Goal. The paper reports on a standardization of a short parent-report screening tool for quick assessment of vocabulary in children aged 16 to 42 months. The tool should capture the early signs of a delayed or disrupted language development. The method asks for children’s use and comprehension of 40 words. Participants. The tool was standardized on a group of 1047 children (535 boys) that was demographically diverse and was obtained in different regions of the Czech Republic. Analysis. Developmental norms and growth curves were calculated using generalized additive linear models. Linear regression was used to test the effects of various demographic factors on the scores. Results. The norms correspond to the expectations about the growth of vocabulary with age. Girls show statistically significant advantages in both production and comprehension. Statistically significant but weak relations were found between comprehension scores on one hand, and maternal education and population size of the hometown on the other. Limitations. The method is based on parent reports, which may result in lower reliability. This norming study has not directly assessed concurrent validity with other methods.
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Cíl. Práce informuje o standardizaci stručného rodičovského dotazníku pro screening vývoje slovní zásoby u dětí ve věku 16 až 42 měsíců, který umožní zachytit rané příznaky opožděného nebo narušeného jazykového vývoje. Metoda zjišťuje znalost 40 slov u dětí a dotazuje se, zda děti slovo používají a zda mu rozumějí. Soubor. Standardizace byla provedena na souboru 1047 dětí (535 chlapců), který byl demograficky různorodý a byl získán na různých místech ČR. 472 / Metodické studie Analýza. Vývojové normy a růstové křivky byly vypočteny metodou zobecněných aditivních lineárních modelů. K ověření vlivů různých demografických faktorů na zjištěné skóry byla použita lineární regrese. Výsledky. Získané normy odpovídají očekáváním co do růstu naměřené slovní zásoby s věkem. Dívky vykazují významně vyšší skóry než chlapci, jak v produkci, tak v porozumění. Byly nalezeny statisticky významné, ale poměrně slabé vztahy mezi skórem v porozumění a vzděláním matky, resp. velikostí sídla. Omezení. Metoda se opírá o rodičovské výpovědi, což může přispívat ke snížené spolehlivosti. V této studii nebyla empiricky zjišťována souběžná validita s dalšími metodami.
The aim of our study is to review the meaning of the term “poeticism” and consider its vitality within contemporary poetry. It identifies specific features of contemporary Czech poetic language that distinguish it from the commonly spoken and written language. For this purpose, we utilise data collected in the Corpus of Contemporary Czech Poetry, using a keyword-extraction tool. We argue that poeticisms in contemporary poetry can be identified based on their frequency as keywords which significantly exceeds the frequency of the same words in common language. Our study concludes by drawing a distinction between two types of poeticisms: functional ones are defined by their frequency, while essential ones are used exclusively in poetic language.
The article describes and analyses the changes in Tunisian French vocabulary that were brought about by the Coronavirus pandemic. The common language borrows lexical units from academic language and foreign languages, particularly from English language. It can be observed that the usage frequency of commonly seldom used expressions is growing as well as the number of occasionalisms. However, there are far fewer units borrowed from academic and from English language in Tunisian French than in French used in France. The number of occasionalisms is also significantly smaller.
The paper deals with the peripheral Czech lexeme sluzej ʻbridge beamʼ. This word was analyzed in the journal Naše řeč as early as in 1923. The current paper corrects the assumption of the author at that time that the noun was adopted from another Slavic language in relatively recent times, and confirms its direct borrowing from German in the early modern period. The spelling of this lexeme, however, was different from the one reconstructed by etymologists so far.
The article deals with the manuscript called "Vodňany medicine" from the beginning of the 15th century. The text has specific language features, such as accumulation of lexical units relating to the same concept (especially in terms of plants, diseases, etc.). It examines whether these words are synonyms, and what words are used to connect them (the conjunctions točúš, tověz, nebo; the phrases to jest, druzí řiekají, slóve, etc.). It concludes by observing that the accumulation of synonymous words is significantly influenced by the fact that the text is based on the Latin original.
The article is dedicated to the production of Aleš Knobloch of Pirnsdorf, a steward and writer from the first half of the 16th century. His two preserved works were published in 1561: the farm handbook Regiment zprávy ovčího dobytku [The regiment of the sheep management] and the moral Písně dvě nové o tom hanebném a nekřesťanském trunkopolství [Two new songs on shameful and non-Christian drunkenness]. The lexical aspect of the songs is interesting – besides Knobloch’s neologisms trunkopolství [drunkenness] and trunkopolec [drunkard], there also occur other names connected with the drunkard themes, e.g. the names of toasts and drinking vessels. The attractiveness of the songs for the reader is increased by folk sayings concerning the drunkard’s conduct, e.g. zerval kantora [literally: he knocked down a school-master], i.e. he vomited, [literally: the tongue is walking in bedroom slippers], plete se mu jazyk [literally: his speech is beginning to slur], i.e. he articulates badly, or propaluje řešídko [literally: s/he is burning a hole in the sieve], i.e. s/he is disclosing a secret.
The word “neústrojný” (inorganic) is used in lexicography to describe some Old and Middle Czech lexical units. It designates lexical units with unusual word-formative structure and timelimited usage, as well as those on the boundary of the word-formative system. The contemporary Czech lexicological terms “neologism” and especially “occasional word” are essentially very close to this categorization. In spite of the fact that lexical units described using these terms often disrupt the word-formative system of the given time period, we understand them as peripheral components, as the (unsuccessful) results of intuitive attempts at systemic changes, and as manifestations of the developmental dynamics of the word-formative system.
Given the role that word-formation plays in vocabulary organization, there seems to be a consensus that word-formation needs to be taken into account in some way within the lexicographic process. Thus, the present study is devoted to central issues of dealing with word-formation in the dictionary, which include its consideration in the so-called outer texts, the type of macrostructure, entries of word-forming elements, special word-formation sections of the entries, word-formation in the definitions, and the use of typography to highlight word-formation phenomena. The subject of the analysis is selected dictionaries of the German language primarily published before the year 1854, which represents an important caesura in German lexicography constituted by the publication of the first volume of the Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) by the Brothers Grimm. Much more often than in the case of today’s lexicographical works, the view of word-formation is linked to a more general conception of language and reflections on it, or even to a broader cultural context, including religion, or life in a pre-secular society, respectively.
Latin-Czech pair zidrach hiratis from the mediaeval Klaret’s vocabulary consists of two words not documented in any other Old Czech source; moreover, it is not clear which of them is the Czech one. Some mediaeval Latin encyclopaedias use the word zidrach, but, certainly, it is not of the Latin origin. The word hiratis (unknown from elsewhere) is entirely opaque: neither its ending nor its root can refer to any Czech or Latin word. We explain zidrach as a Czech word of the German origin (seedrache) denoting sea-horse. The form hiratis is probably an abbreviation, possibly a corruption (perhaps from the Latin hippocampus).
Enantiosemy describes a situation in which a lexical unit acquires opposing meanings as a result of long-term semantic development. In this article, using several examples from Old Czech, I show how the enantiosemic status of words results from the development of lexical units or (sub-)systems. In the first example, the verb ublížit (to harm) has gained (on the background of words blízký, bližní, přiblížit, etc.) negative conceptual content through the systemic usage of the directional meaning of the prefix u-. In another example, the verb odpravit has changed its meaning from ‘to arrange regularly’ to ‘to murder’ during its own complicated semantic development (‘to make sth rightly’ → ‘to punish sb rightly’ → ‘to put sb to death’ → ‘to murder’). Finally, it is shown that the meanings ‘to love’ and ‘to hate’ of the Old Czech verb náviděti have become the result of a double progressive artificially-created opposition to the initial common Slavic nenáviděti – the previous concept, presented both in linguistic and in popular literature on its polysemy, is thus incorrect.
Vladimír Skalička’s contributions to linguistic typology have been widely recognized. This paper tries to capture the significance of the problem of language diversity in its broadest sense for the development of Skalička’s scholarship and for his scientific legacy. The author argues that in a 1947 Czech-language article titled “The problem of language diversity” published in Slovo a slovesnost, Skalička gave in fact a sketch of a blueprint for modern linguistics in which he advocated a holistic approach to the study of language through a balanced texture of the triple aspect of language: its semiotic nature, its diversity and its structure. The least one can say is that Skalička seems to have followed these self-imposed, yet highly stimulating guidelines for the rest of his life. The final part of the paper is an attempt at summarizing Skalička’s contribution to the understanding of the semiotic connection of linguistic typology and the mutual relations between language and mind or language and society. The author concludes that although Skalička did not directly answer or even explicitly ask the question of why languages differ from each other, he nevertheless cleared the way for future attempts at a structural explanation of the origins of language diversity.
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