Pravidla českého pravopisu [Rules of Czech orthography] (review)

BOOK NOTICES 617 claim to be an ESL teacher without already knowing everything in this book, but that says more about educational realities than about this publication. [Robert DeKeyser, University of Pittsburgh.] Pravidla ceského pravopisu [Rules of Czech orthography]. Praha, Czech Republic: Academia, 1993. Pp. 389. Czech orthography has been relatively firmly codified since 1902, when Pravidla Medici k ceskému pravopisu a tvaroslovi [The rules pertaining to Czech orthography and morphology] first appeared. Over the past 90-odd years, Pravidla underwent several fundamental revisions (especially in 1913, 1941, and 1957) and appeared from time to time in additional socalled smaller editions with minor revisions (the 1957 edition, for example, had had eight variants as of 1983). Because the treatment of orthography and punctuation has been greatly expanded at the expense of morphology (the vocabulary section doubled in size between 1902 and 1993), the title of Pravidla since 1913 has referred only to orthography. The manuscript of what was to be the latest major edition of Pravidla was originally prepared between 1986 and 1989 in the Institute for the Czech Language of the then Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, with the new norm set to become binding as of January I, 1991. Political developments in Czechoslovakia at the end of 1989, however, resulted in a change of plans. Several reasons have been cited for the need of additional revisions. Some of the individuals who until 1989 were in control of Czech cultural affairs had the new edition oí Pravidla prepared under conditions to which the Czech public took justifiable exception. For example, the preparation of Pravidla was done in secret for some time, and the text of the long chapter on orthographic rules was submitted for evaluation to selected scholarly institutes, university departments of the Czech language, and Communist publishing houses and newspaper editorial offices ; but the judgment of many competent linguists and writers not actively supporting the regime was not sought. Many of the examples used in the text smacked of the political sloganeering practiced during the previous four decades . (Here is one example, among many, from p. 98 of the 8th revision of the 1957 edition: 'For the bourgeois, "the freedom of the individual" is only a guise for the real despotism of a thin layer of exploiters' [cited in translation].) In short, the hushed work on Pravidla created suspicion that something incompatible with the cultural needs of the Czech-speaking people was to be forced on them by those holding political power. Therefore, after the fall of the Communist regime in late 1989 it was decided that the manuscript ofPravidla needed to be thoroughly revised. The revised 'academic' version finally appeared in November 1993; the 'school' version (in which the same rules are presented in less detail and in simpler formulations) had been published six months earlier. Besides depoliticizing some of the illustrative examples, the editors have introduced a number of changes. To give recognition to stylistic variants of the same word, more orthographic doublets have been sanctioned. The orthography of loanwords is now governed even less than before by unequivocal principles: medical terminology, for example, tends to follow the orthography of the language of origin much more than do business, sports, and culinary terms—in this respect the new Pravidla provides more a recommendation than a normative edict. And then there are new rules concerning punctuation, vowel length, capitalization, and the writing of compound adjectives and of i and ? in loanwords, to mention only a few. Thus, all those who wish to consult an authoritative source on Czech orthography and avail themselves of a fairly extensive vocabulary of Czech words whose spelling they may not be sure of should now, supposedly, refer to this latest edition of Pravidla, the first major revision since 1957. But the situation has turned out not to be that simple. Despite the delay in the appearance of this edition in order to give the public a greater opportunity for input, many critical comments appeared in newspaper articles after the publication of the 'school' edition in mid-1993. The lessjustified these criticisms have been, the more vociferous the form they have taken. For example, one writer, under the title ? slap in the...