This short note tries to point out that modern Czech editions of J. A. Comenii Labyrint světa a ráj srdce suffer from a recurrent punctuation mistake in a Latin motto preceding the main text. This mistake is brought about by a tricky syntax of the second verse of the motto, which allows several interpretations, and by insufficient attention paid to this detail so far. By analyzing the syntactical structure of the verse discussed, some interpretations can be either completely refused or rendered more or less implausible on the ground of metrics, syntactic properties of individual lexems, semantics as well as pragmatics. In the end, the author shows how the syntactic analysis should be reflected by punctuation, and why the current way of punctuation should be abandoned, and recommends the best way according to the reasons given through the article.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.