czech in the 17th century, and which penetrated into the written language only slowly – the blurring of gender differences in the nominative plural declension of adjectives and pronouns, the unification of instrumental plural adjectival and pronominal suffixes in the form -ma, the stabilization of the form si as the dative of the genderless reflexive pronoun se, the penetration of compound declension into singular forms of possessive adjectives, the stabilization of the second person singular bys as the conditional auxiliary verb, the violation of concord in transgressive forms, the retreat of the negative genitive, and the constitution of the category of frequentatives in verbs. However, in addition to these features, the texts of Jesličky also preserve certain traditional linguistic forms typical of written communication: the masculine and neuter instrumental plural of the type pány / městy, the genitive plural suffix -ův of the type pánův, the third person singular present tense form of the athematic verb jest, preterite forms such as nesl jest / nesli jsou, and the use of the antepreterite or the negative genitive. This symbiosis of progressive and traditional forms in the texts not only shows that the author of the hymnal was attempting to use a high style that was at the same time comprehensible to contemporary readers; it also confirms that post-White Mountain authors drew naturally on the language of the previous era and developed it creatively, well aware of the wide functional range of linguistic means at their disposal. The language of Jesličky contains a minimum of clearly dialectal or potentially dialectal forms, which can be localized in Central and Eastern Bohemia. This low frequency of dialect features can be viewed as 1) an indirect confirmation of Bridelius’ probable authorship (he came from Eastern Bohemia and lived and worked mainly in Central Bohemia), and 2) a reflection of the fact that Baroque authors tended to deliberately avoid the use of dialectal forms.

Keywords

EN

development of the Czech language; the Czech language of Baroque period; Czech hymns; historical ortography; Fridrich Bridelius

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Listy filologické (Folia philologica)
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 136
• Issue: 1-2
• Pages: 125-160

Contributors

author

Kosek Pavel

• Ústav českého jazyka, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy Univerzity v Brně, Arne Nováka 1, 602 00 Brno, Czech Republic