Pracovní seminář o možnostech digitálního zpřístupňování starších českých textů
This article is a review report on the "IT JAKUB" workshop on held in October 2015 in Prague.
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This article is a review report on the "IT JAKUB" workshop on held in October 2015 in Prague.
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The paper focuses on word order in nominal phrases (NP) in which the modifying components of the NP are extracted outside their syntactic domains. These components are separated from the head of their phrase by another word (or words) not bound by the syntactic relations inside the NP, and therefore appear in a distant position, away from the dominating noun. This distant position of NP modifying components tends to be on the periphery in the modern Czech system; however, some authors (e.g. Trávníček, 1956, p. 154) consider it to be a word order variant which is rather typical of earlier stages of Czech language development.
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The paper analyzes the ambiguous Old Czech lexeme smiechoval/směchoval. It examines its context, textual variants and relationship to the Latin original and compares the different ways it has been addressed in historical dictionaries. Based on word-formational, syntactic and semantic relationships, the lexeme is interpreted as a substantive compound meaning ‘jester, joker’.
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The paper examines the multifunctionality of the word-formation suffixes used in the formation of Old and Middle Czech deverbal nouns and the possibility of using semantic maps to analyze this multifunctionality. This methodology is first briefly introduced, then a semantic map of six onomasiological categories used in the word-formation patterns is presented (based on extensive data from Old and Middle Czech dictionaries and lexical databases), showing which combinations of functions are possible in a single suffix and which are not. The map is compared with maps found in the literature and several methodological issues are discussed.
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The text is devoted not to the journal Naše řeč [Our Speech], but to “our speech”, i.e. Czech, as mirrored in a handbook of Czech orthography (Hanka, 1817). This pamphlet was the initial part of the conflict between “iotists” (followers of Dobrovský and Hanka’s Czech orthography reform) and “ypsilonists” (their conservative opponents). Part (1) outlines the historical context of Pravopis český [Czech Orthography] from 1817 and its contents. Part (2) deals with the last part of Hanka’s pamphlet — the list of words for which speakers of Czech had to deal with the problematic transition from the spoken to the written form. Hanka recorded many orthographically incorrect forms of the words. An unintended result of his work was a kind of “recording” of contemporary spoken Czech (the most frequent examples of the recorded phenomena were cluster reduction, voicing assimilation and articulatory assimilation). Part (3) considers the theoretical importance of this list as a unique document of the Czech from Hanka’s time. The list reveals much about the actual pronunciation of Czech from that period, as well as the difficulties connected with the “translation” from spoken to written Czech.
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Имена числительные среди других частей речи занимают особое положение, так как их формирование как части речи происходило, по сравнению с другими частями речи, позже, уже в историческое время, и поэтому его можно прямо наблюдать по памятникам. Речь идет, главным образом, о количественных числительных как основном виде числительных вообще. Порядковые числительные, напр., с грамматической точки зрения никогда не отличались (и не отличаются) от имен прилагательных, да и все другие виды числительных, в том числе и количественные, первоначально по грамматическим признакам распределялись по другим частям речи.
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The paper deals with the synonymy in the terminological lexis in Old Bulgarian. The analysis is based on the lexical material provided by the translation of St. John Damascene’s On Orthodox Christianity made by Joan Ekzarh. The discussion covers the factors that had evoked the occurrence of doublets in the terms, what, regarded historically, has been pointed out to be one of the features of this category of words. There comes the question of the so-called ‘classical Old Bulgarian lexicon’ and the ‘lexicon found in the manuscripts from Preslav’ and the possible relationship between the doublets, namely: the existence of the two synonyms in the classical Old Bulgarian and in the Preslav manuscripts with the preservation or change in the fractions in the synonymous order; lack of one (or more) members of the synonymous order in the classical Old Bulgarian period and availability in the Preslav manuscripts and vice versa; the presence of one or more members of the synonymous order only in the Old Bulgarian translation of John Ekzarh. The comparison with the lexical macrosystem of the language proves that there cannot be a confrontation between the ‘Cyrillo-Methodian’ and the ‘Preslav’ lexis. Nevertheless, that concerns a lexical accretion belonging to the oldest texts.
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This contribution describes the adaptation process of the anthroponym Barrabáš/Barabáš/Barabbáš in Czech versions of printed New Testament text in the Early Modern Period. Following the development in foreign sources, the Czech form changed from Barrabáš and Barabáš, inherited from the Old Czech translation tradition, to Barabbáš. The latter is the form introduced into Czech tradition by the Náměšť New Testament of 1533, it prevailed in Brethren translations from 1601 onwards and in the exile, whereas the Baroque Catholic tradition in the St. Wenceslas Bible opted for Barabáš, a form exceptional in the late pre-1620 editions.
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The article discusses the most likely versions of the origin of several Lithuanian toponyms Gùdas. The versions are proposed taking into account all the circumstances of recording the toponyms from the spoken language, the context of toponymic microsystems, the additional information relating to place names and the objects designated by them provided by the recorders, which is compared to real historical and ethnographic data. Based on the analysis carried out under the chosen methodology, the article associates the appearance of the names of two stones situated in the Nemunas River near Darsūniškis and Dvareliškės Manor with the historically attested fact of timber rafting from Gudija (Belarus) to Karaliaučius (Königsberg) and Rusnė. It is outlined that there were also raftsmen who were gudai by descent. As a result, the two names of stones are traced to the ethnonym gùdas ‘Belarusian (sometimes Pole or Russian); a person speaking a different dialectʼ. The hypothesis proposed by other researchers concerning their origin from Lith. gùdė ‘strickle, whetstone’, gudti ‘to sharpen by a whetstone’ is questionable. The article provides arguments to prove that the hydronyms Gùdas from the environs of Pumpėnai and Žemaitkiemis, which some linguists trace to Balt. *guda- ‘bent’, ‘bending down’ < Balt. gud- ‘to bend’, are most likely of ethnonymic origin. In the first case, this proposition is supported by the data of the analysis of the interrelations, origin and semantics of the compact microsystem toponyms with gud-. In the second case, it is evidenced by the semantic analysis of the ethnonymic parallel of the potamonyms situated in the same inhabited settlement
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The article addresses the questions of transcribing the Aukštaitian subdialects of the Lithuanian language by the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), revises certain symbols from the earlier set of the IPA symbols for the sounds of Lithuanian dialects presented in 2017 and ways of transcribing. It discusses the vowel and consonant symbols of the IPA, which may possibly be used for transcribing the sounds in Aukštaitian, diactritical marks, the opportunities and problems of the IPA in transcribing the prosodic units (pitch accents and their allotones) of Aukštaitian subdialects. It reviews the generalized system of vocalism of Aukštaitian subdialects (phonemes and their more prominent variants), analyses certain more difficult cases of consonant transcription by the IPA symbols, gives the examples of transcribing the syllables, which contain diphthongs and bear different pitch accents. After more indepth studies on dialectal phonology are conducted in the future and more theoretical works are generalized, the transcription of Lithuanian dialects by the IPA symbols will be further revised.
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Studies of the Christian apocrypha have paid relatively little attention to the authors' self-awareness and intentions. The authors of the Apocrypha often impersonate characters of the apostolic generation or write about events that could not have been known to them. This leads to the suspicion that they are deliberately trying to manipulate the reader by directly deceiving him. In contemporary scholarship, apocryphal literature is often described as "forgery". We believe that in many cases this is not an accurate characterisation. The aim of the authors was not manipulation, creating a power relationship of authority with the reader, but the reconstruction of tradition by responding to a new Sitz im Leben. The article emphasises the secondary, derivative character of apocryphal literature. The authors of the Apocrypha were convinced of the veracity of their texts because they systematically relied on sources that were reliable from their point of view: the future canonical gospels, the oral contents, often with folkloric features, theological topoi taken over from the previous generation. This made it possible to attribute their work to the apostles or their companions, since the belief of the time was that the work of the disciples could rightly be attributed to the teacher. It is very likely that some of the works reflect the experience of altered states of consciousness.
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Although the earliest Turkisms that entered Arabic go back to the 9th century – when the Arabs began establishing regular contact with speakers of Turkic languages – a significant number of Turkish loans in both written and spoken Arabic only date from the time of the Ottoman Empire, which in the course of its expansion conquered and for centuries ruled a large part of the Arab world. This paper aims to examine the words of Turkish origin found in the dialects spoken in Egypt and parts of the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine), i.e. the Arabophone regions that have been most exposed to Turkish influence for historical and cultural reasons. It has also been endeavoured to provide information about the etymology of the Ottoman-Turkish words (interestingly, as some of these come from Arabic, the Egyptian, Syrian, etc. words borrowed actually prove to be backborrowings).
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Persisting in a binary relationship with honor, shame was an important element of the pre-Islamic Arabic social evaluation system. In my study, I analyzed the two most important EPA concepts parallel to English shame – ˁayb and ˁār – applying the Cultural Linguistic approach. Based on the analyses on corpus of Early Arabic poetry and Classical Arabic dictionaries, I represented cultural schemata encoding the knowledge shared by pre-Islamic Arabs about those phenomena. The paper presents also metaphoric, metonymic, and image-schematic models, which account for the specifics of associated linguistic frames. Moreover, I posit a hypothesis on the existence of a schema subsuming the honor- and shame-dishonor-related schemata in form of social evaluation of usefulness, which seems to correspond to the historical and linguistic data.
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Our essay revisits Saussure’s frame regarding the concept of value and its implications in the field of semantic changes, proper and figurate meaning, as well as synonyms. We follow a critical examination of the concept of value, as used by Saussure in order to define meaning. A brief discussion regarding linguistic alterity as well as the mutability and immutability of signs will be carried on.
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The article examines the readings from the Pandects of Antiochus as a source for compiling the didactic section of the Church Slavonic Prologue. The research material consists of circa 100 copies of all the known translations and versions of the Prologue for the autumn-winter half-year. In total, 44 readings have been identified as deriving from the Pandects, and in six cases the same sermon is given in two versions. The largest number of readings (21) is present in the extended edition of the Prologue compiled in the 60s of the 12th century. In this group of texts borrowed from the Pandects, the source text has been thoroughly edited. The shortened edition of the Prologue and the subsequent editions of the Prologue compiled on the basis of the oldest versions partially derive from the readings in the extended edition of the Prologue. The Moscow and the Kyrill-Belozersk editions of the Versed prologue were supplemented by individual new readings from the Pandects. The sermons were more actively transferred to the Prologue versions created and/or prevalent in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, namely, the Kiev-Sophia, the Museum, the Kiev editions and special varieties of the Prologue based on the extended edition.
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The article focuses on the textual criticism of the Ruthenian translation of the Czech book entitled Lucidář (Lucidarius), a medieval encyclopedic treatise consisting of the student’s questions and the teacher’s answers, which was most widespread in the Cyrillic manuscript tradition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland). This translation was made in 1636 from a non-extant edition (*Olomouc, 1622) and is represented by at least nine manuscript copies: five of them have been published and other four still remain practically unknown (kept St. Petersburg and Yaroslavl). All of them are involved in this study aiming to identify cases of a complete substitution of original (translated) texts of the teacher’s answers to some of the student’s questions with new texts. They reflect a critical approach of Ruthenian copyists to the ideas about the world set forth in Lucidarius translated from Czech. The process of replacing some of the texts went on, increasing in extend, during the 18th–early 19th centuries and affected more than half of all the manuscripts under consideration. Consequently, this Ruthenian translation of the Czech Lucidarius is to be characterized as an open textual tradition, since its content was partially (but regularly) adapted by scribes to meet their own cultural needs.
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This publication presents an incipitarium of sermons borrowed into the Church Slavonic Prologue from the Pandects of Antiochus. The data are collected from all the known translations and editions of the Prologue for the autumn-winter half-year. The beginnings and headings of 41 synaxarian teachings are indicated in alphabetical order, in three cases the same sermon is given in two versions. The calendar date (there may be more than one), on which the readings are placed in the Prologue, is marked after the ellipsis, the editions containing this text are listed in brackets. If the didactic article is specific only to certain copies of edition, the call numbers of these manuscripts are given in bracket after dash. Then the links to the source chapters are provided. The index of incipits summarizes information about handwritten prologues of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the instructive section of which is unknown to a wide range of readers.
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In the light of the development of the historical toponymic dictionary of West Ingermanland, Russian and Swedish sources of the 16th and 17th centuries have been searched for the names of those settlements of Ingermanland which disappeared by the early 18th century. The area under consideration is the western part of Kingisepp district, Leningrad region. The material for the study consists of 16th and 17th century Russian and Swedish scribal documents and 17th century Swedish maps. The place names found were classified according to six territorial areas determined. Each place name was lexicographically considered by the following components of the dictionary entry: the original place name, its historical variants with administrative-territorial reference, hypothetical etymology, brief information about the local ownership of the object, variants of the name with a common root on the territory of all five pyatinas. As it turned out, not all place-names that have fallen out of documentary use can be unambiguously referred to a particular disappeared settlement. The reason for this is complex historical and geographical transformations that led to the emergence of doublet names for the same object, sometimes semantically completely unrelated, while some oikonyms do not always refer to one and the same settlement.
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Some features of the North-Western Prakrit that was used as the administrative language of the kingdom of Kroraina (‘Niya Prakrit’) have in the past been more or less vaguely described as the result of language contact. One particularly striking feature that invites such an account is the innovative preterite of this Prakrit variety. We argue that, from a structural point of view, this formation and its morphosyntactic behaviour can be plausibly attributed to interference from Khotanese. In addition, a scenario involving Khotanese as a substratum language of Niya Prakrit may also be well accounted for from a historical and sociolinguistic perspective.
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The present paper examines the principles of the language policy designed in the Kingdom of Prussia at the junction of the 18th-19th centuries. This research aims to identify the main factors affecting the introduction of the Lithuanian language as the official regional language in the Kingdom of Prussia and to evaluate the parameters applied to such language planning. The main research objects in this study are the prefaces to Christian Gottlieb Mielcke’s dictionary Littauisch-deutsches und Deutsch-littauisches Wörter-Buch (1800) and the archival material of the end of the 18th century, which provide information on the preconditions, directions, goals, and objectives of the language policy of the time. The politics favorable to the Lithuanian language was preconditioned by the political changes in the 18th century. After the third partition of the Commonwealth of the Two Nations (1795) and with the annexation of Užnemunė to Prussia, the range of the Lithuanian language use expanded, and the ideas of regional particularism strengthened. Christoph Friedrich Heilsberg, the author of the third preface to Mielcke’s dictionary, a counsellor in the Königsberg Chamber of War and Domains, and an inspector of East Prussian schools, was well aware of the Lithuanian attitudes to the influence of language on identity, motives for language learning, legislation, and the potential of schools and churches. On the grounds of this versatile expertise, he undertook language status planning. With regards to Mielcke’s observation about civil servants who need to learn Lithuanian and the Lithuanian approach to language, Heilsberg took a practical position on language planning. He suggested expanding the Lithuanian language use in the public sphere rather than considering the idea of German as a common state language. At Heilsberg’s initiative, the Lithuanian language had to be used in such important areas as education, church, law, business, and administration. Heilsberg sought to ensure that it did not lose its cultural or administrative functions. Such plans presuppose the status of Lithuanian as an official regional language, equivalent to linguistic autonomy, where the language of a national minority has political autonomy and coexists with the official language of the state. Heilsberg initiated not only the development but also the implementation of language policy. He developed the directions and measures of corpus planning: to help non-Lithuanians to learn Lithuanian, he encouraged Mielcke to prepare a Lithuanian-German and German-Lithuanian dictionary and supervised the publication of a Lithuanian grammar and a collection of sermons. This highlights the priorities of his education policy, which aimed to develop the language skills of teachers and priests, and to create conditions for civil servants working in the province to learn the Lithuanian language. Three statements of Heilsberg as a high-ranking state official were important for increasing the prestige of the Lithuanian language: 1) language is a guarantor of identity; 2) provincial languages must be learned by civil servants and not vice versa; and 3) language must be nurtured. The author of the fourth preface to Mielcke’s dictionary, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, raised the criterion of language purity. Considering that only pure language is important for the maintenance of the nation’s distinctiveness, for science, and especially history, he emphasized the need to preserve the purity of language and proposed two ways to achieve this: to use pure language in schools and churches, and to expand the domains of its use. This is the earliest attempt in the history of Prussian Lithuanian culture to give the Lithuanian language the status of an official regional language. Such policy ensured its functioning in all spheres of public life, its use in the education system, and created conditions for maintaining identity.
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