National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements

Josef Jungmann: Second conversation concerning the Czech language

JOSEF JUNGMANN: SECOND CONVERSATION CONCERNING THE CZECH LANGUAGE Title: O jazyku českém rozmlouvání druhé (Second conversation concerning the Czech language) Originally published: First published in Hlasatel český (The Czech Herald), no. 1, vol. III, 1806, Prague Language: Czech The excerpts used are from Felix Vodička, ed., Josef Jungmann: Boj o obrození národa. Výbor z díla Josefa Jungmanna (Prague: F. Kosek, 1948), pp. 31–50. About the author Josef Jungmann [1773, Hudlice (central Bohemia) – 1847, Prague]: linguist, translator, literary scholar, and lexicographer. He studied philosophy at Prague, where he was particularly interested in mathematics, physics, history and literature. In the humanities he was at first influenced by German professors, the historian Ignatz Cornova and the aesthetician A. G. Meissner. Later he attended the lectures of František Martin Pelcl on Czech language and literature, which shifted his interests toward national culture. After his studies he was hired to teach at a grammar school in Leitmeritz (Cz. Litoměřice) and later also in Prague. He married a wealthy Leitmeritz German woman and was granted burgher status in 1805. He became a leading member of his generation of Czech patriots, who radicalized their struggle for Czech cultural autonomy. Their main aim was to raise the Czech language to a level that would make it possible to use it to write modern works of literature. With his teaching and especially lexicographical activities, Jungmann was instrumental in this respect . Seeking to expand the Czech vocabulary he revived words from the old Czech literary language of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and created neologisms on the basis of other Slavic languages, namely, Polish and Russian. With his masterful translations of Chateaubriand, Milton, Goethe and others into Czech, he laid the foundations of modern Czech poetic vocabulary. During the 1820s he gathered around himself a few younger intellectuals (F. L. Čelakovský, Ján Kollár, František Palacký, P. J. Šafařík) with whom he worked to realize, intellectually and institutionally, his ethno-linguistic national cultural program. He was engaged in most of the heated debates on the grammatical and orthographical codification of Czech. After the ‘discovery’ of allegedly ancient (but in fact forged) Czech manuscripts in 1818, Jungmann, who was convinced of their authenticity, drew important 104 SPIRIT OF THE NATION: CUSTOMS, LANGUAGE, RELIGION conclusions regarding the historical roots of Czech literature in, for example, one of his major works, ‘History of Czech literature.’ This, together with the emphasis on the connection between academic activities and the nascent national ideology, became a source of personal and generational conflict between Jungmann and the authority of the previous generation, Josef Dobrovský. Jungmann’s major accomplishment , however, was a five-volume Czech-German dictionary containing more than 120,000 headwords depicting the Czech lexical fund in a historically, geographically , and socially broad perspective. With the dictionary, Jungmann to some extent achieved his main goal, which was to elevate Czech to a modern tool of communication . Main works: Slovesnost aneb Sbírka příkladů s krátkým pojednáním o slohu [Literature, or a collection of examples with a short treatise on style] (1820); Historie literatury české aneb Soustavný přehled spisů českých, s krátkou historií národu, osvícení a jazyka [History of Czech literature, or an overview of Czech writing, with a short history of the nation, education, and language] (1825, 1845, 1846); Slovník česko-nemecký [Czech-German dictionary], 5 vols., (1834–39). Context At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the new Romantic concept of ‘nation’ that was developed in Western Europe began to spread among Czech and Bohemian German elites. The ideas that appeared in German-speaking areas (Jakob Grimm, Friedrich Schlegel), treating the vernacular language as a stable community-building element (in contrast to the changing political order) and the only way to raise the education of humankind, naturally found fertile soil in Bohemia as well. This was supplemented by a new vision, emerging from the French Revolution, defining the nation as an entity unified by the quest for freedom. Josef Jungmann was one of the most important representatives of the ‘second ’ generation of Czech patriots, among whom language still evoked the greatest interest. Nevertheless, in comparison to the prevalently ‘scholarly’ interest of the former generation, Jungmann and his compatriots were much more enthusiastic about the Romantic ideas of language and nation, especially those inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder’s approach, which demonstrated a high regard for the Slavonic nations and languages. In...