Jak mluvil (a psal) český venkovan na přelomu 18. a 19. století?

Abstract

The paper deals with authentic written and spoken utterances of ordinary Czech people of the turnof the 19th century, as recorded in linguistic works by the Czech philologist and translator František Jan Tomsa (1751–1814). It analyses the examples published in the books Elementarwerk der böhmischdeutsch-und lateinischen Sprache (1784), Von den Vorzügen der čechischen Sprache (1812), Über dieVeränderungen der čechischen Sprache (1805), and Über die Bedeutung, Abwandlung und Gebrauch derčechischen Zeitwörter (1804), which are at least partly written with scholarly precision and often provideaccurate information about who said what when, and in what situation. Thus they representa unique source of information not only about the manner of speaking of ordinary Czech people atthe beginning of the National Revival period and about the differences between the language spokenin Prague and in the country, but also about the usual topics of conversation, including the historyof agriculture.