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Laurel's Challenge: Down the Rabbit Hole with 14th-16th century Czech orthography

[This post was written in answer to Mistress Lissa Underhill’s “Down the Rabbit Hole” challenge in the East Kingdom Laurels Challenge event (https://moas.eastkingdom.org/list-of-laurels-challenges/).]


In the process of researching 14th-16th century Czech names for my own name registration, I realized that I didn’t know how Czech orthography had changed over the centuries. For nearly all languages, of course, there are shifts over time, but this question is particularly of interest in languages that use diacritical marks. Particularly for name submissions to the SCA College of Arms, where we register the period spelling whenever possible, it’s important to know what period spellings look like, both for submitting the most period-appropriate form and for evaluating sources in the research process.


With Czech names in particular, post-period secondary sources have a frustrating tendency to normalize the spelling of names, which seems primarily to be because Czech orthography in SCA period was (a) not standardized at all until the fifteenth century, and (b) different from modern Czech orthography in a couple of fairly key ways. So, in the process of hunting down what the most common period spelling of Anéžka was likely to be (and in trying to decipher the 15th c. manuscripts I had found), I fell down a rabbithole of learning about the history of Czech orthography.


I mentioned above that for languages with diacritics (like Czech) it’s particularly important to note how spellings have changed over time; this is because diacritics are used to represent sounds that aren’t otherwise represented in the letters used in the language. The sound that is modernly represented by the letter š, for example, is “sh” to English speakers, but that’s a result of our own spelling conventions, and is not reflected in the default letters available in the Latin alphabet. So, given that there are sounds present in the language that are not reflected in the available alphabet, how do we write those sounds?


For Czech, prior to about the early fifteenth century, these sounds were written using digraphs (two letters used together to represent a single sound), like the English “sh” above, but there wasn’t much standardization in what specific letters were used in these digraphs. The sound ř, for example, could be found as rz, rrz, rs, rzs, rzss, and zr (among others, I’m sure). Besides the digraphs, there were a handful of other letters that were used differently in period than they are today: c was used for k, instead of today’s ts; g was used for today’s j; w was used for today’s v; and there was no distinction made between short and long vowels.


In approximately 1406, a manuscript was published (commonly attributed to Jan Hus, though this isn’t certain) titled De orthographia bohemica - “On Bohemian Orthography” - that proposed a number of spelling standardizations to improve readability. The biggest changes were the punctus rotundus - a dot above certain letters to indicate palatalization, which would eventually become the modern háček towards the end of the sixteenth century - and acute accents over long vowels to indicate their length. Though this was published in the early fifteenth century, the changes took most of the century to fully propagate, and it’s interesting to see what orthographic choices each scribe made in a given manuscript. 


In printed works, in the latter half of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, the háček began to gain greater popularity, and in 1579, the first printing of the Kralice Bible (notable for being the first Czech translation of the Bible from the original languages, not from Latin) solidified the use of the háček rather than the punctus rotundus. Further changes in orthography continued over the following centuries, but as that gets past the end of SCA period, I haven't studied them at all.



For some really neat side-by-side comparisons, the University of Oxford has a page of Czech & Slovak Resources that includes transcriptions of, and links to, the same passage of Genesis 22 in a handful of 15th-century Czech bibles here: https://czech.mml.ox.ac.uk/vyvoj-jazyka-prekladu-bible


Further reading: 

Digraphic Orthography (University of Oxford, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, Czech & Slovak Resources): https://czech.mml.ox.ac.uk/digraphic-orthography

Czech orthography (English Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_orthography

Český pravopis (Czech Wikipedia): https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%8Cesk%C3%BD_pravopis

Orthographia Bohemica (English Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica



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